Why does European and American education attract Chinese people?

Introduction: An article written nearly ten years ago was thrown away somewhere, and I didn't look back. I accidentally found it the day before yesterday, and after looking at it, I found that not only has this old article not expired, but it has become more time-sensitive. The writer is proud of it. The blocking of this article a year after its publication proved to be more timely than expected, at least in the eyes of mainland Chinese authorities.

In today's modern or post-modern era, when mentioning "village", many people immediately think of Canadian communication scholar Marshall McLuhan (Marshall McLuhan, 1911-1980). Whether his knowledge can really be regarded as profound is still controversial, but Western academic circles recognize that he is prophetic, especially good at creating famous aphorisms.

"The global village" (the global village) was a term put forward by McLuhan 66 years ago (that is, in 1962, that is, when people did not know that there would be an Internet covering the whole world in the future). Another of his famous aphorisms that is still fresh and relished is, "The medium is the message" (The medium is the message).

On the other hand, the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu (date of birth and death is unknown) painted a world picture completely different from the global village McLuhan imagined about 2,500 years ago: It is said that the people do not communicate with each other until old age and death."

Lao Tzu's timeless wisdom cannot be doubted, but the world he described has indeed passed away.

Today, "global village" has become a reference that does not need special explanation, and globalization has long been an irresistible trend. Globalization will of course lead to various problems, but countries and individuals that are self-enclosed and isolated from globalization will lose many opportunities for their own development. This is another interesting question which cannot be discussed in detail here.

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Globalization is not only the globalization of economy and information flow, but also more and more reflected in the globalization of education.

As for China specifically, more and more Chinese people now believe that education in Western countries is better and more humane. They lament or scold that Chinese education is not to enlighten, encourage, and cultivate children's thinking and creativity, but intentionally or unintentionally, or even do everything possible to stifle children's thinking and creativity. Chinese education is still a kind of revolutionary machine. Standard screws for education.

There are many people who praise or even forcibly promote the screw education of the revolutionary machine. At the same time, there are plenty of admirers and hard-sellers who want their children to escape the education they praise.

Because of strong dissatisfaction and even despair with China's current education, many Chinese turn their attention to the West, thinking that the outside world is wonderful and their education is wonderful. In the summer of 2012, the philosophy composition questions of the French baccalaureate in liberal arts, science and economics and social subjects were introduced to China, and once became a hot topic in China, which was popular and praised by everyone:

liberal arts:

1) What do people gain from labor? (Que gagne-t-on en travaillant?)

2) Are all beliefs contrary to reason? (Toute croyance est-elle contraire à la raison?)

3) Interpretation of an excerpt from Spinoza's Theological-Political Tractatus. (Expplication d'un texte de Spinoza, "Traité théologico-politique.")

science:

1) Do we have an obligation to seek the truth? (Avons-nous le devoir de chercher la vérité?)

2) Are we freer without states? (Serions-nous plus libres sans l'Etat?)

3) Explain an excerpt from Rousseau's "Emile". (Explication d'un texte de Rousseau, "Emile.")

Economic and Social Section:

1) Are there innate desires? (Peut-il exist des desirs naturels?)

2) Is labor merely useful? (Traviller, est-ce seulement être utile?)

3) Paraphrasing an excerpt from Barclay's "On Passive Obedience". (Explication d'un texte de Berkeley, "De l'obéissance passive.")

What needs to be explained here is that the so-called philosophy composition questions in the French Baccalaureate may sound scary, but they are actually just deep thinking questions. Such questions do not require students to come up with some profound philosophical thinking, but just to let students show as much as possible whether they have in-depth thinking on a certain issue, and whether they can show their thinking in an orderly manner.

Such examination questions are rare and precious in the eyes of Chinese people, but Chinese education in Western countries is commonplace. Speaking of everyday meals, I should add by the way: Although ordinary meals are common rather than rare, they are still very precious, because they are the most nourishing people and the most nourishing qi (that is, what Mencius calls "nourishing qi").

