The exam that defines what counts
From East Asia·A current case, last reviewed September 2026
China's gaokao channels millions of students' entire schooling toward one sitting, and whatever the exam rewards, memorisation, speed, model essays, becomes what a decade of childhood optimises for. An assessment instrument, scaled far enough, stops measuring education and starts defining it.
The concepts this raises
Each of these gives a class a different way into the same case.
- PowerKnowledge and Society
- The capacity to shape what counts as knowledge, who is heard, and what gets funded, published or taught. Power is not only censorship; setting an agenda, controlling a platform or being granted authority all change the knowledge that a community ends up with.
- ValuesKnowledge and Society
- What a knower or a community takes to be worth pursuing, protecting or preferring. Values operate inside knowledge production and not just around it: they select the problems, set the acceptable risk of error, and decide which trade-offs count as costs.
Where it sits in the knowledge framework
- Scope
- What this area of knowledge is about, what problems it takes as its own, and where its questions stop being answerable by its methods. Scope is where you examine why a discipline exists at all and what it deliberately leaves to others.
- Ethics
- The ethical questions internal to the knowledge itself: what may be investigated and how, what obligations the knowledge places on those who hold it, and the ethical constraints the discipline imposes on its own practitioners.
Areas of knowledge
The same ideas, somewhere else
Cases that raise a concept this one raises, but in a different area of knowledge or a different part of the world. That contrast is the point: it is what shows a student the concept travels.
- Latin America
Telescopes on other people's mountains
The Atacama's dry altitude makes it ideal for observatories, and the same plateaus carry deep significance for Indigenous communities who were rarely central…
Current · The natural sciences
- Power
- Values
- Latin America
The vine, the lab, and the elders
As clinical interest in ayahuasca-derived compounds accelerates, Amazonian communities that developed and ritually govern the brew's use are often absent from…
Current · The natural sciences
- Power
- Values
- Africa
The bronzes and the museums
Thousands of Benin bronzes, seized in the 1897 British expedition, sit in Western museums that long defended holding them as universal stewardship, while…
Current · The arts
- Power
- Values
- India
Demonetisation and the missing counterfactual
India's 2016 note ban was declared a success and a failure by credentialled economists looking at the same aftermath. With no parallel India that kept its…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Evidence
- Power
- Values
- Africa
The appetite plant and the patent
South African researchers patented an appetite-suppressing compound from hoodia, a plant the San had long used on hunts, without initial benefit-sharing;…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Power
- Values
- Oceania
Ancestors in the storeroom
Museums worldwide hold Maori and Moriori ancestral remains collected in the colonial era, and New Zealand runs a standing programme negotiating their return…
Current · History
- Power
- Values