The starting line of life, Zhang Baotong 2018.1.21

"Don't let your child lose at the starting line". This sentence seems to have been made by a well-known scholar and official who had returned from overseas. He used his own personal experience and the differences and contrasts between Chinese and Western cultures to speak out and quote scriptures, and blamed many people's failures on losing at the invisible starting line, that is, children's early education. And this starting line is kindergarten, or even prenatal education.

At that time, after reading this article, my first feeling was that my fate was not good, and I was not born in a scholarly family or a wealthy family. Because my father was an ordinary railroad worker, and my mother was a family member of the workers, they were both older generations who could not read a single word. They just let us eat and drink, and never ask us how we are studying, let alone give us guidance and edification. Therefore, I have never been to kindergarten, let alone received prenatal education. For a long time, I blamed my failure in life on losing at the starting line.

However, when I think about it later, how many of the thousands of families in China are ordinary families, how many of them are scholarly families and wealthy families? Moreover, in our daily life, those children born from scholarly families and wealthy families are not as ordinary as us. Especially in the past era, people couldn't even eat enough, so how could they consider early education and edification?

However, in those days, the state's educational policy was to enable students to develop morally, intellectually, and physically in an all-round way, and to become educated workers with socialist consciousness. In other words, as long as you can become a worker, a farmer, or a soldier, you have achieved the goal of education. Therefore, a person's educational attainment and goals are not measured by "success" or "unsuccess". Moreover, no one characterizes their life as a success or a failure. At that time, the state arranged your life position, and if you were assigned to the factory, you would be a worker, and if you were assigned to the countryside, you would be a peasant, and you would have little choice and opportunity. Therefore, the education of parents to their children is basically natural.

It was after the reform and opening up that people really knew that "knowledge changes destiny" and "education makes the future". The restoration of the college entrance examination system is like a spring thunder on the land of China, so that many people have begun to let go of their life ideals and dreams. Further education, college entrance examination, going abroad, and postgraduate entrance examination have become the ladder of success for many people. With the increasing competition in education and talents, the main position of education has begun to move from primary school, middle school to high school to early education in kindergarten, and even prenatal education for mothers. Finally, one day, someone climbed high and shouted, "Don't let your child lose at the starting line", so thousands of parents began to be busy educating their children and desperately moving the starting line forward in the early childhood and fetal period.

In order to "not let their children lose at the starting line", many parents desperately seize high-quality educational resources, do not hesitate to trust relationships, go through the back door, pay high prices, transfer household registration, rent houses, and even buy houses to choose schools for their children. In order to let his child enter Xi'an Middle School, a boss and a parent paid 200,000 yuan to the school at one time. Even if you want to enter some well-known primary schools, parents have to pay 70,000 or 100,000 yuan at a time. Many parents let their children memorize poems and arithmetic at a very young age, and begin to play the piano and practice singing. A colleague asked his four-year-old granddaughter to give us a performance of memorizing Tang poems and Song Ci and the "Three Character Classic", which made me feel ashamed to listen to it. Every time I write about quoting, I look it up from the Internet. But the kid was able to memorize more than 60 songs skillfully. Another colleague's child is only 6 years old, and he is not only learning English, playing the piano, dancing, but also swimming and football. Moreover, this has almost formed a kind of ethos. Our school is a young school, almost all the teachers are young and middle-aged teachers in their thirties, everyone seems to be comparing to see whose children are smart and capable, once on Saturday and Sunday, today take the children to learn English, learn Olympiad mathematics, tomorrow take the children to learn piano and dance, so that the teachers are busier than usual on Saturdays and Sundays. Because they pay more attention to their children's education than the average person, they don't want their children to lose at the starting line.

A few years ago, there was an incident in Australia that caused shock and curiosity among the Chinese people. A Chinese immigrant brought his child to Australia to attend school, and the child was in the third grade of primary school. One day in class, the teacher asked what 42+22 was equal, and no one knew what it was, only this child raised his hand and replied that it was 64. After school, the teacher visited his home and threatened to accuse the parents of abusing the child on the grounds that the child had been abused and had learned to add to the double digits at an inappropriate age. But in China, not to mention the third grade, even the first grade students can almost do it. But this is indeed an incredible thing for many teachers and parents in some western developed countries such as the United States. I've seen an exam paper for a third-grader in the United States with only a few questions on it, such as 4+9= and 14-3=. But that doesn't mean that American children are dumber than Chinese children. Because American children also learn many other things in school, such as crafts and games. And these things are things that we Chinese students can't learn in school. It seems that the knowledge ability of American students in primary and secondary schools and high school is not as good as that of Chinese students, but the level of American college students is not worse than that of China, especially the quality of students in some so-called Ivy League schools, which is obviously much higher than that of Chinese students. In particular, in terms of research and experimental ability, it is much higher than that of Chinese students.

Although Chinese children bear the burden of learning too early, although they have some advantages in terms of knowledge, they also pay a heavy price in terms of vision and health. In fact, the bigger price is hidden in the hearts of children. Too much and too much burden makes many children lose interest in learning and even the joy of childhood. The current education model in China is an elite education model, not a mass education model. It constantly weeds out batches of students with knowledge that is beyond the ability of many children, leaving them with the frustration and helplessness of trying to fail.

In fact, Chinese education has been an elite education trend for thousands of years. Such as "everything is inferior, only reading is high" and "the book has its own golden house, and the book has its own Yan Ruyu." There are twenty or thirty idioms about reading books in Chinese, such as "hanging beams piercing bones", "chiseling walls to steal light", "snow cases in the window", "yellow rolls and green lights", and "ten years of cold windows", etc., all of which are content and stories of hard reading and hard work, but it is difficult to find idioms and stories about happiness. Western education, on the other hand, is about happiness and encouragement. Although China is also experimenting with happy education in terms of education, it always seems stiff and reluctant. Because there is so much pressure on education in China, how can children be happy? If there is happiness, it is the happiness of a few.