We Have Entered an Era Where Lifelong Learning Is Required for Survival

Because my son loves mathematics and has chosen it as his lifelong career, I did a careful survey of university education in Paris a few years ago. The reason I looked at Paris is that it is the world capital of mathematics, home to many world-famous mathematics schools headed by the École Normale Supérieure.

To my surprise, universities in Paris are full of white-haired university students—not young people who have gone prematurely gray from hard study, but genuine middle-aged and elderly people. They study all kinds of majors, and quite a few study mathematics. Young students attend class in the same lecture hall as their middle-aged and elderly classmates, and everyone is used to it and thinks nothing of it.

Paris universities are only a microcosm of European and American institutions of higher education. More than twenty years ago, when I was in international trade, I met an Australian business partner. He wholesale all kinds of Chinese goods from me to sell locally in Australia. He told me that, besides completing university, he had received eight kinds of vocational training. These trainings lasted from one or two years for the longer ones to one or two months for the shorter ones.

Our country now also has some middle-aged and elderly people returning to university, and these returning students have become a topic of conversation over tea. This shows we have not yet joined the ranks of developed countries; once we do, middle-aged and elderly university students on our campuses will be common, and no one will bother noticing them anymore.

Moreover, most of the middle-aged and elderly people now returning to school study highly practical majors; they have not yet reached the French point of studying majors that seem to have little practical value, pursued purely out of interest.

I venture to predict that before long our country will also see many middle-aged and elderly people going to school to study eclectic, interest-driven majors, and I may well be one of them. When I am old, perhaps I will study mathematics at the Capital Normal University near my home—mathematics was my favorite when young, and studying it in old age helps ward off dementia. My son's love of mathematics is, frankly, a straight inheritance of our family genes.

After my son finished high school, we briefly considered sending him abroad for university. After struggling with the decision for a while, he chose to study at home, though from time to time he goes to other countries as an exchange student for a spell. Beijing children have this advantage; most of them have had exchange experiences abroad since junior high, and my son is one.

In the second year of junior high he went to the United States on exchange, and later also spent time at the National University of Singapore; so he has been disenchanted with studying abroad. He is a homebody; he would not even consider going to another city in China for school, let alone staying abroad long away from his parents.

In my son's class, a white-haired elderly pair would often sit quietly listening to lectures. So he is not at all surprised by my university life. According to my son, whenever this elderly couple came to their classroom, his teachers became very careful in class. He guesses the couple are retired professors; when they sit there listening, the teachers at the podium feel the pressure. Interestingly, one of my own teachers told me in conversation that she also felt pressured when I sat in her classroom.

Friends often praise me for what I am doing now, and I always tell them it is perfectly normal; one day, as our society develops, everyone will think nothing of it.

Those of us with international-trade experience have the broadest international perspective. Generally, we are well informed, follow global current affairs and technological advances, have a keen business sense, and keep very flexible minds rather than seeing things rigidly. Looking at the whole world, as society develops, more people choosing to keep studying new majors and knowledge in middle and old age is an inevitable trend.

The more developed a society, the faster it progresses, and the faster knowledge and technology become obsolete. If members of society want to keep up with that development, they must have the awareness and habit of lifelong learning; otherwise they cannot keep pace and life becomes a struggle.

Moreover, as our life expectancy rises, our very longevity confronts us with many unprecedented new challenges. For example, we will face more and more age-related diseases and spend longer living with illness. These require us to learn a great deal of new knowledge to cope with the changes.

Our approach to raising our own children may also need considerable improvement. I do not much care what degree my son eventually gets; although he himself very much wants to do a PhD, I do not think it matters that much. I will support him in pursuing his own goals, and leave him room to change direction later in life.

If needed, I will personally train him in business, so that he can, on the premise of financial freedom, do what he loves. I believe that with my experience of struggling in business and the new skills and knowledge I have continuously acquired over the years, I can still get my child started in business. The reason I value my child's business training so highly is that through my own life I have deeply felt the importance of not being economically dependent on others; financial freedom is the foundation of spiritual freedom.

At school I pay little attention to hot news on social media. Yesterday evening a friend suddenly sent me a video about Zhu Yuejun, a veteran PhD graduate of Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine. After watching it I felt both surprised and not surprised. Dr. Zhu's early academic record was outstanding, but his fate was full of hardships. He worked as a rural doctor for decades, ended his old age in poverty, and relied on the government's minimum living allowance.

His story set me thinking for a long time and gave me a new view of his doctoral advisor and his fellow PhD students. These people are held up as role models in our medical textbooks, but they have an unknown side. I am not yet willing to discuss this at length, because many unknown details have not yet been disclosed, and it is too early to draw any conclusions.

There is much in this elderly PhD's life that is moving; his experience made me all the more aware of the importance of lifelong and well-rounded learning. If one wants to live a good life, fully deploy one's talents, and realize one's aspirations, one needs to learn skills in many areas, and be flexible—when one path is blocked, one must have the ability to break through and carve out another.