Last night, I happened to see a milk ads on TV, which shown how good milk could be to brain development. A little kid maybe just more than 2 years old can recognize so many Chinese characters. (Forgive me, I forgot the exactly number about how many words she could remember. Now I am just not good at remembering data.) Smarter as she is, it puts me to think that it will be a little bit tough to be a Chinese especially child.
At age of 4, parents are eager to buy piano, flute, painting-pen or any other type of art-thing for you and drive you to training school after coming back from kid-garden on weekends. Before age of 6, you must remember certain amount of traditional Chinese poems, and could write down some Chinese characters. Then from 9, you will have to study till 5-6 pm everyday, which also means a period of 10 years of student career just begins. Save to say, there are still art-thing training during weekend, and inches-high of homework for you to do. Then, probably, at that time, there is a thick pair of glasses already sitting on your nose, you will, together with thousands of other teenagers, face the entrance exam to college. If you work harder and harder enough, you may be a lucky guy to pass it. Then after four comparatively leisure year, you will again face the problem of job-hunting. But, halt, what we get from this education system? --- If, just sole year, in youth Olympic Math Champion, there is no Chinese winner, it will be a new-history. For so many colleagues of mine, when they send their kids to study abroad before college age, there is a large percent of foreign teacher would say “ you need not study math in my school” to their kids. It seems that we have so many talents and gifted children. We won so many times on math champion when we were young. But pity to halt again here, could you know how many Chinese people won Noble Prize of Math? Shamefully saying, zero! But WHY?
Have you ever realized that nowadays when you find out a so-hard-to-be-math problem when you were young and you feel amazing that you could solve it so easily? Why the teachers and parents force the children to solve the questions, which will be “out-of-question” ones to them when they are even just one year older? Why it is being so? Why Chinese children work so hard? Why? The answer is, I think, people.
We just have so many people here in China. Why I choose you instead of him or them among thousands and millions of candidates? Why I can do so without bringing anybody’s sense of unfairness? There, at least, should be a standard. And in China, it could be nothing better than marks of exam being used as standard. Same school, same exam, same ages, if you get a higher marks, you win. Then forget about capacity-cultivating education system, save that thought-provoking teaching experiment. So long as there are lots of examinees, there must be exam-oriented education system.
When I was in my senior high school. In order to face the college entrance exam, I will have to recite all the affairs of the history very well. There are about 6 books of history, both on Chinese history and World one, from very ancient time till current affairs. The method of my self-testing is so: given any book of these six, and there is one person open any page of the book and told me just one detailed year, then I can begin to tell you all the events happening in the very year both home and abroad. I feel great on that, but my history teacher tell me, no! It is just initial stage, you will also have to know why the events happened, and how it would affect the world, and what was the result, and who was the real mastermind of the event, so on and so forth! To confess, it disappointed me! Then the teacher would say, “The competitors you will face in the exam, are mostly from countryside. For them, the sole way to get rid of poor life of countryside and to enter to the town or city is to be a college student. They can, not only recite the events, but also tell you all the stories behind the events, which are collected by their teachers from all kind of books they could get.” I am shocked by this news. And my sympathy is with them!
At last, being a part time oral English teacher, I just try my best to entertain my students, and if they could feel, even a tiny sense of funny, during the procedure of studying, I will give them a A-mark! However, from the school side, maybe I am not a good teacher. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------If you want to be improved, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.
择善固执，纵望之愚且鲁，何足介怀。
