MCLC: No room for western values in university education (8)

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No room for western values in university education (8)
Below, find Rujie Wang’s translation of the Cai Zhaoyang talk referred to in # 6 in this thread. My thanks to Rujie for sharing this with the MCLC community.
Kirk
Looking at Education from the Perspective of Freedom
Cai Zhaoyang
Tr. Rujie Wang
I’m a middle school Chinese teacher, the one you see from your first year of elementary school through your third year of high school, ugly, dull, and middle aged. Today, I’d like to discuss my thoughts about education with you. Education has become a point of national shame. Everyone talks about it, and student’s parents and teachers are all outraged. It seems that education today is filled with evils and countless problems. When I was preparing for this speech, there was a popular video on the internet, so let’s look at that first… For those of you that don’t know, you may think this a meeting for tiered marketing, and those of you that understand what this is know that this is a famous middle school in Hebei doing a pledge before taking college entrance exams.
Today when we watch this video we laugh at them, make fun of them, mock them. In fact, this made me sad; it was like an essay I wrote in the past, titled “Because you don’t understand my worries”. What was it that pushed our naïve, creative, free-willed children to the brink of mental and psychological collapse? This reminds me of the time when people tried to boycott Japanese goods, when the entire country was passionate and incredibly excited. This strikes me as similar to the pledge, so why on earth have our children become young punks from one generation to another? Have we not made continual progress?
We grew up drinking poisoned baby formula. By poisoned milk, of course, I am speaking through metaphors. This is a mysterious country, where we can host the Olympics, but cannot offer baby milk that people trust. This poisoned milk is also a metaphor of our children’s spiritual food that is poisoned. Don’t assume that because we are in the 21st century, our textbooks are also up to date. From 2009 to 2010, a friend and I studied China’s 3 sets of most adopted teaching textbooks, put out by PEP, Jiangsu Education Publishing House, and Beijing Normal University Press. We reached a conclusion: our children are still being fed the wrong medicine. Ever since our study was published in February 2009, we saw a great deal of concern nationwide, first from “Southerners’ Biographies Weekly”, followed by reports from several major media outlets, reflecting on Chinese textbooks used in elementary schools. The reflections led to the sale of Chinese textbooks from 2009 to 2011. Why did we even want to study these materials? Because in 2008, my son and friend was three; in 2012 when he was an elementary school student, the textbooks he used were the same materials that we had criticized earlier, totally unchanged.
Over this year’s winter break, PEP released a second edition of their teaching materials, of their elementary school language textbooks, even with an audio tape. Our son listened to them in tape, and I did as well. The lessons they contained were things like “Never forget those who dug the well you drink from”, and, “Wang Erxiao, the anti-Japanese hero”. After listening, my son asked me a question. He said, “Dad, what is ‘big sweep’?” The big sweep? ! I was stunned, because to a child living in 2013, it’s hard to have to explain what an all-out military campaign is, and I want to protect his right to not know. Let’s talk about the story of Wang Erxiao. He was a cowherd who led the Japanese invaders into an ambush by the Eighth Route Army, but was killed along with the Japanese enemies. He was a little hero, like many other heroes in this series, for example, we all know the stories of Xiaobing Zhangga, Yu Lai, Liu Hulan. Since 1949, we also had the little hero Lai Ning. What these heroes had in common is that they were all children. In fact, we discussed this years ago, what do we do when we encounter a fire? We don’t encourage our children to put it out, but instead tell them to first leave and then report the fire to the police. In 2013, these lessons were still contained in the elementary textbook. We know, it is this education, it is textbooks like this, in which all the details are meticulously stated and carefully worded that systemically make our children who they are, starting from as early as elementary schools or even kindergarten, their heads are full of these empty stories, told in the official discourse. They (the kids) went in innocent and naïve, and came out hysterical.
