遇见简·奥斯汀：孩子到英国游学，究竟看什么
Dropping a student at a half-term club, Dr Zhihao Yan looks up and finds a blue plaque: Jane Austen lived here, 1814–15. London has over a thousand. The criteria are twenty years dead, national or international significance, and a building still standing — and the city keeps its dead on the street rather than moving them into museums. He uses Austen to make a point about observation: she wrote balls, dinners, visits and gossip rather than wars, and people still recognise themselves in her characters two centuries on, because she watched people rather than events, from a position inside her world and slightly at its edge. Then he turns it on study trips. Twenty years ago the aim was Big Ben and a red phone box; now everyone says the word "immersion", but a fortnight of workshops staged for visitors is not the local classroom, and real entry takes long enough to get bored in.
圣诞老人会给我送礼物吗：一节关于“相信什么”的儿童哲学课
A Christmas-week online class, Dr Zhihao Yan in a London sitting room and the children in Shanghai, where the decorations this year are everywhere. He does not start with Father Christmas but with Ultraman, whom every child dismisses at once as an actor in a suit, then the earth god, ghosts and aliens, where the hands go up unevenly. Then dinosaurs, which every child is certain about — and nobody has seen. Pressed on what counts as evidence, they produce fossils, palaeontologists, museum specimens, until one child suggests the fossils might be an oddly shaped rock and dinosaurs the biggest hoax in the history of science. From there: inference from frequent experience, inference from habit, and inference that is only a wish. A boy who would give his ten yuan to the Jade Emperor because he outranks the others reinvents Pascal's wager, and says why in three characters: it doesn't lose.
和孩子做哲学：如何让孩子敢问、会问、爱问
On World Philosophy Day a Year 4 girl asked Dr Zhihao Yan, on camera, why am I me — the question that had sent him to a philosophy department and kept him there for seven years. This is his account of what children's philosophy is and is not. It is not a professor visiting a primary school: Matthew Lipman built P4C because he found his Columbia undergraduates rigid and incurious, which means the course was designed to fix children rather than to start from them, an original sin his Chinese colleague Liu Xiaodong names. He separates philosophical thinking from general critical thinking — it is meta, boundary-crossing, and asks after the presuppositions each subject is allowed to leave alone — and he argues children are philosophers without training: lovers of wisdom who do not yet know how to love it steadily. Then a transcript of a class arguing about love, kissing and marriage.
英国中小学每年 6 次教育旅行，是“消费陷阱”还是改变人生的资源
English schools run two educational visits a term, at least six a year, in both the state and independent sectors, tied to the curriculum rather than bolted onto it: day trips to museums and galleries, residentials from Year 5 for two to five days, and subject-specific visits. Dr Zhihao Yan, teaching in London, could not at first see why schools already short of lesson time would give up so much of it. Then a deputy head told him about a boy on a red double-decker who held on to the window and stared the whole way — a Year 3 child in London who had never been on a bus or into the centre. He sets out the infrastructure behind it: free national collections, museum education teams trained to a common standard, the Museums and Schools programme, and City of London funds that reimburse visits for eligible schools.
寒假插班：比夏令营更接近真实的英国课堂
After a summer of camps, Dr Zhihao Yan sorts the children who came into three kinds — the sightseeing tour led by a Chinese teacher, the language camp where a mixed-nationality intake forces English, and the academic camp built on two or three weeks of project work. Then he argues that none of them shows a family what English schooling is actually like. A camp is addition: cross-cultural games, arranged socialising, visits, all designed to soften adaptation, with classroom time necessarily limited. A winter placement is the opposite — the child joins a real spring term alongside local pupils, at their pace, with nothing packaged for a visitor. He notes why schools resist two-week placements, why Chinese families keep asking for them anyway, and why a growing share of the enquiries now come from pupils who are already top of their class at home.
在英国，没有一个老师敢随随便便带自闭症儿童出远门
An eight-year-old boy, reportedly on the autism spectrum, went missing on a summer camp climb in Yunnan; by the second day more than three hundred people, two search dogs, four drones and five thermal imagers were looking for him. Dr Zhihao Yan's first reaction was that after months in an English state school's autism provision he would not have accepted that job. He describes what the provision actually looks like: classes of no more than eight, a specialist teacher and four assistants, door handles mounted out of reach, safety scissors, craft materials chosen to be edible. Even there a boy under one-to-one supervision swallowed something and was taken to hospital. Residential trips in England normally start around Year 5, and for autistic children often not at all. He is blunt about the camp organisers' belief that autism is caused by absent fathers and cured by more male staff.
Talk for Writing：学写作，真的要等到识字之后吗
The Chinese route to writing is fixed: phonics, then characters, then sentences, then model essays, and only then your own words. A child waits until they have enough characters to deserve to say anything. Dr Zhihao Yan sets that against two classrooms. In Dr Xiaoyun Peng's writing class the starting question is philosophical — who are you, and how do you introduce yourself? — and children who can speak but not yet write take names apart and chain them into a story. In a Year 1 literacy lesson in an English state primary, after The Tiger Who Came to Tea, nobody is asked to write a response: they pick four picture cards and retell the story by ordering them. Migrant children with English as a second language, local children just starting phonics, and a child who will not speak all "wrote". He ends on the difference in marking — a teacher who writes "ran 😊" beside runned and then praises the reasoning.
