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It's World Book Day again, and information about reading is concentrated on this day and there is an intensive wave of "bombardment" on the public. When "reading" becomes a slogan, a gesture of flaunting oneself, this reading spree seems to become somewhat suspicious.
Is reading really any closer?
Based on this, Wenjing does not intend to simply recommend the book list to you today, but wants to publish an article written by Lin Xiaoying, the author of "Children in the County", which she has obtained in the process of studying and governing the pure joy of reading.
In this article, Ms. Lin fondly recalled the time when she was studying and teaching at Peking University, those who had accompanied her to study, and those who were strung together by names and books.
The article is very long, I hope you can read it patiently, I believe that you can gain something after reading this article today.
I am a reader
Lin Xiaoying
Before I came to the Institute of Higher Education of Peking University for graduate school, I had a very small range of reading, and I had not read a few academic books seriously, and I basically spent my spare time singing and wandering around in my spare time. After the master's degree was enrolled, there were four people in a dormitory, and the other three were all undergraduates from Peking University, Shuang Ye was an English major, Yang Polonium was an economics major, and Xiao Wei was a sociology major. All three of them have a common hobby, which is to throw books at me. Shuangye would buy every issue of "English World", she seemed to be able to read it in a few minutes, and then threw it to me, I couldn't finish it in a month; Yang Polonium would buy every issue of "Reading", and after reading it, I would comment on it, but I didn't understand it, so she threw the book on my bed, whether I read it or not; Wei Qinge was gentle and elegant, and I could only look up at the row of "Gu Zhun Anthology" at the head of her bed, and I didn't dare to reach out to turn it over until I graduated. Although our master's programs are all related to education, they come from different backgrounds and have their own strengths. It wasn't until the three of them felt that they should take a good look at the educational books, so they asked me to lead the way and take the bus to the bookstore at the east gate of Beijing Normal University to buy books, but I finally became the boss once, and the four of them took the bus to Beitaipingzhuang, and took the stop carelessly, got off the bus in Shuangxiu Park and walked back, and they no longer believed in my ability to lead the way.
Founded in 1979, Reading Magazine is a book-centered ideological and cultural review magazine. The picture shows the February 2024 issue.
In my spare time as a graduate student, I either read books or chatted. At the end of the first semester of the first semester of graduate school, the resident population of the dormitory was me and Shuangye, in order to hand in the final paper and see how to cooperate and complete it reasonably, we went to the Xuewu canteen to buy food together, and each person had a pack of Tsinghua yogurt, and brought it back to the dormitory to eat. The four of us in the dormitory bought a small round table, which was just right to put on the table for dinner, and after eating, we drank yogurt, and after drinking yogurt, we ate melon seeds. While knocking, chatting about the articles and books read, half a day passed. I cleaned up the melon seed shells, washed the rice bowl, and continued to go to Xuewu to buy rice and yogurt. As the days passed, the words in the computer piled up more and more, and I inadvertently forgot to buy a train ticket home, and finally I couldn't buy it, so I took a plane for the first time in my life and went home. The book that Frost Leaf bought seems to me to be messy, what Japanese food culture, the translation effect of advertising, Tutankhamun's tomb, etc., as soon as the new novel is published, it will be quickly bought and read, Alai's "The Dust Settles" is that I read it as soon as she finished reading it, and we also concluded that this novel is the most suitable for filmmaking, and many scenes have a very filmmaking feeling. Later, I really made a movie.
Mao Dun Literature Award-winning work "The Dust Settles", People's Literature Publishing House, 1998 edition.
As students, we all feel that we should read more books, and how to achieve this goal requires us to think of many ways. One is to make copies, in order to have good books, and the other is to engage in reading clubs, in order to read good books. The higher education institute "lives" on the fourth floor of the audio-visual education building, looking at the office and classrooms, but the learning conditions provided for students are very good, there is a photocopier that teachers and students can use, of course, it is okay to copy a single article, but too much I will be embarrassed. There were not as many copy shops on campus as there are now, and they are more expensive, so you can rub the photocopiers in the school. In front of the photocopier, there are often unexpected gains, seeing the owner of the copy shop at work, I don't know whose original, when I see the right one, I will say to the boss, also give me a copy. Later, when I did research on education policy, I wrote a lot of books on political science, such as Zou Yan's "Chinese Politics in the Twentieth Century", which were obtained quietly.
