Then what was the goal? There was only one: for students to get high marks on the English section of the college entrance exams. At least for the teachers in the public high school I attended, being able to read books in English or have ordinary conversations with foreigners was beside the point (I won’t go so far as to say superfluous). For them it was far more important for us to memorize as many English vocabulary words as we could, master the past perfect subjunctive,