The first semester that my son was in school, I took him on some trips. For the first trip, I took him to Beijing at his vehement request to see Tiananmen, because his textbooks had a section entitled “Places that I most want to visit”. Upon reading the textbook, our son argued that he wanted to go to Tiananmen, so I took him there, and took a picture of him, and he cheered, throwing up his arms and jumping. But I was worried for him, because this was the first time he was kidnapped by a big word. Think of it, as a child growing up in Southern Shaoxing, how could he love Beijing more than his own hometown? Just now, when professor Hong Qi made his speech, I was quite moved to tears, because he so truly loved his hometown. Only one’s love for his native land can come from the bottom of one’s heart, which is why I think this textbook has some problem. Another event, my son’s birthday was in January of lunar calendar, when we happened to be in Malaysia. On that day I suddenly had a thought. In a boastful voice I spoke to him: “Son, this year we’re celebrating your birthday in Malaysia.” He was furious and said: “No, I want to celebrate my birthday in my homeland!” I was stunned, dumbstruck, “homeland”, this was the first time the child had opened his mouth to say such a big word, because I didn’t supply him with books that contain that type of language. So I wanted to write an essay, titled “Homeland Test”, examining exactly when, where, and how the term entered his mind and became part of his vocabulary.
Why are our children like this? Let me tell you a true story about homework. The child of a friend of mine was a second year student. One day he returned home with an assignment to write about his thoughts on the spirit of the 18th Chinese Communist Party National Congress. My friend was a bartender, so he joked, “Sonny, come here, and just write, ‘the earth and the heavens are vast, but not as vast as the CCP’s kindness; father and mother are dear, are not as dear as the party chairman.’” This is a father of great character. But I know, most children are becoming Huang Yibo, the poster child of cultural literacy in China. They love watching the news, and their vocabularies are full of big words. So can we now understand these students at Hengshui Middle School? Are they not the same? With this type of education, they become this kind of people. Aside from school’s effort to instill our values, there is another reason related to our traditional views on education. For many of us parents trying to teach our children, the most important word is “obedience”. This view of education, in my opinion, is a problem, so I am known as a supporter of children’s educational freedom. Many of my friends do not understand and think freedom, love, and tolerance mean doing whatever one pleases. They tried to talk down to me as if they had been there and done that, saying: “Young Cai, it’s necessary to establish norms and regulations. Their believe that children must follow these norms, so when disciplining their children, instead of encouraging freedom that is in their nature, they use discipline and punishment to force them to obey.
I am from Zhejiang, and my hometown has a saying that, if a child is troublesome, he is someone with “untied hands for seven days”. This means when a child is born, for the first seven days he is kept inside clothes. This is called “swaddling” in Mandarin. In where I am from, the swaddling was done with “wax paper”, and using this method, the hands and feet of the infant would be tied together for seven days, and after these seven days, the child would grow to be well-behaved and obedient. My grandfather often criticized me for “not having my hands tied for seven days”. This story always reminds me of domesticating the eagle by the Oroqens, who try to train an untamed and ferocious eagle to act like a falcon. If you check Baidu on how to train it, and at the heart of the instructions is one word: “corporal punishment”, and only by corporal punishment could an eagle be made to fly through the air like a falcon. There is little difference between the training of an eagle and the troublemaker believed not to “have his hands tied for seven days”.
We often feel as parents, we are noble, teachers, engineers of humanity, but in my opinion that is not the case, we are circus animal tamers. Well, once you grow up, you hit puberty, read your middle school reading, you start to have rational, independent thoughts, when the indoctrination and control become ineffective, we have yet another magic bullet. It’s the carnage of college entrance exam and the high school entrance exam that take up your entire time. It’s thousands of soldiers crossing a single-plank bridge, incapacitating you completely.
You must go through these processes, where only preparation, tests, and reviewing material are important events. Furthermore, all of one’s childhood is eliminated, and before you go to college, the only words in your life are “test” and “grades”. But most parents don’t see what the essence of education is, so they echo this system, and become accomplices in harming their children, because children naturally desire freedom, but parents torture them in the name of love. The two generations have a tense relationship, as the popular song says: “it is those who love you the most, that hurt you the worst.” So now we understand this school’s the pledge to succeed in college entrance exam, because they believe in the official discourse, even now, during childhood, they are being force fed to obey authority. They face an unparalleled amount of test-related pressure, so they adopt the models of tiered marketing strategy and “Crazy English”, and become what we see today.
