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.
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.
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.