The history class that was "abandoned" and the teacher who left the podium

Ask AI · How has the new college entrance exam policy triggered a surplus of high school history teachers?

On June 7, 2025, in Sanmenxia, Henan, students review at their testing site. Henan has ushered in its first new college entrance exam.(Visual China｜Photo)

Wang Zhiying, a high school history teacher, has not taught for nearly half a year since November 2025.

In the middle of a county in central Henan where she teaches, changes came with no warning. After subject selection in early November, among nearly 2,000 students in her grade 10 cohort, fewer than 170 chose history, and the history classes were cut in half to just 3. In the research group, there are 20 history teachers, nearly half of whom are facing the reality that “there is nobody to teach.”

This is not an isolated case. Several history teachers told a reporter from Southern Weekend about their current situation of “keeping a cold seat.”

In 2014, after the State Council issued the “Implementation Opinions of the State Council on Deepening the Reform of the Examination and Enrollment System,” the new gaokao reform was rolled out gradually, province by province. By 2025, except for Xinjiang and Tibet, all 29 provinces nationwide had implemented the new gaokao model.

The reform originally aimed to break down the barriers between arts and sciences, and to expand students’ choices. But in school operations, choices have become increasingly similar: more students lean toward physics, while history has become a field many try to avoid.

Li Muzhou, deputy director of the Institute of Imperial Examinations and Examinations at Zhejiang University, told a reporter from Southern Weekend that subject selection is increasingly tied to university majors and employment prospects. “Pre-assigning choices,” he said, “to a certain extent exacerbates competition and differentiation.” “Over these two years, we’ve seen a phenomenon of ‘skipping the exam’ for history, which is a kind of phased fluctuation after policy adjustments.”

During this round of fluctuations, some history teachers have had to switch posts due to having no classes, or leave the podium.

“More obvious at key high schools”

The demonstrative high school in Henan where Wang Zhiying teaches has traditionally been strong in science. Each grade has about 30 classes: more than 20 science classes, while arts classes have long remained steady at 6 to 8. In the past, even with a big disparity, each history teacher was able to teach at least one arts class.

After the new gaokao was implemented, the gap between arts and sciences widened further. As a province in the fifth batch to implement the new gaokao, Henan adopted the “3+1+2” subject-selection model starting in 2022. Students must choose Chinese, math, and English; among their two preferred subjects, history and physics must be chosen as one pair; then they choose two more from ideological and political studies, geography, chemistry, and biology.

In 2023, the second year of the new gaokao, in the school’s subject-selection pre-registration, history classes could only be assembled into 4 classes. The school once delayed subject selection, hoping students would change their choices after a monthly exam, but the results were minimal.

At that time, Wang Zhiying had just finished teaching her last round of senior 3, and then faced reassignment again. She was in her early 30s, and most teachers in her group had longer teaching tenures. In terms of seniority, it was hard for her to be assigned to teach arts classes. She said bluntly that if she wanted to take over a class, she would have to wait ten years for a teacher to retire.

As expected, Wang Zhiying was assigned to teach history in five physics classes, one class per week for each class, until the following May when the history exam for high-school academic studies ended.

Starting in the spring semester of 2025, many places nationwide began implementing the “two weekends off” system for high school. To ensure that physics classes could keep pace, the school canceled the history lesson that had originally been scheduled once per week, and instead offered it only in a concentrated way one month before the ordinary high school academic level qualifying exam.

From then on, Wang Zhiying became a “teacher without classes.” She said that among nearly 500 teachers at the school, about 20 had no classes to teach. Excluding those who were sick or of advanced age, most of them were history teachers.

When other teachers were teaching, she and a few other “leftover” history teachers would look at each other in silence. They handled tasks such as organizing practice questions, making slides for lessons, teaching-research work, and sometimes temporarily took on administrative duties.

At a provincial-level history subject exchange meeting in Henan, Wang Zhiying learned that the phenomenon of too many history teachers exists broadly, and is even more pronounced at key high schools.

It’s not just Henan. A history teacher from Hunan told a reporter from Southern Weekend that in the top three ranked high schools in their city, out of 24 classes only 3 classes were in the history track. Yet there were 4 history teachers.

