What Chinese School Actually Taught Me

Written on February 3, 2026

Looking back at my years in China’s education system—primary school, junior high, and high school—I realize the most valuable lessons had nothing to do with textbooks. The formulas faded. The exam scores became irrelevant. But three things stayed with me, shaping how I navigate the world today.

Writing Is the Ultimate Leverage

Naval Ravikant often talks about leverage—the ability to multiply your impact without multiplying your time. Code and media, he argues, are the new forms of leverage that don’t require permission or capital. Writing is the purest form of media leverage.

In school, I was taught that math, physics, and chemistry were the serious subjects. Writing was somehow secondary—a soft skill for those who couldn’t handle the hard sciences. I now believe this hierarchy is backwards.

Here’s why: the core principles of science can be learned in three to six years. With AI tutors and accelerated learning tools, perhaps even faster. But writing? Writing is different. It’s not a body of knowledge you can download. It’s a skill that compounds only through years of reading and writing, thinking and revising.

Paul Graham, who built Y Combinator and writes some of the most influential essays in tech, put it simply: “Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them.” The act of writing forces clarity. It exposes fuzzy thinking. It makes you interact with your own mind at high bandwidth.

More importantly, writing scales. A single essay can reach thousands. A conversation reaches one. In an age where attention is the scarcest resource, the ability to write clearly is the ability to multiply yourself across time and space.

My Chinese education, despite its flaws, gave me thousands of hours of reading and composition practice. Essay exams. Book reports. Classical Chinese analysis. At the time, it felt tedious. Now I understand: those hours were building a skill that no AI can shortcut for me.

Navigating Hierarchy Is Real-World Training

Chinese schools are hierarchical systems. There’s the principal, the head teacher, the subject teachers, the class monitor, and the implicit rankings among students—by grades, by family wealth, by social standing. It’s not a fair system. It was never meant to be.

But here’s what I learned: the world is full of hierarchical systems. Companies. Governments. Academic institutions. Learning to navigate them—when to conform, when to push back, how to build alliances, how to earn trust from those above and respect from those beside you—this is practical wisdom.

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner, often emphasizes the importance of understanding incentive structures. “Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome,” he says. School was my first laboratory for understanding incentives. Who gets rewarded? For what behaviors? How do the rules differ from the stated values?

Collaborating within imperfect systems taught me more about human nature than any psychology textbook. You learn to read situations. You learn that competence alone isn’t enough—you also need to communicate it, position it, and sometimes protect it from those who feel threatened by it.

Fighting for Your Rights Requires Courage

I’m particularly grateful to my junior high school for this lesson. Unlike my high school years—which were consumed by exam pressure in ways I don’t think served me well—junior high gave us genuine agency.

We decided which drinks to buy for class activities. We organized our participation in art festivals. When we faced unfair judgments from teachers or conflicts with other classes, we had to figure out how to respond. These weren’t life-or-death situations. But they were real. The stakes felt real to a 13-year-old.

From this I learned something Naval describes as essential: the courage to be disliked. Speaking up, questioning decisions, advocating for yourself and your group—these actions carry social risk. Not everyone will appreciate it. Some will actively resent it.

But the alternative—staying silent, accepting unfairness, letting others define what you deserve—carries a different cost. It erodes your sense of agency. It trains you to be passive in your own life.

The students who learned to speak up in junior high, I notice, tend to negotiate better salaries, advocate for their ideas more effectively, and build lives more aligned with their values. It’s not about being combative. It’s about having the self-respect to believe your voice matters.

What Remains When the Exams Are Over

Chinese education gets many things wrong. The pressure is often excessive. The focus on rote memorization can kill creativity. The competition can be dehumanizing.

But embedded in that system, almost accidentally, were these three lessons: that writing is the skill that compounds forever, that hierarchies are laboratories for understanding human behavior, and that courage—the willingness to stand up for yourself—is a muscle you must exercise while young.

These weren’t in any syllabus. No teacher explicitly taught them. But they’re what I carry with me, long after the quadratic formulas have been forgotten.

What unexpected lessons did your education teach you? I’d love to hear at persdre@gmail.com.