中考作文“高考化”，值得点赞，但还可以更好

Shanghai's 2024 zhongkao asked fifteen-year-olds to write on "I too am a water-drawer", against a prompt comparing the world to a formless pool. Dr Zhihao Yan reads this as real progress: it is harder to pre-package than the narrative titles of the previous decade, and it rewards handling an abstraction. He then names its limit. The prompt fixes the metaphor — why must the world be water rather than a mountain, a fire or an atom, and why must growing up be drawing water rather than digging or climbing? His larger argument is about what the exam teaches teachers to teach. Because high-scoring zhongkao essays reward emotive narrative and ornamental phrasing rather than argument, classroom writing has drifted that way too — leaving pupils underprepared for the reasoning demanded at gaokao, at A-level and in any university.