Three forces

According to multiple frontline teachers, after the “new gaokao” was promoted, in real-world tradeoffs, students tend to choose the physics track, making the trend of “valuing the sciences over the arts” increasingly obvious.

Feng Linqing, a history teacher at a private high school in Hebei, recalled that when she started in 2022, the school focused on the arts, so the number of history classes was far more than physics classes. In the following years, history classes steadily declined. In 2025, the number of physics classes surpassed history classes for the first time: 8 physics classes versus 7 history classes. What surprised her even more was that some students who originally struggled with physics began choosing the physics track.

Southern Weekend learned that history being “dropped” is more like the result of three forces stacking together.

The most direct consideration is the coverage of majors. Multiple interviewed teachers mentioned that the number of major categories that can be reached through physics-based combinations is clearly much larger. Taking the common “physics-chemistry” combination as an example, it covers almost all majors. But combinations in the history direction have a much narrower choice space.

Behind the difference is policy orientation. The “Guidelines on Subject Selection Requirements for Undergraduate Admissions Majors in General Colleges and Universities (General Version)” issued by the Ministry of Education in 2021 strengthened requirements for elective subjects: about 70% of majors require physics as a compulsory selection, and about 60% require physics and chemistry to be selected.

Policy adjustments are seen as a response to some provinces’ “skipping” of physics and chemistry in the early stage of the reforms. Li Muzhou said the adjustment is related to the country’s industrial structure and talent needs. It responds to the need to cultivate science and engineering talents, but also changes, to a certain extent, the balance among disciplines.

Meanwhile, the shrinkage of arts enrollment at the university end amplifies people’s sense that the arts are “retreating.”

In March 2025, when Fudan University President Jin Li was interviewed by a Southern Weekend reporter, she said that the proportion of arts admissions would drop from 30–40% to about 20%. During the Two Sessions in 2026, while the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference/National People’s Congress were held, Liaoxiang Zhong, the Party Secretary of the Communication University of China, said that the school “cut” as many as 16 undergraduate majors and directions in one go, including translation and photography.

A more practical factor is the difference in cutoff scores. In many provinces, the undergraduate admission cutoff for the physics track is generally lower than for the history track, and the number of students admitted in the former is also higher than in the latter. Taking Henan as an example: in 2025, the physics undergraduate line was 427, with an undergraduate admission rate of 62.7%. The history undergraduate line was 471, with an undergraduate admission rate of 25.6%.

To improve admission rates, schools also tilt their guidance accordingly. Feng Linqing said that at the grade-level conference held before subject selection, leaders compared arts and science score lines and admissions quotas, emphasized the advantages of physics combinations, and even directly said that “arts students are hard to find jobs.” Sometimes Feng Linqing was even notified by the school that fewer assignments should be kept for arts students, giving them more time to study math, physics, and chemistry.

Yang Lin, who has been providing higher-education guidance services for students and parents for 13 years, told a reporter from Southern Weekend that at the beginning of the new gaokao implementation, the students and parents who came to consult her cared more about subject selection. There were also school staff coming to learn about subject selection matters.

But now, students usually have already locked onto the physics track. They care more about what majors the “physics-chemistry bundling” allows them to choose, which is more favorable for future employment.

Employment expectations move the decision earlier. Wang Zhiying remembered that in the second year after the subject-selection system was introduced, the situation shifted quickly. As employment pressure increased, students who had originally “had no ideas” began consciously using the internet to gather information—comparing the major ranges and employment prospects corresponding to different subject combinations.

Wang Zhiying once joked in the office: “As long as you can beat your chest and promise that you’ll be able to find a good job by choosing history, the application rate for history will go up.”

And in resource-limited county towns, because there aren’t enough classrooms and it’s hard to manage, subject “roster shifting” gives way to a “package” system. The available combinations are not the dozen-plus options in theory; they are only a few combinations the school can schedule. The school where Wang Zhiying works offers 5 combinations: 4 in the physics direction, and only one choice in the history direction: “history, politics, and geography” (历政地).

The narrowing of major coverage, employment prospects, and the supply of subject combinations at county high schools squeezes the choice space even further.

