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Let Children Be Themselves
Summary:A country's independent personality depends on its citizens having the ability to think independently. A country's ability to innovate comes from people with passion, curiosity and creativity. These qualities must be nurtured from childhood, and it starts with letting the children be themselves.

 


By Yan Yong (言咏)
Issue 585, Sept 3, 2012
Nation, page 15
Translated by Laura Lin
Original article:
[Chinese]

It's the beginning of the school year again. Since 2008, the Ministry of Education, together with the Chinese public television station CCTV, has broadcast a program called The First Lesson (开学第一课) to mark the start of each new school year.

This year is the fifth broadcast of the program, and as usual, all 220 million Chinese pupils, from elementary to secondary schools, were required to watch it and write something afterwards.

This year's theme was "Beauty is by Your Side" (美在你身边).

In viewing each year's theme, "Knowledge is the Guardian of Life" (知识守护生命) in 2008, "The Education of Love" (爱的教育) in 2009, "The Dreams" (谈梦想) in 2010 and "In Search of Happiness" (寻找幸福) in 2011, we can see how China's education field is advancing with the times.

They are gradually moving out of the conformism of patriotic and ideological ideas and are opening up to topics associated with life at a more personal level.

To be fair, in comparison with the preaching of the past, The First Lesson has progressed in style.

The program is well intentioned in using a magazine format to pass on mainstream values through inspirational stories. However, what remains to be answered is: can such a method really educate children about love, beauty, and inner happiness as the program intends?

First of all, we should be clear that a lot of the life's lessons are taught through experience rather than in classrooms.

The best way to educate children is to allow them to have access to a wealth of life experiences. The First Lesson cannot be a substitute for this. For instance, how can a child whose life is filled with after-school classes and who has no time to dream understand the meaning of dreams?

This is precisely what the Chinese education system is oblivious to.

In last year's program, one of the guest-speakers in the video said that growing up was more important than school results. That's absolutely true. However, in a country that lauds the concept of quality education, whereas in reality its practice is examination-oriented, talking about the principle is much easier than putting it into practice.

Moreover, the beautifully packaged program hides a danger: that adults are still trying to "indoctrinate" children. Even though the methods now being used are more subtle, the adults are nonetheless still passing down their values to children from a position of supposed wisdom.
 
The big difference in education between the West and the East is that Chinese are inclined to play an authoritative teaching role whereas Westerners are more willing to be a companion. The latter won't easily impose his view, but rather encourage independent thinking and diversified growth.

The trend in education today requires us to move towards being companions. The danger of an "authoritative preacher" is that it creates children who lack assertiveness, who blindly follow the mainstream, and who aren't innovative.

When I watched a seven-year-old child in the CCTV video saying that, "Love is sharing. Love is dedication (爱是分享, 爱是奉献)," which obviously was a line that had been carefully prepared before the show was broadcast, I suddenly felt distressed.

When are we going to stop trying to shape children who obey and heed, and who are as standard as their uniforms?  

As American writer Peter Hessler noted in River Town, his book about teaching English in a city on the banks of the Yangtze called Fuling in Chongqing, his students relied too much on a model essay that he had provided them with early in the term and he complained that "all the students in the school had learned to rely on copying models and re-producing what they had read without thinking, that's how they'd come through the system."

When Barack Obama assumed office in 2009 and made a speech to all American schoolchildren on their first day of school, it caused a controversy. It was actually the Department of Education that got him into trouble, by suggesting that the pupils write a reflection on his speech. Parents objected to the idea. In their view, children go to school to learn how to think independently, not to develop the habit of bowing to authority.

A country's independent character depends on its citizens having the ability to think independently. A country's ability to innovate comes from people with passion, curiosity and creativity.

These qualities must be nurtured from childhood, and it starts with letting the children be themselves.

News in English via World Crunch (link

 

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