There has been no bookstore in the township for ten years, but the bookstore in the county town is in full swing, what should the children in the small town who are addicted to games do?
When I was a kid, I loved to read. How much do I like it? Every time I do well in an exam, I want to buy a book as a reward.
This sentence may not sound wrong at first glance, but if you analyze it carefully, you will find a problem. For a child born and raised in a rural area, it is a reward to come into contact with books or buy extracurricular books.
At that time, there was a Xinhua bookstore in our town, and there were really few books, but it was enough to fascinate me. It's just that everyone knows that the books in Xinhua Bookstore are generally at the original price, so around 2010, a book at the original price is indeed a big cost for a rural family. My family was not very good, but thankfully, my mom agreed to my request for this award almost every time, from Aesop's Fables to The Grass House, from Pipiru to Little Beanie by the Window, every book was written about my childhood. Thanks to the help of books, my composition has been very good since I was a child, and when I was in the fifth grade, I went to participate in the county-level essay competition as the only contestant in the town center primary school. I can say that reading has had a really profound impact on me.
Township bookstore. It is usually sold with stationery.
Sadly, books that children in rural areas can only get as rewards are readily available to children in many big cities. When I was a child, because after buying a book, it meant that I might have to wait a long time for the next time I bought a book, so I had to read a book many times, and some books were really turned off the page, but later, before I finished elementary school, Xinhua Bookstore was permanently closed because it couldn't be opened, and I lost even the most basic reward request.
In fact, it is obvious that the most fundamental reason for the emergence of this phenomenon lies in the inequality of economic conditions. LaRue, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States, in her book "An Unequal Childhood" In this study, he examines the lives of children from middle-class families, working-class families and poor families in school and at home, and proposes two different parenting styles, one is the collaborative cultivation of middle-class families, and the other is the natural growth of working-class families. Similarly, in rural areas and townships, the most direct reason why bookstores cannot be opened and the lack of children's book resources is that the rural economy is backward, and the economic accumulation of families is still in a relatively weak state, which cannot support the development of children's spiritual culture.
However, more than ten years have passed, has the situation in the township changed? No, as of now, there is still no official bookstore in the township where my family is located, only some stationery stores will sell some books by the way, I have noticed before that many books on the shelves are mainly divided into two categories, one is the required reading list required by the new curriculum standard, and the other is the selection of essays. And in the county where my township belongs, how many bookstores are there, I have not counted in detail, and there is no official statistics, but a search on Baidu map, 93 results appeared, these are those famous bookstores, and the actual number of bookstores will only be more. This is only the gap between the county and the township, and it has not been compared to the larger cities and towns. More than ten years have passed, and the level of economic development in rural areas is also rising, and now many rural families have built buildings, there are more cars whistling on the streets, various types of shops have opened, and even fast food restaurants have begun to take root downward, why is there still no bookstore?
Because there is no concept of books in the concept of rural people, bookstores represent a kind of discourse of urban life in their life logic. The long-term absence of bookstores in rural areas has made the habit of reading books neglected since childhood, and parents do not have the concept of bookstores, and children are even less likely to have them if they do not have the need to read. As LaRue argues, parenting styles have a huge impact on a child's development. Rural parents are busy improving their family's material accumulation and making money desperately, neglecting not only the improvement of their own spiritual culture, but also the cultivation of their children's spiritual culture. Education, in their mindset, is narrowed to attending classes well and completing homework conscientiously. Extracurricular books never seem to have entered the minds of these parents.
Similarly, because of the scarcity of economic resources, coupled with the inherent risks of education, this makes the education of rural families more utilitarian. For the purchase of every educational resource, they should ask in advance, "Can this improve academic performance?" In their own judgment criteria, the essay selection is the most direct and effective tool to improve language expression skills. The unique frugal and result-oriented values of rural people are brought into the education of children. They simply can't wait, or don't believe that the long process of reading can eventually feed back their children's cultural literacy, and their children are cut off from books by their parents. What is even more tragic is that if it were not for the mandatory implementation and intervention of the national education discourse and system, that is, the establishment of a new curriculum standard required reading list, how far would the isolation period of rural children from books be over?
When I was in high school, I went to a bookstore at noon because I wanted to buy a study material, and that was the first time I walked into a bookstore in the county town on weekends, how should I describe that scene? The floor of the bookstore is full of people, and there are people standing around the shelves, there are students, adults, and even the elderly, and the shelves are full of dazzling, there are all kinds of books of different categories, and they are placed in different areas, and the township is 36 kilometers away, and the bookstore is trying to survive in the cracks, and my younger brother is swimming in cartoons.
We say that the economic gap between urban and rural areas already exists, but with the progress of rural economic conditions and the advancement of the national rural revitalization strategy, the economic gap between urban and rural areas seems to be getting narrower and narrower. But what about the cultural gap between urban and rural areas? Is it getting bigger or smaller? Now that the pressure of education is sinking, urban children are being dragged into the track of reading habit cultivation from the beginning of learning to read and write, what are rural children in the same growth dimension doing?
County bookstore. Generally, the windows are bright and clean, and the books are placed neatly.
From a small point of view, parents' neglect of the cultivation of children's reading habits is also a reflection of how parents do not know how to guide and enter their children's education process. Their neglect of children's spiritual culture is also gradually projected onto school education. Rural parents pay too much attention to material accumulation, ignore the spiritual and psychological attention to their children, and choose to transfer all the educational rights to the teacher. This retreat from educational discourse is actually a moral pressure on teachers, and it also violates the educational model of home-school cooperation and co-education. Teacher Lin Xiaoying used "often invisible, occasionally conflicting" in "Children of County and Township" to describe the current situation of rural home-school education.