In 2005, when Lian Zhan returned to the mainland for the first time, he visited the Xian primary school he graduated from, and the school’s students sang and danced, very dramatically, with exaggerated poses and voices, calling to him: “Grandpa Lian came back, you finally came back”, and when the performance was broadcast in Taiwan, it was widely ridiculed by the media and those in the Green Party. Long Yingtai wrote an article, saying that nobody should laugh at the elementary school kids in China. In 1972, my professor from Berkeley came to Taiwan and looked at the assembled 20-year-olds, wearing Taiwan military uniforms on the playgrounds, goose stepping, practicing with rifles, standing at attention to sing the national anthem, shouting patriotic slogans. At that time he showed pity. Why didn’t we not look at our children with the same pity? Long Yingtai said, as a 20 year old, she didn’t understand, but now she does. Now we understand as well, why these children always turn into these kinds of people, as well as why a machine as large as our school system does not allow change. Seeing everything from this perspective, should understand.
Children, especially those in middle and high schools, are adolescents. This is the time in your life when your mind is most active and creative. We know, most of Einstein’s scientific discoveries and inventions were done when he was in his twenties. This is the age when we are the most energetic, the most creative. If at this age we do not use these useless, even harmful, things to suppress you, to use this test preparation to restrain you, then how will you put your energy to use? My friend from Nankai University is a blogger, and on a blog called “rabbit teacher” he tells the story of Cinderella. She wants to go to the prince’s ball, but her stepmother does not allow her to, sprinkled a pot of peas in the ashes, and tells Cinderella that if she can separate the peas from the ashes in two hours, she can go to the ball. The separating itself is meaningless; its only purpose is to prevent Cinderella from doing something meaningful, namely, going to the ball. In the movie “Dead Poets Society”, there’s a line that I really like: “Seize the day”, which can be translated as “extract the essence of life.” I often think that this is a great metaphor, education is like Cinderella’s ashes and peas, by itself, it is meaningless, but it can destroy our most energetic years, wear out our free will, and we cannot do the creative things that we need to do, and we never go to the ball, because we go to the pledge meeting instead. This is a true black humor, in the face of such a hard education system, everyone complains that we can do nothing, because “you cannot change the world by just yourself”.
This is a line that I was often told as a young man, by those who look like they have been there and done that. But fortunately I am a very optimistic person, a very naive person. My wife says I’m McDull. A colleague of mine has recently just finished reading “Journey to the West to Vanquish the Demons,” and said if you only have “three hundred children’s songs” you can subdue a demon. Because I am naïve I don’t want the system to defeat me; in my teaching I could add to that education, to put my own educational philosophy into practice. As an example, I often give the kids extracurricular books and movies to look at. When this book club started, for example, there was a list of must-watch films: “Dead Poets Society,” “The Shawshank Redemption, ” “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest “,” V for Vendetta”, and ” The Truman Show, ” among others, and because this teaching method was unlike any other, local media interviewed me, viewing me as a topic-based teacher. But what is interesting is that, with a salon-style education, one of last to know that I was the teacher in the paper was one of my student’s parents. She said, “Oh, you’re the teacher. If my husband knew you were that teacher, he would beat you up.” Our views on education are different, but we don’t have to use force to solve this.
Because I was a McDull style optimist, I always thought that we aren’t totally powerless. If we place all the responsibility and blame on the system, then I also want to tell you that our system is but ourselves, and each one of us is a part of this system. As Lu Xun said before, we have to put on our shoulders the gate of darkness, and let the children go into the light, and when I read this sentence I felt quite tragic-heroic, searching for this gate for years and never finding it.
But I realize now, there is at least one thing I can do. It’s not to add more to the unnecessary burden of our children. Looking back at the story of Cinderella, Cinderella finally knew that she was going to the ball, and we also know that in “The Truman Show”, Truman finally escaped Seahaven to find freedom and love, and in “The Shawshank Redemption”, Andy spent 20 years with a small hammer digging a tunnel to freedom. These are very exciting scenes. So, I always believe that miracles happen in this world. The stories of achieving freedom through suffering, through ongoing and unyielding pursuits are to me miracles. So please forgive my McDullish naivety that in this world miracles happen. You always believe that a miracle will happen, that a miracle did happen, so we need to believe in education as well, keep our dream alive that miracles may happen.
What is the value of education? Is it tests, going to a good school, finding a good job, going to a good university to find a good job to have a good marriage, and letting the next generation do the same? The way I see it, this is not the case, its purpose is to guard your freedom and realize your potentials, so you can find yourself, so you can become your own person, so that you can have the courage to follow your own path, to have the energy to explore. To use a quote from Kant, “Have the courage to use your own reason —that is the motto of enlightenment”. Before our children could understand this, before they have the energy to explore, is it not our duty as parents, as teachers, as guardians, to help them? But many parents are worse than Cinderella’s stepmother by scattering more peas in ashes. When Cinderella finally went to the ball, it was because she quickly separated the peas, but who helped her? Doves, birds, elves, fairies. We adults, teachers and parents should be that fairy, which is the biggest problem that I face as the father of a first grader.