The teachers and students in the college are relatively close to each other, and the college basically tries to meet the various needs of the students as much as possible. For example, we proposed that we should hold a spring outing for teachers and students to enhance the opportunities for academic exchanges, and then there would be an annual spring outing; we should hold an academic salon, and ask the teachers to easily guide us on how to plan our studies and academics, how to read, and especially like to listen to the teachers talk about their own study history, so we allocated money to buy us food and drink, and set a time to go to the academic activity room for one night to talk, neither need to write posters, nor write summaries, just shout, gather, and then disperse. This kind of academic salon later slowly evolved into a reading club, which met in the name of reading.
It seems that we are very hungry for reading, but in fact, we read less of the reading literature assigned in class, and we don't necessarily read what the teacher prescribes, because we always want to wait for the teacher to talk about it. People are so strange, they don't cherish what is easy to obtain, they don't value it, and they always feel good about what they can't get. If two or more courses are required, then you need to pay attention to them. For example, Weber's "Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism", Xiao Wei and Zhou Tao were both in the sociology department as undergraduates, and they had known that this was a classic for a long time, but I was not ordered to read it until I became a doctoral student, and in the political science course required for all liberal arts students, the first book in the reading list was this book, but I still couldn't read the original text, so I read a lot of journal articles, hastily handed in the homework for the reading report, and I was not ashamed that I only recognized the title of the book during my master's degree and couldn't read the content.
Weber's classic work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Wenjing Edition.
The cost of academic salons was too high, and it gradually evolved into a kind of no-cost one: dormitory gatherings. Somehow, Pu and I's dormitory became a fixed place for academic discussions after 10 p.m. every night. Before studying for his Ph.D., Mr. Hou (Hou Longlong Yes) had published great works in the three fields of research methods, economics and law, and he liked to be a master of academics, so he was extremely self-disciplined during his Ph.D. period, and stayed in the office every day to read literature, and a bunch of questions in his mind needed to be discussed. In order not to interfere with his regular reading and writing, he would only come after 10 o'clock in the evening every time, which we thought was strange at first, and thought that he was going to pursue someone, but later we learned that he had lofty academic ideals. Many questions he had been thinking about for a long time, so he had to start concisely so that Pu and I could catch his train of thought. A bunch of books on institutional economics, a bunch of theories from a bunch of people such as North, Coase, and Hayek, along with a bunch of lessons from China's economic center, are placed in front of us. Fortunately, the classes in the Faculty of Education are basically interdisciplinary, and the books recommended by the teachers in the classroom are rarely in the field of pure pedagogy, so we can fully enjoy this way of reading everywhere without any obstacles.
Hayek's masterpiece The Road to Serfdom was the foundation of his worldwide fame. The picture shows China Social Sciences Press, 1997 edition.
Xiao Hou (Hou Huawei is also) has a professional background in political science, and after graduation, he has been working in higher education institutes, and has always been interested in the field of education policy, after all, the disciplinary foundation of this field is political science in the first place. When I wrote the analytical framework for my doctoral dissertation, I was afraid to finalize it until I finally accepted the concept of "discretion" that he had been reminding me of, and at that moment, I finally realized his ability to "see through but not tell". Probably this is what the ancients called the teaching realm of "not being angry, not being angry, not being angry". In the more than ten years that I stayed in school as a teacher, Xiao Hou said to me the most: to study education policy, you must read books on political science, and it is best to read political philosophy. Although he does not specialize in academic work, he has a very deep understanding of the academic profession, and almost regularly beats the side drum for me: "If you want to read books, you must read books! A scholar who does not read books will only become more and more shallow." Tell me about the books you've been reading lately. "This kind of supervision really makes people dare not relax.