For example, if we randomly find a collection of exercises for the American college entrance examination (SAT or ACT), we can see that such composition questions abound:

1) Is growth necessary for a person to live a happy and fulfilling life? (Is growth necessary to a happy and productive life?) (Requirements: Write an essay, answer this question, and discuss your views on this issue. Please cite sources from literature, art, history, politics, technology, current events, or Examples from your personal experience or observations that provide logical support for your position.)

2) Can losing be more valuable than winning? (Can a loss ever be more valuable than a victory?) (Same as above)

3) What's a real example of courage? (What is one example of true courage?) (Same as above)

4) What is the great injustice in the world and how should it be solved? (What is one great injustice in the world, and how should it be addressed?) (same as above)

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Obviously, to meet such an examination question and make a decent answer, students need to demonstrate their solid knowledge and thinking ability with solid text organization ability. To deal with such examination questions, relying on rote memorization or playing tricks, or making a quick turn of the brain to make a half-sentence or three-sentence two-sentence quiz, it is difficult to get away with it.

Even if a Chinese student is very smart and hard-working, if such a student transfers to the United States (or France) to go to school, at least in the first half of the year, he will inevitably feel dizzy and panic, because he will find that he has lost his foundation all of a sudden. From Chinese to mathematics to science to history, everything has become suspicious, elusive, and at a loss.

This crisis of confidence or culture shock is not all caused by language differences, or even differences in reading classics.

For example, middle school students and even primary school students in the United States are required by their teachers to read books, read all the original works of classic literature, and then write down their reading experience. This kind of reading experience must be the student's own point of view, well-founded thinking. Students are required to start from their own point of view, organize and connect other people's thoughts, comments from other schools, students' own life observations, and what they have learned from reading newspapers and news, and clearly declare and mark the words they quote from others. In short, students are required to organize the information they have in a meaningful and orderly manner to support their own distinctive views.

A student from China will find that even if he has good reading comprehension in English and can write his reading experience in Chinese, which is his most handy, he will still feel flustered and self-doubt, because he has never learned to use his own mind Thought, he doesn't know what his point of view is.

In China, his personal views are neither valued nor encouraged. He has been euphemistically hinted or sternly warned that his personal views are unimportant, worthless, or even worse than worthless. , because the truth has already been discovered and mastered, he should obey the leadership and obey the truth. Since students’ personal views are unimportant, worthless, or even negative, and Chinese language education is not intended to instill nihilism in students after all, it can only be other people’s (and specially designated others’) views that matter, valuable.

Therefore, the language education that students get in China is mainly to learn to find chapters and excerpt sentences, and then post a few parrots, meaningless and empty remarks, such as, "This article better expresses the simple and profound feelings of the working people who love their hometown", or "This article better explains why the people's choice and the history's choice are hard-won" and so on.

After this kind of education, no matter how excellent the students are, no matter how high the scores are, it is self-evident what kind of situation they will face and what kind of feeling they will have when they enter Western schools.

***

The spread of the French college entrance examination philosophy questions to mainland China caused a sensation and even shock. Since there is no such philosophy examination in China's college entrance examination, and since such examination questions undoubtedly require candidates to write essays, and since more and more composition questions in China's college entrance examination in recent years require students to write essays, we might as well take the French college entrance examination as an example. Philosophy is regarded as equivalent to the composition questions in the Chinese college entrance examination.

It is said that many Chinese netizens were shocked when they saw the essay questions of the college entrance examination by French students. Many people criticized China's education and education system for decades for strangling the growth of students' thinking ability. Some people even said that not to mention that Chinese high school graduates can't come up with decent answers to the test questions of French middle school students, even Chinese university professors may not be able to come up with decent and decent answers. Or the snicker test.

On Sina Weibo, where intellectuals once gathered together, there was a lot of discussion, and there was no consensus. Although it is common knowledge that China's liberal arts education is too poor, almost no one can give a specific one, two, three, just how bad it is and where it is.

