Don't Let Your Child Become a Dumb Sheep in the Tide of Commercialized Education

My son is in fifth grade this year. The combined burden of schoolwork at school and at after-school tutoring classes is so heavy that I feel tired just for him. Yet his mother seems to think it is not enough; every kind of tutoring outfit bludgeons her with brainwashing—the advertorials are written to be irresistibly tempting, and some ads are pure fear-mongering.

I have gradually come to understand why my older brother refuses to have children. He says that in this painful world, the best love one can give a child is not to bring him into being. This life attitude, rooted in Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy, led my brother to choose not to have offspring.

My child was born in 2005. Looking around at his cohort, they have not yet begun to learn how to live and survive; eighty to ninety percent of their lives is taken up by studying, and even time for physical exercise is pitifully small. As for feeling nature, or training survival skills such as cooking, washing clothes and sweeping the floor, there is not much time for those either. I remember that I myself began learning these things beyond textbooks at the age of six or seven.

My son has hardly ever had a complete weekend. Even at junior high, my own studies were not as busy as my son's are now. Though back then the school had 'enrichment classes' that gathered so-called top students together for weekend enrichment, because I was by nature incorrigibly mischievous, I often skipped out to play ball, climb tall towers or climb mountains.

A person who studies and works seven days straight, with nerves taut for the long term, will run into serious trouble. I do not believe that under such conditions learning can have any joy. Life should not be so monotonous as to do only one thing. I keep trying to persuade my wife not to push the child too hard. But since moving to Beijing, she has never relaxed her own nerves; she has grown used to letting the child live this high-pressure, fast-paced life.

From my limited life experience I know that only one factor can trigger the explosion of a person's potential: interest. Interest is not like other things that can come and go on demand. Many people go through life without ever tasting what interest is. Since I started school, I have not found many of my classmates with interests of their own. As for me, I have had bursts of intense interest many times, and each burst made my potential gush forth like a blowout.

My father was a rough man, but he had one virtue: he never meddled in my studies. Throughout my school years I was free as could be. I have at various times taken tremendous interest in literature, philosophy, mathematics, medicine and Buddhism; to this day I have achieved something, more or less, in each of these, and he did not even know it.

Today, all manner of for-profit training outfits lure parents under the banner of cultivating students' interests. Education and medicine are the two fields that least should be commercialized. Unfortunately, in the age we live in, every walk of life across China has fallen into ruin. The severe commercialization of education has turned children into the clients of training agencies, which use all manner of marketing tactics and psychological siege against parents, making the parents—who control the children's time—succumb.

Chinese people have simply forgotten how to live a three-dimensional life. Amid the blanket advertising barrage, their brains are muddled and their hearts anxious, led by the nose by the thick commercial tide of society, their emotions entirely ruled from without. The children raised this way grow more restless and shallow with each generation; they no longer know how to live with refinement, nor to do well, with refinement, anything they love. They can only surrender themselves again and again to the advertising slogans, ending up as people of no independent will.

I am deeply convinced that great master-craftsmen are never produced in such an environment. On the contrary, children will be stupefied in batches in this tide of education. If we wish to give our children a happy life, we should swim against the tide rather than, panic-stricken and bewildered, blindly follow along.