In 2023, Wang Wendong, an associate professor at the School of Education Sciences of Northwest Normal University, conducted a subject-selection survey of 2,445 high school students in Lanzhou, Gansu, and found that students, in order to “maximize their scores,” made utilitarian subject-selection strategies. Wang Wendong told Southern Weekend: “Many students choose physics, not because they like physics, but because it’s the best choice among many factors.”

The data confirm this shift. Southern Weekend reviewed the “one-by-one score file” charts across provinces and found that among the 23 provinces implementing the “3+1+2” model, in nearly half of them, the proportion of history-track candidates continued to decline. The ratio of physics-track to history-track is generally close to 7:3, and in some provinces even reaches 8:2. For example, the share of candidates in the history direction in Hunan fell from 41.34% before the new gaokao in 2020 to 30.81% in 2025. Fujian fell from 35.5% to 23.88%.

On June 11, 2023, in Beijing, a gaokao志愿填报 (college-application) book for candidate selection.(Visual China｜Photo)

Find another way out

After the “3+1+2” subject-selection model was rolled out, demand for physics teachers and history teachers began to become imbalanced. Wang Wendong calls it “structural imbalance”: on one side, physics teachers’ teaching periods increase and class sizes are forced to expand; on the other, history teachers have no classes to teach.

The first thing history teachers feel is income volatility.

In many regions, teacher performance is linked to teaching periods, evening self-study, and weekend courses. Wei Siyue, a history teacher in a provincial key high school in Qiqihar, Heilongjiang, said that she only teaches history in first-year physics classes, and each month her pay is about 1,000 to 2,000 yuan less than other teachers.

More difficult to put into words is a “stuck” career development trajectory.

Wei Siyue graduated in 2020. For four consecutive years, she taught history in first-year physics classes, but she was never able to enter a full teaching cycle. In her first year of teaching, she still prepared seriously, learned from videos of master teachers, and also listened to teachers in the same group. “I got to be familiar with the textbooks and train myself.”

But after some time, the sense of frustration became stronger and stronger. History classes almost had no students listening attentively. When Wei Siyue asked a question, there was often silence underneath. Occasionally someone answered, but the answer was wrong. Later, she learned to ask and answer herself. “I try not to have the conversation just end on the floor.”

“Basically no need for much lesson preparation, and no need to do practice questions.” Wei Siyue told Southern Weekend. This kind of state gradually made her lose the space to make progress, and also made it hard to accumulate teaching achievements; in evaluations for excellence and competitions, she often ended up at a disadvantage. “I’m not willing to give up, and I also want to produce results.”

At Wang Zhiying’s school, “having no classes” is not only a reduction in workload—it also brings a subtler change in identity. A colleague joked that they were “being paid for doing nothing,” and when it came to duties like being on duty and keeping watch, someone even casually said, “Let the teachers with no classes go.” Wang Zhiying mostly stayed silent and offered no rebuttal. “If you don’t have classes at school, you just feel inferior.”

“Unable to even listen to others bring up this topic.” After there were no more arts classes Wang Zhiying could take over starting in 2023, she felt lost for a long time. Her family comforted her by saying it was fine to have no classes—work was easier. But in an instant her emotions would flare up, and she even couldn’t stop crying. In her bleak thinking, it felt as if this phrase—career—no longer existed.

History teachers who had no classes to teach had to find a way out. “Each department, as much as possible, go look and ask around.” Wang Zhiying said.

Some tried a “curve to save the country” by becoming homeroom teachers for arts classes; others were assigned to places like the Communist Youth League Committee, academic affairs offices, and the cafeteria/catering department, shifting their focus to administrative work and participating much less in teaching-research, gradually moving away from the classroom.

Another history teacher in Henan, Ding Changyi, also faced a similar choice. School leadership recognized her teaching performance, but proposed that if she were to keep leading arts classes, she would have to take on additional administrative tasks such as student management. She didn’t want to.

Wang Zhiying decided to transfer to become a psychology teacher. The school has 3 psychology teachers, and there truly was a gap. During university she had passed the psychology counselor certificate exam, and starting in the summer of 2025 she began systematically studying psychology courses.

In January 2026, the school issued transfer policies for teachers with no classes. Wang Zhiying submitted an application.