Elementary school textbooks written in official discourse use these empty stories to hijack the minds of our children, and to start elementary education geared solely towards exams. But as long as you are an enlightened parent, you can teach by example and by explanation, easing your child’s academic burden naturally, or at least relieving their emotional burden, and the worst thing for us to do is to go to Xinhua Bookstore, and buy supplementary materials and auxiliary textbooks for them, so the parents themselves understand that education is more than just tests. Furthermore, what do we do when our children are already kidnapped by such big words? What if they already learn to speak like those living in Zhongnanhai but fated to live like those eating poisoned cooking oil? What if his head is filled with such garbage as “Drinkers who forget well-diggers“ and “Wang Erxiao”? Even if we cannot stop such a change, we need to know how this change happened in children, from first grade to the last year of high school, so that we might be involved in helping these children grow. Their beauty has become corrupted, and it doesn’t matter, because we use countless books, far more than one person’s brain could ever hold. The human brain’s capacity is unlimited, like the sea, so even if we cannot remove all those garbage texts, we can at least dilute them to near nothing.
Before they can understand words, the best books to read children are picture books. My friends and I read comics as children, and now there is a book genre called picture books, and they can enrich children better than anything else. Until they can read words, you should give them the best books, “The Little Prince”, “Charlotte’s Web”, “Peter Pan”, “Jonathan Livingston Seagull”, “Little John”, and so on. The unvarnished aesthetics of these books matches our own humanity, and children who are exposed to these books will thrive. Like all terrifying teachers through the years, I too have knelt at the feet of a test-focused education, where books are the field in which we plant our rice. But the good news is that I have stayed with these ideas, my own ideas. I’m headstrong, but I am grateful for my stubbornness, because now I’m forty, and only just recently begun to understand the meaning of education, I have a feeling that I’ve been looking at this the wrong way, so I titled my blog: the things a 40-year-old learns.
There were two times when I really wanted to leave the educational system, to stop teaching. The first time was in the 1990s, when teachers’ salaries were very low, even lower than those of factory workers producing bicycles. The second time was in 2000, when the media and internet reached a new level of prominence, I really wanted to work in the media, because then I could “pay back my motherland by writing articles” and “shoulder the heavy burden of morality” by “trying my hand in writing”. But ultimately, because I was lazy, I didn’t leave. I’m glad that I made that choice, because now I understand the significance of education in my own life, I think I needed to be a teacher to do so, to become the teacher that I wanted to be. Those who told me when I was young that an individual cannot change the world are wrong. I have never considered relying on one person to change the world. My plea is not to be changed by the world. Those who want to change the world want demonstrate their strength; but what we want to show is our weakness, hoping not want to change the world, but only not to be changed by the world; our desire is a sign of weakness.
People who want to change the world have a hero-complex; they want to save the masses hanging upside down, to establish a center for the world, to provide life for the people, to continue knowledge of the saints at the brink of extinction, to bring peace and order in the world for eternity. When obsessed with these, they become driven by ambition. The Chinese people often have this kind of savior complex, where the ambitious see themselves as heroes, but since most of us are not ambitious, we hope that a hero will emerge and save us. But we are on our own; we are alone in this, without hope of a hero. In fact, none of us are heroes, we are not ambitious, we are only ordinary people, who look out only for ourselves, rather than expecting to change anything. Even what I’ve said today, all that I have discussed, should not be seen as preaching to you.
Because I showed my students films like “Dead Poets Society”, they now refer to me as, “O captain, my captain”. We know that Keating, the teacher in the film, tells his students that they can call him “captain”, but I am not one of those. On the contrary, I identify more with Andy from “The Shawshank Redemption” who was a prisoner, as I was a prisoner of the education system, one that took me 16 years to carve out the road that led me to thinking freely. My tools are reading, thinking and writing, so as a middle school teacher, I am willing to be the light for these children trying to find a way through the darkness that engulfs so much of their lives. I want to give them a way to opt out of the mainstream thought, as well as the dominant values. There are other choices out there and you can choose to do things on your own, that you can be your own captain.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on February 9, 2015
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