Carefully reading the relevant Internet discussions at that time, it can be seen that the vast majority of those who criticized Chinese education, the Chinese educational system and educational ideas seemed to have yet to jump out of the traditional Chinese humanistic education thinking and to understand the purpose and practice of Western education. There is still a lack of clear understanding of the huge differences with China.

During the hot discussion on Sina Weibo at the time about the composition questions of the 2012 French college entrance examination, the following Weibo post that was widely circulated and appreciated clearly showed this lack of understanding:

"When Zang Kejia applied for Qingdao University, he had to choose one of two questions for the Chinese language test: 1. Why did you apply for Qingdao University? Light, whoever sinks into the boundless sea of suffering... After writing, there are only 30 characters including punctuation. The examiner is Wen Yiduo, who scored 98 points, and then looked at the mathematics-zero points. Zero points are zero points, and admission What if Zang Ke’s family was born today?”

Zang Kejia (1905-2004) may be a good poet, and Wen Yiduo (1899-1946) may be a good poet, scholar and professor. But judging from Zang Kejia’s composition answer sheet and Wen Yiduo’s grading, according to the most basic standards of American or French essays, one of them failed (Zang) and the other failed (Wen).

Of course, according to the traditional Chinese composition standards, Zang Kejia’s answer sheet of Zen Enlightenment can be said to be ingeniously conceived, concise and to the point, with substance in his words, full of poetic flavor and long meaning; Wen Yiduo called him immediately With a score of 98, it can be regarded as discerning talents with eyes, and Bole knows horses. At least, it should be said to be sympathetic.

However, according to the essay standards of western schools, Zang Kejia did not make any argument at all, but published an arbitrary conclusion, which is thoughtless, groundless, and fragmented, so it can only be failed. As a professor, it would be irresponsible for Wen Yiduo to give such a failing test paper almost full marks.

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Speaking of which, we can go back and compare the composition exam questions of France and the United States in the 21st century and the composition exam of National Qingdao University presided over by Wen Yiduo in the early 1930s.

Obviously, all the test questions in France and the United States, without exception, are uniformly opened up to ask students to make an argument and require students to reason. As for the two test questions of National Qingdao University, one requires students to make an open-ended discussion (why do you apply for National Qingdao University), and the other requires students to express their feelings on any topic (miscellaneous feelings).

Is the focus of Chinese/language examinations and teaching teaching students to learn to think critically and analytically and to make coherent discourses, or to teach students to express miscellaneous feelings that may have literary value?

Obviously, at least from the time when Wen Yiduo presided over the College of Arts of National Qingdao University to today, this fatal issue has been entangled in the Chinese language education and academic circles.

When Chinese language education has stagnated or hesitated for a long time (more than 80 years have passed since Wen Yiduo's time), the world is changing, and China is also changing.

If Zang Kejia was admitted to the National Qingdao University, he could not write essays in the college entrance examination, but could get a high score by writing mixed feelings that do not require evidence, argumentation, or reasoning, then those good times are obviously over. up. Not to mention anything else, in this era of global villages, that set of unreasonable essays can no longer be accepted by other countries, at least not by schools in France, the United States and other Western developed countries.

Thankfully, China can no longer accept such unreasonable and unreasonable compositions. But how to reason (or even whether students should be taught or encouraged to reason) is still a deadly educational issue unresolved in China today.

***

Although France and the United States are both industrially developed democracies in the West, the education systems of the two countries are quite different. To put it simply, primary and secondary education in France is nationally unified, and teaching materials and teaching progress are also nationally unified; primary and secondary education in the United States is localized (funding comes from local taxpayers, local voters elect leaders of education management agencies), textbooks And the teaching progress is also different. The university education in France is all public, while the university education in the United States is both public and private.