But the cost was also right in front of her. Even if the transfer went smoothly, her personnel relationship would still remain in the history group. The evaluation of professional titles is tied to the teacher qualification certificate for the subject she teaches. She had already been awarded a junior high school “assistant-level one” title in history, but if she were to compete as a psychology teacher, everything would need to start over, and she would also have to compete for limited quotas with teachers from her major. For now, she could only take it one step at a time.

To get out of the situation where she was being chosen for others, Ding Changyi proactively applied to switch to teaching English. After transferring, she became even busier. She took on English teaching for two classes, often working from early morning at 6 a.m. to evening—but she felt more fulfilled instead.

Maintain a suitable balance between arts and science majors

But in fact, teacher redeployment is never as simple as “moving people around.”

In 2025, when Wang Wendong conducted research in four counties and cities in Gansu, he found that the problem of “structural imbalance” among teachers widely existed there. He learned that a fully academic high school in Gansu had once tried to reassign teachers who had “no classes” in senior high to the junior high division, but the teachers were unwilling, so the plan couldn’t be carried out.

Wang Wendong explained that this involves multiple factors, including finances, staffing assignments, and individual teachers’ preferences. Therefore, many local education departments have not yet found a way to respond.

In his view, there are inherent limitations to teacher coordination at the county level. For example, within the jurisdiction, if all the high schools have a shortage of physics teachers, then there is no teacher to redistribute. He suggested building a city-level overall coordination and dispatch mechanism, integrating actual needs for school development and teaching at high schools across counties, and allocating resources in a scientific manner.

At the same time, Wang Wendong added that the decline in the number of students choosing history subjects aligns with the current higher education admissions structure and future talent cultivation needs. But if it keeps declining long-term, it will affect the development of humanities and social sciences disciplines.

He reminded that schools need to strengthen the interpretation of the new gaokao for students, parents, and teachers—so that students’ subject-selection decisions are based on a comprehensive judgment of interests, abilities, and development pathways. “If subject selection is completely driven by the employment market, the significance of the new gaokao reform may be weakened in practice.”

From a longer-term perspective, Li Muzhou believes that with the arrival of the AI era, the importance of humanities and social sciences may be seen again. He said that guidance on students’ career planning should be strengthened at the high school stage to help students make rational subject selections; and at the institutional level, through optimizing university elective subject guidance, the requirements for electives in arts and sciences should be balanced in a suitable way.

Since classes started in March 2026, Wang Zhiying has been busy attending trainings with the psychology teaching-research team, and the transfer notice still hasn’t been issued. She also said she couldn’t be sure whether she could transfer smoothly.

But notices from her grade group arrived first. With only just over a month left before the history exam for high-school academic studies, the history class that had been suspended due to the implementation of the “two weekends off” system needed to restart in the physics classes. Wang Zhiying is responsible for teaching history in five physics classes. Faced with the tight classroom schedule, she self-deprecatingly called herself “the machine that emphasizes the key points.”

Back on the familiar podium, she feels “even though it’s tiring, in my heart it’s solid.” But this sense of steadiness comes from the timetable temporarily giving her a place.

When history teachers have no classes to teach, naturally the employment end is hit as well.

A history graduate student at a university in Northwest China, Liu Pan, is scheduled to graduate in June 2026. During the campus recruitment season, she traveled to history teacher recruitment exams in Guangdong, Jiangsu, Tianjin, Anhui, and other places, only to find that history positions had been reduced significantly. Taking Jiangsu as an example: in a January recruitment announcement from schools directly under the Nanjing Municipal Education Bureau, of the 103 positions, there were no history positions. In Changzhou’s 2026 “Excellent Talent Program” public recruitment of 301 teachers, there were only 6 quotas for high school history teachers—the smallest number among all subjects.

Liu Pan has participated in more than ten recruitment exams, but her job still hasn’t been settled. In her class, there are very few people who found work. “They’ve already stopped recruiting completely.” she told Southern Weekend. A month from now, she will go to Jiangsu again to take the entrance exams.

(At the interviewees’ request, Wang Zhiying, Feng Linqing, Wei Siyue, Ding Changyi, and Liu Pan are pseudonyms.)

Southern Weekend reporter Su Manying

Editors Du Maolin