从统一校服到独自跨国飞行：我在希思罗看到两种“出国”方式
Waiting at Heathrow for children arriving for a summer camp, Dr Zhihao Yan watches two versions of going abroad come through the same doors. Chinese groups emerge dozens at a time in matching tracksuits, with a group leader, shared classes, shared meals and a shared write-up on return — a low-risk collective outing that is barely an international experience at all. Then French, German and Spanish thirteen-year-olds walk out alone with battered backpacks, find the camp staff, sit down on their bags and eat a sandwich they packed themselves. He argues the gap is not ability but practice: those children started years earlier. He sets out what his own camp does about it — a pre-departure cultural briefing covering gender norms and they/them pronouns, a rule that speaking badly beats staying silent, a cap of 15% Chinese speakers per class, and phones held centrally. And what parents have to do: disappear.
教师出海记：不去公办学校，你永远不知道英国的课堂有多难
"Miss Liz is off tomorrow." "Oh, then they'll definitely kick off." Dr Zhihao Yan, with eight years of international-school teaching behind him, took a London state primary class alone for a full day — 8:30 to 3:15, English through maths to art and computing, no other adult in the room, about a quarter of the class with special educational needs. He spends more than half his energy on behaviour. A boy goes to the toilet three times, then reappears in a comic hat; a second child starts crying and the first announces to the class that the teacher made him cry. The next morning the class teacher explains the invisible architecture she runs the room on: never correct that boy, never make him the focus, never let him sit beside another child who needs support, and seven pupils who must be kept apart. Twenty-seven children, seven of them with additional needs.
英国中小学怎么“做哲学”：哲学教育仍是私立学校的专利吗
After nine years teaching philosophy to children in Guangzhou and Shanghai, Dr Zhihao Yan went back to being a novice — a PGCE in London and placements in English primaries. He finds philosophy present but hidden: in Narnia and free will during English, in how we know a theory is true during science, in what is right during PSHE. He describes teaching a PSHE lesson on gender stereotypes where pupils had to physically take a side, and notes who held the strongest stereotypes — recently arrived children with English as a second language. Then the other half of the picture. EEF research put philosophy's cost at about £12 per pupil a year for two to three months' progress, yet one in seven English lessons is taught by someone without qualified teacher status, and his own class teacher's two-week absence was covered by an unqualified assistant. Meanwhile Eton, Westminster and a Fulham prep school teach it properly.
哲学教育在英国：没有法国的“硬性四小时”，却无处不在
France has required four hours of philosophy a week in the final school year since 1808 and examines it. England has no equivalent slot. Dr Zhihao Yan, a philosophy PhD now teaching in an English primary school, argues that philosophy is nonetheless everywhere in English classrooms — inside religious education, PSHE, oracy work, English writing and even science — and names the cost of that arrangement: content with no exam output is the first thing squeezed out in SATs and GCSE years. He traces England's philosophy-for-children infrastructure to SAPERE, founded in 1992, whose accredited schools serve an unusually disadvantaged intake: 59% of pupils on free school meals or Pupil Premium in its 2024 impact report. And he follows the evidence where it goes, from the EEF trial that found two months' progress in reading and maths to the £1.2m scaled replication that found no significant attainment effect at all.
世界这么乱，孩子们如何思考未来：为什么哲学能力更重要了
Children growing up now have no settled narrative to inherit: truth is contestable, rules get rewritten, feeling outruns reasoning. Dr Zhihao Yan argues that before languages, coding or financial literacy, what has to be woken is the capacity to ask a question, test an inference, recognise dressed-up authority and stay honest under pressure. He shows how he picks topics — anchored in the news and in the children's own lives, because an abstract question asked cold gets nowhere. The Russia–Ukraine war becomes just wars, and then, scaled down, what you do when a classmate wrongs you. A ghostwriting scandal becomes the line between using AI and copying. He is candid about rating topics like films: a case of assisted death was too much head-on, so he approached it through organ donation instead.
警惕教育中的偏见：什么样的老师还在教室里制造刻板印象
The last week of Dr Zhihao Yan's first placement carried no teaching target, only a TED talk to watch and write up: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the danger of a single story. He takes her point past the obvious one. Adichie was not only the object of a single story — an American roommate pitying her for Africa, asking about her tribal music, receiving a Mariah Carey tape — she was also its author, knowing Mexico only through coverage of drugs and migration. He applies that to teachers, who shape how children see themselves and each other, sometimes more than families do, and then to his own upbringing in Chaoshan and the assumptions about gender and household roles he had to examine. The rest is what an English state primary does about it: Black History Month across subjects, shared reading chosen for who appears in it, and picture books with animal protagonists for the youngest.
