Millions of Chinese high school students are sweating through preparations for the national college entrance examinations taking place June 7-8.

This is the last sprint of their 12-year school race. Winning means getting a place at university. This, in turn, means an advantageous start in life and social climbing for many. Obviously, there are enormous pressures and anxieties involved.

But some think there is even greater pressure and anxiety for the parents. Many of them try to prepare the best meals for their teenagers, cater to their sensitivity, and compare and analyze all the information on universities and majors that they can get their hands on. Some, ultimately, have to cope with failure.

I used to feel sorry for these pitiful people, but now I have found myself falling victim to this parental anxiety.

My five-year-old son will enter school this year. Having been tipped off by friends and colleagues about just how competitive it is to get into a decent school, I put my mother to work on a school hunt and registered at four.

The results were as follows. One school asked for a trial period of two months, after which they would pick 120 of the 180 participants. Another called for an interview, at which my son, like other 5-to-6-year-olds, was asked to recite classical poems, and dance or play the piano if he happened to know how. There was even a written test, after which my son proudly told me he had solved one mathematical problem.

I was lucky that money was not a problem. My husband and I have an adequate income and can afford the additional 20,000 (US$2,410) to 30,000 (US$3,614) yuan fees that allowed us to have a choice, rather than just accept the school nearest to home or the one assigned by the local authorities.

However, my apprehension grew while I waited for a response from the two other schools. A simple search of online forums told me I was not alone in my apprehension. These people were in their 20s, 30s and 40s and were getting anxious about the outcome of their children's exams for senior high, junior high, and even primary schools.

Parental anxiety over the state of their children's moral, intellectual and physical well-being is nothing new, in China and elsewhere, but the sheer scale and intensity of the situation now is hard to ignore.

It is hardly surprising that education in China is improving, measured by most standards. There are more schools and universities, higher enrolment rates, and increased budgets at all levels. This would all seem to suggest that children have more chance of a quality education than they did before.

So why all the anxiety? And, more to the point, why is it so much more prevalent than before?

For many urban parents, the worry is not whether their children can get into an ordinary school or university, but whether they can get into a top one to get the best education on offer or the best they can afford.

So, first, the anxieties are rooted in the unequal distribution of educational resources. It is simple. Key schools and universities get a big slice of cash, frequent corporate donations and the very best teachers. The others have to make do with fewer computers or even less playground space or equipment. Market demand alone allows the better schools to accumulate additional cash by charging extra for choice.

The privileged get better and the less fortunate lag behind, and the gap gets wider than before.

To soothe or alleviate these parental anxieties we need to tackle the disparity in education. Some have gone so far as to suggest that we get rid of the key school system, which started in the 1950s, lay dormant for a while, then resumed in the 1980s.

Some schools are designated as key ones because their teaching staff, facilities and other resources are up to certain standards set by education authorities.

It was seen as an effective way to educate the talented people that China badly needs.

However, the kind of uniformity that getting rid of the key school system would result in is both risky and unrealistic. As the British philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in 1926: "Even if the highest education were desirable for all, a crude application of democratic principles might lead to the conclusion that none should have it." Now, allowing for the fact that he was heir to an elitist system that was class-bound and not entirely egalitarian, we must still see the truth at the centre of that statement.

Access to better-quality education is an important index of social equality. So, government at all levels needs to have more forceful policies (which, by the way, it also needs to enforce) and a better mechanism to allocate its limited resources to narrow the gap between the very best and the rest.

This could include targeting less-developed schools for special assistance, standardizing quality controls on teaching (and, again, implementing this in a strict way), and perhaps rotating headmasters and teachers to give a greater number of students access to a higher-quality education. In any case, these moves would be a pretty tall order and this sort of change would not come easy, but they are realistic to some degree.

From a broader perspective, this widespread parental anxiety points to a disparity in the use or allocation of social resources. Distribution is increasingly related to the quality and quantity of education people have already received. Credentials from a prestigious university mean more earning power and a better chance to secure a well-paid job in an increasingly competitive society.

As recently as a decade ago, university graduates had little difficulty finding a job, whether it was ideal or not. Today, many are having a tough time just getting one. The employment rate for last year's graduates is 73 per cent, according to the Education Ministry. Some of the major companies, domestic and foreign, have an unwritten policy that they only take graduates from a few top universities.

A good job, of course, brings a higher salary, which often leads to a private car, trips overseas, a cool apartment, better medical care; all are symbols of the good life and higher status.

As a result, the competition for these golden opportunities starts much earlier and goes all the way down to the beginning of a child's school life. This brings us back to the beginning of this piece: parental anxiety is not just the realm of parents of high school graduates; the disease has spread to parents of pre-school kids.

It is difficult to see how this situation can be remedied unless people have more options to climb, instead of claw, the social ladder. For example, there should be more space for entrepreneurs, and more social benefits for everyone.

Maybe even our concept or definition of happiness and success needs to change. If enough of us do not measure success by material wealth or social status, there will be fewer demands on our kids and they will be much more relaxed.

I do not really know how much our education system can improve to the degree that it results in fairness or how our mentality can be modified to produce a healthier environment. I have adopted a wait-and-see attitude, and the only thing I personally can do is to make adjustments myself. I believe my child is blessed with the potential to develop a well-balanced character and to live a better life than his parents, just as his parents did.

(China Daily June 1, 2005)