Now, the advancement of Internet technology and the development of technology have made bookstores seem to have no place in the countryside. Our college teacher Xia Zhuzhi research team has gone deep into the countryside to investigate the situation of rural left-behind children's addiction to mobile phones, from their research data, watching short videos and playing games have become the main way of online entertainment, accounting for 69%, 33.1% respectively, the absence of books makes mobile phones take away all the attention of rural children, however, mobile phones have further weakened the demand for extracurricular books in rural children, mobile phones and reading in the countryside, as if there is a natural tension.
If we can understand the shortcomings of family education from the lack of bookstores, then we can get a glimpse of the problems of school education from the library.
I was lucky to have libraries in elementary, middle, and high school, but I never went to them once. It's not that I don't want to go, it's that I can't get in.
The elementary and junior high school libraries are just a classroom with several shelves of books on top of them. There are not many books, and many shelves are not full, but once a leader comes to check them, those shelves will suddenly be filled with books. Because the school requires each student to hand in a book to replenish the library, and then return the book to the student after the inspection. In many rural schools, the library has become a tool for coping with inspections. The fact that the school library does not lend books to students, but asks students to borrow books, is paradoxical and ridiculous enough. When libraries are only set up and exist for the sake of formalism, there is already a problem with the cultural education of schools.
I went to high school in the county No. 1 middle school, and as soon as I entered the campus, I was very impressed by the library because of its magnificent appearance and name. But the only time I went inside it was because it had to be checked, and in order to enrich the book corner at the back of each class, some books would be allocated from the library to each class to cope with the inspection. I was one of the people who was responsible for bringing the books to the class. In addition to the role of formalism, the library of the county No. 1 middle school will appear on time on its enrollment promotional video every time, the library in the promotional video is so magnificent, the library has become the face of the school, with the grandeur of the appearance to highlight the school's brand power and economic power, as well as the richness of educational resources. For the school, the more important role of the library is to make the school's educational function complete, and its purpose is to serve the learning and growth of students, rather than just to dissolve the meaning of its existence in the maintenance of face image and engineering.
County schools
The function of the school library is directly erased by the school, and students have no books to read outside the school, and there are no books to read in the school, so the children cultivated in this way must lack cultural literacy and spiritual profundity. However, now the Ministry of Education has listed reading lists for each grade from primary school to high school, but many teachers only require them to read the books required by the curriculum standards, and arrange them to read after class, and there is no special reading class. However, for many children in the county, the autonomy after school will be worn out by the attraction of electronic products, or by various homework courses and even training. Therefore, the school will also directly collect and organize the written materials on the Internet, and then send them directly to the students to memorize, and the students have become an endorsement machine and cannot get great growth.
In fact, behind the differences in libraries between schools are the differences in education methods, that is, the differences between quality education and performance-oriented education. Every transition point in education (junior high school entrance examination, high school entrance examination and college entrance examination) is a score competition, and the highest scorer will have the right to choose a school first. Therefore, schools need to do everything they can to improve students' scores. The comprehensive development advocated by quality education here seems to be a bit contradictory to the "fractional theory". As far as county and township schools are concerned, they do not have sufficient resources to carry out quality education, nor do they have the energy and heart to carry out quality education. In their view, in the context of the lack of educational resources, only by paying close attention to learning can we successfully break through. The counties and townships under the involution of education have completely abandoned the morality, physical fitness, aesthetics, and labor of quality education, and have devoted themselves to improving intelligence. Teachers collect questions from all directions, and then summarize them into fixed answer templates to teach students, and then form conditioned reflexes through a large number of question training, which is a routine and stylized learning method that is popular in county and township schools.
Obviously, we all know that this kind of education will not be of much help to the growth of children, even if they rely on this way to get admitted to a good university, after entering the university, these small town problem-solvers will still not adapt to the university's strong autonomy education model, and become the "disappointed" of the elite university. Of course, there are too many problems in county and township education, I will not repeat them here, and if we have time or friends who are interested in it, we will discuss it later.
Finally, I would like to ask a question. In fact, in addition to the school library, many cities will have their own urban library. Our county also opened a library a few years ago. There is no doubt that the library is a kind of public space, but the orientation of the library is still mostly the city, or in other words, the library is also a functional area of urban life layout. When will the library be able to sink to the township and break the private domain of township culture, so as to pry the stereotype of reading in the countryside and promote the progress of children and even parents' civilization. I think that if the township had a library, perhaps the children would not only have mobile phones, but also knowledge and books in their childhood.
To sum up, in this article, I actually want to start from the micro phenomenon of the disappearance of rural bookstores and libraries, and discuss the more macro and deep-rooted education issues. Economic backwardness has led to the demise of bookstores, coupled with the utilitarian educational concept of rural parents, resulting in an extreme lack of cultural literacy education for rural children. This cultural gap puts rural children at a disadvantage in the face of educational involution. And this lack of spiritual and cultural cultivation of children is enough to expose the shortcomings of family education, emphasizing material over spiritual, stealth and evading responsibility in home-school cooperation, making the education that should be home-school cooperation even weaker. On the premise that there are problems in family education, schools in important educational towns have further exacerbated the shortcomings of rural children in terms of spiritual and cultural quality. Behind this neglect of cultural literacy is the general orientation of county and township schools to focus on grades and quality under the criterion of fractionalism, and it is the routine and stylization of education methods, which ultimately loses the temperature that education should have.
County Library. It is very artistic, and the township does not have a library.
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Middle school students debugging a robot.
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