特殊教育在英国：公办学校能为特殊孩子兜底吗
A boy runs into a phonics lesson, punches a classmate and starts hammering on the visitor's laptop. He cannot tolerate noise or bright light, and he is in a mainstream Year 1 class, because England places children in inclusive settings rather than separating them. Dr Zhihao Yan spends a placement week with the school's SEND coordinator, one of the busiest people on the staff: 40 children on her list out of about 300, eight of whom cannot work independently at all. He follows the harder part of her job — the families. Parents often refuse the label first; in some households the father blames the mother. Even with a diagnosis, special-school places are scarce and the assessment can take twenty weeks. He asks whether parent volunteers could fill the gap. She says no, and explains why.
课间十分钟，没有的：英国小学生的一天
Chinese parents picture the English primary school as relaxed. Dr Zhihao Yan, on placement in a south London state school where nearly 70% of pupils are on free school meals and under 20% were born in Britain, reports a day that is tightly packed: one fifteen-minute break between 8:40 and noon, an afternoon that runs from one o'clock to 3:10 with nothing in between, and almost no homework before Year 3. The lightness is real but it is on the other side of the school gate — the work has been compressed into the lesson rather than sent home. Break and lunch, by contrast, are untouchable: teachers may not take them, and a child made to wait a minute in the lunch queue cried. And reading is deliberately not framed as homework. It is framed as a reward, and set daily from Year 1.
“你都资深名师了，还要从头学习如何当老师？”——英国 PGCE 培训体验报告
The PGCE is widely misread by Chinese applicants as a certificate. It is a master's-level, practice-led programme that confers no master's degree, and in England it is the gate: without qualified teacher status you cannot hold a class in a state school, and heads do not waive it even in a shortage. Dr Zhihao Yan, who had taught for over a decade in Guangzhou and Shanghai, sets out five things that make it work — theory taught by people still in classrooms; a weekly reading list tied to that week's practice; placements in inclusive state schools rather than selective ones; a dual-mentor system with a university link tutor as firewall; and reflective practice as a compulsory module rather than a private virtue. His own first attempt was a five-minute maths segment. He expected to find it trivially short. It gave him a week's worth of things to write up.
看学习障碍门诊不是新鲜事，难的是教师该不该区别对待
A learning-difficulties clinic at a Shanghai children's hospital drew a wave of comment from parents hoping a prescription might fix a bad report. Dr Zhihao Yan points out that such diagnoses are routine in Britain — and that the British worry runs the other way. There, the fear is that a label licenses a teacher to expect less. He reports from an East London primary where a class of thirty may include two or three pupils who cannot follow the lesson and one teaching assistant to support them, and from a classmate placed in a class with eight; a teacher cannot designate a child as having special needs, only a doctor can, and the application for more support can take two years. He then takes apart learning-styles theory, which he argues turned respect for difference into a licence to lower the bar.
英国教师危机：从热爱到离职，只需三年？
"I can't remember the last time my husband and I had a serious conversation." Dr Zhihao Yan heard that from an English primary teacher on a month-long online training course where two-thirds of participants could not stay for a full session. He uses it to open an account of why England cannot keep its teachers. A primary teacher may cover up to thirteen subjects. Teaching is only part of the job; assessment reports and administration push real hours well past contracted ones. He traces the shortage from the late 1990s through austerity-era budgets and rising rolls to the post-2015 spike in attrition and the early retirements of the pandemic, and notes that around 42% of secondary physics is taught by non-specialists. His own PGCE opened with survival advice and the line that nobody who has not cried has really done a PGCE.
“学校是用来发呆的”：孩子们为什么要上学
On the first day of term Dr Zhihao Yan watched a father drag a crying child through a metro barrier by the ear, and took the scene into his philosophy classroom — not to talk anyone out of refusing school, but to ask what school is for. The children give the adult answers first: a good job, then knowledge. One boy builds a valid syllogism on two false premises, which nobody attacks; they change the ground instead. Then a girl says the best thing about school is that you are allowed to help, because at home her parents do everything for her. Later the class dismantles every other reason — good teachers, friends, facilities — showing each can be bought outside school. The last hand up before the bell belongs to a child who says school is where you can stare into space. He spends the rest of the piece working out what that child meant.
孩子们的生活，不只有作业与苟且，还有诗与恐龙
Dr Zhihao Yan asks a class of primary children where they would go if they had one trip in a time machine. The answers map what each child has been allowed to be curious about. One girl goes to Tang-dynasty Dunhuang to find out how the library cave was sealed; a boy to the Cretaceous to see a triceratops, and to the Cambrian, and to bring something back as a pet; another to Stonehenge, because of the rumour about aliens. A boy whose parents are migrant workers, and whom the project funds, chooses the extinction of the dinosaurs and the evolution of human beings. One girl chooses the first day of a school term, because she once failed to hand in her holiday homework. He sets this beside a boy in 2018 who said he wanted to become a tiger — and, after half a minute of silence, that it was because tigers eat people, and people set homework.