Recently, the incident of a primary school student falling from a building in Jintan District, Changzhou, Jiangsu Province spread throughout the Chinese Internet. In fact, I didn’t really want to devote a special episode to discussing this matter. After all, the little girl just left not long ago, so it is really not good to bring this matter out to make it a hot topic and attract traffic. But then I thought about it, the dead are gone, but the living are working hard. It is time for those of us who have experienced Miao Kexin’s feelings to some extent to stand up and discuss how to prevent similar tragedies from happening again.
I mainly want to discuss two issues today. First of all, regarding the issue of “transmitting positive energy” that many people are criticizing, my personal views on this may be different from the mainstream views. Maybe for us adults, blindly “delivering positive energy” is indeed a kind of self-paralyzing spiritual opium. It only whitewashes the peace and is not helpful in solving any real problems. But for children like Miao Kexin, who is about ten years old, under normal circumstances, should we focus on “delivering positive energy”? At least in my personal opinion, it is an extremely cruel thing to let a child of around ten years old know the complexity and ugliness of the adult world in advance. So** in a normal society, no matter how intense the intrigue among adults is, we should strive to let the next generation grow up in an environment full of kindness and warmth**. This is why I support “passing positive energy” to children.
However, what I said above can only be established in a normal and ideal society. In our current social reality, people like Miao Kexin’s generation have lived in cram schools, exams and competitions of all sizes since childhood. The cruel competition and huge pressure they face may be something that even us adults cannot understand. In such an environment, children have actually entered adulthood early. For them, there is no such thing as a warm and innocent childhood. This is why Miao Kexin was able to write an article like “Three Strikes of White Bone Demons”. Because it’s not that they don’t want to “deliver positive energy”, but that from a very young age, they have already tasted the bitterness of the adult world that should only belong to adults. In this case, your teacher still insists on asking the children to “deliver positive energy”. This is not forcing the children to lie, what is it?
In the final analysis, when it comes to “positive energy”, it is not the children who are wrong, but the entire society. It was the incompetence of us adults, our failure to do our part, and our failure to create a childhood world full of innocence and warmth for our next generation, that ultimately led to such a tragedy.
The second question I want to discuss today is about the role that teachers, as a group, play in the growth of each of us. I think many of you are like me and have experienced inhumane treatment by your head teacher or classroom teacher. I don’t know about first-tier developed areas like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. I grew up in a shantytown in a third-tier city. I experienced corporal punishment and beatings when I was in kindergarten. At that time, I was young and full of energy, so I always couldn’t sleep during lunch break, so the teacher asked us, who were not sleeping, to do squats in the corner. I was only 5 years old at that time. It got even worse when I was in elementary school. Those who didn’t turn in their homework would be queued up and slapped on the back of their hands. Note, it’s not the palm of your hand, but the back of your hand. Our teacher said personally that the back of the hand hurts more than the hand, and he wanted us to “long memory”. As for the verbal insults and abuses, there are countless. If you fail to answer a question in class, you will be said to have “granite in your head.” If you repeatedly get the same question wrong, you will be said to be “mentally retarded,” “incurable,” and so on. Students whose families do not give them red envelopes will be placed in the row behind the teacher, and class cadres will give them to students whose families have money and are willing to give them red envelopes.I won’t continue to list them here. What I want to say today is that no matter which country you are in, teachers are an inherently authoritarian profession. Because they are facing a group of children who are absolutely disadvantaged, they hold huge power** in their hands over the students. We all say that the power of the government and the state should be restricted, but should teachers’ power over students also be supervised and restricted? If you have ever joined the so-called class group or parent group, you should have experienced that parents nowadays are even more humble in front of teachers than in front of unit leaders. What are the reasons that led to today’s situation? I think this issue is worthy of reflection by all of us.
It has been some time since Miao Kexin passed away. I would like to end today’s program by quoting John Donne’s sermon:
No one is self-contained, An isolated island, Everyone is part of a vast continent. If a wave washes away a rock, Europe will decrease. Like a promontory that loses its tip, Like losing a piece of your friend’s or your own territory. Every death is my sorrow, Because I am a member of the human race. So, Ask not for whom the bell tolls, It chirps for you!