As far as the composition test is concerned, the in-depth thinking composition test in France takes four hours, while in the United States it depends on taking the standardized test. Test takers on the ACT now have 40 minutes to write an essay, and those on the SAT have 50 minutes. Obviously, France requires students to demonstrate deeper thinking and write a large essay in the examination room. The United States requires students to quickly sort out their thoughts in a relatively short period of time, and it is best to write down to show their daily accumulation and writing skills.

The difference in the composition test between France and the United States can also be said as follows: France requires students to demonstrate their thinking ability (of course, the display of their thinking ability must be based on a sufficiently high writing ability, and messy writing means that their thinking ability is not good enough); In the United States, students are more required to demonstrate their writing skills (of course, their writing skills must show sufficiently subtle thoughts, and nonsense without thinking is nonsense even if the grammar, syntax, and morphology are completely correct).

In this way, McLuhan's famous saying "the medium is the message" can be used to make a high-level generalization, and it can also be used to distinguish in detail the similarities and differences between the French and American exams and even the teaching content: French exams focus on ideas, while American exams focus on expression, but ideas There must be expression, expression must have thought, and the medium is the message. (Mai really has a skill. He can complete two language operations in opposite directions in just one sentence. It seems that he is really not idle.)

Judging from the composition questions of the French and American baccalaureate exams (the term "baccalaureate exam" is somewhat problematic, but for the sake of brevity and convenience), the educational concepts of the two countries are quite similar. Although France and the United States have different education systems and different teaching and examination methods, their test questions all focus on testing students' understanding of Western values of democracy and freedom, requiring students to show their thinking and understanding of Western classics, as well as their understanding of society and themselves. 3. Thinking about the relationship between oneself and society.

Therefore, if you use French test questions to test American students, or use American test questions to test French students, students from both countries can roughly cope with it, because they are educated with roughly the same values. However, when Chinese students and even Chinese teachers encounter their problems, they can only feel helpless, confused, overwhelmed, or at a loss.

Having said that, the author must quickly confess that he only has a superficial understanding of French and French education. What is going on with education in France? Can children receiving French education, especially French elementary and middle school students, usually write amazing compositions? Such issues require people who are in France, who care about French education, care about and observe children who are educated in France, to speak out.

At the same time, the author has a superficial understanding of American education, but perhaps a few more than I know about French education, so in the future, I may be able to boldly talk about whether the composition of American elementary school students is a magic horse. How to write a composition.

***

Finally, by the way, the above-mentioned composition question in the 2012 French Baccalaureate Examination "What do people gain from labor" is probably not as simple as many Chinese imagine. Students who take the test are unlikely to expect to complete the task and get high marks by praising labor with beautiful words.

"Labour/work/labor" is a very controversial issue in the West. This controversy has a long history. Voltaire (1694-1778), the leader of the French Enlightenment, said:

"Work takes away our three evils: boredom, vice and want..." (Le travail éloigne de nous trois grands maux : l'ennui, le vice et le besoin...)

However, on the iron gate at the entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp, the terminus of the Nazis’ genocide against the Jews, there is also a large-character slogan: “Work sets you free” (Arbeit macht frei).

That slogan is the standard fraud, deceit, hooliganism, is the sign of evil.

Auschwitz taught us that the conditions and environment of work/labour/labor are free, which is an extremely important key issue; to be free is heaven, it is paradise, at least it is possible to work safely and expect to get what you deserve every day resting place; without liberty, there is hell, or at least prison.

These issues remain highly sensitive in some countries. Only in a liberal democratic country like France, can teachers and students freely explore and debate such issues, and develop from such issues, and then conduct in-depth thinking on other issues.

How should such issues be discussed? How should such an article be written? I believe that Chinese teachers with conscience, conscience, and knowledge (rather than pretending to understand) will admit that they cannot teach such composition questions, and dare not teach them.

From this we can see that the issue of Chinese education is actually a political issue.

This is the reason why autocracy leads to mental retardation. No wonder those who praise China's education system are unwilling to let their children receive Chinese education.

(Note: This article was blocked in 2018, one year after it was published on Douban.)