Except for a few students who have desks and computers provided by their supervisors, all other students can only stay in the dormitory. In other words, people who have experienced a study career like ours that has been closed for four or five years are quite good. Dr. Lin Jie is one year higher than me, his sitting skills should be recognized by everyone as the best, he basically does not attend classes, he never participates in lectures, he is the most active "Tianya" brother on BBS, and reading is the kind of worm that is the most stubborn to the end. Since everyone is an unusually active animal at night and never sleeps before two or three o'clock in the morning, let's toss the reading salon again. Brother Tianya agreed very much, but he categorically said that he was studying the death of Socrates, and vowed to read all the books about Socrates in the library of Peking University in order to study the issue of academic freedom. He quickly sent the first draft of the doctoral dissertation proposal report, saying that it could be used as a discussion topic for the first reading salon. At that time, the "Five Heroes of Langya Mountain" in the Department of Educational Technology set up a BBS forum within the college, and all of us students registered accounts, mainly discussing academic issues, literary and artistic youth, and petty bourgeois topics. I discussed Weber's musical with a girl called "Little Match Seller", and one day my roommate Pu came back from outside, and I couldn't help laughing, "Xiaoying, I really convinced you, you really don't know that it was me who discussed the musical with you!" Brother Tianya is the same as the girl in the boudoir, he easily does not show his face, and has been posting on the forum, and there are almost no topics that he can't participate in. Naturally, Sharon didn't get involved once, and the death of Socrates was not discussed, but he sang back and forth and reconciled a lot of various poems. At that time, there seemed to be a small craze for reading Lin Huiyin and Zhang Ailing, and even Hu Lancheng's "This Life and This World" was a copy of each of us, because the binding was good-looking, the pink corrugated paper cover, the writing was half literate and half white, quite elegant, and I didn't wonder whether he was a traitor. Brother Tianya is very extreme, he likes Lin Huiyin, and he will sit in front of Lin Huiyin's tomb in Babao Mountain for half a day on the Qingming Festival, and I don't know if my heart has turned 10,000 times again. When he defended his doctoral dissertation, he had both theory and emotion, and was highly praised by Mr. Wang Yongquan, and the dense handwritten comments of the fly-headed Xiaokai were covered with two pages of A4 paper, which was really in vain Brother Fei Linjie seriously asked about the death of Socrates and the romantic pilgrimage to the tomb of Lin Huiyin.
Babaoshan Forest Emblem Tomb.
Pu's ontology is the gene of Tsinghua University, and the undergraduate is biomedical engineering and instrumentation, and I have finally remembered this professional name after reciting it hundreds of times, and I have not forgotten it until now. But she enjoys the name of "Tsinghua American Literary Town" in the rivers and lakes, with delicate emotions and gorgeous words. As soon as she was a doctor, she unknowingly published the beautiful essay collection "Squandered Fragments", which she had written without much effort, and each student in the class gave one copy, of course, there were only 7 people in a class. The strange thing is that she didn't write much after studying for a Ph.D., but she was very excited to read academic books, and she had a super ability to search for information, as well as a strong ability to retell. Her doctoral dissertation was on education policy making, and I was on education policy implementation, and the books we read were almost the same, but the focus was different, and sometimes we would read each other's books. It is so strange to man that a book is much more enjoyable to read if it is not directly related to the work at hand. I have such a PhD roommate, and a master's roommate like Shuangye, both of whom are extremely extensive and have super search skills, so I am happy to sit back and enjoy it, anyway, they will find it and push it to me, and they will remain in a stupid state until they graduate from the doctorate.
Jianxin and Chunping are the leading sisters in our class, they have been university teachers for many years, and they still have children to take care of, and they don't have many bad habits in us. Not only can they finish the book on time, but they are really not fooled. A few of us who came up in the new year always felt that we had a lot of time to squander, but they always seemed to be rushing for time. Jianxin has a habit of going to bed at 12 o'clock at night and going to the cafeteria for breakfast at 7 o'clock in the morning. This guarantees her reading speed and quality. Once, when she read a doctoral dissertation that had been submitted anonymously for review, she felt very familiar, and quickly found the original text for comparison and determined that the paper was plagiarized. When the opening report of her doctoral dissertation came out, she was plagiarized by others again, but fortunately, she solved the matter by grabbing the plagiarist himself with her usual lightning speed. Chunping is very meticulous in her reading, and she will never follow the crowd. In order to solve the anxiety of topic selection and writing during the doctoral study, our class decided to have dinner and discuss at a Korean restaurant in Tongfu on a regular basis. Because of the hurry, it seems that a consensus on a certain genre and a certain book can be quickly reached, but Chunping can always come up with a "not necessarily" at the end, so she points out what is wrong. Pu and I always look back after graduation and sigh, thanks to Jianxin and Chunping, the two leading sisters, who rushed to our posture of being excellent and not taking the DDL set by the college and the tutor in their eyes at all, and we would never be able to graduate without postponing it for a year and a half. Because they will definitely be able to submit the comprehensive examination thesis and doctoral dissertation proposal report on time, as long as they submit, our tutor Chen Xuefei will be reassured, and those who are dragging their feet must keep up!
The campus of Peking University where teacher Lin Xiaoying and her classmates studied. The picture comes from the Internet.
Shuangye went to Hong Kong to study for a doctorate, and came into contact with more and more English books, and "throwing books" is something she has been doing to me, including electronic and paper versions. English literature on educational policy, sociology of education, school process, sociology of networks, critical pedagogy, etc., came one after another, and it was too late to read them. Most of the original English public policy books on my bookshelf were brought to me by her from Hong Kong and thrown to me, which is enough for me to read slowly in this life. She studied for a PhD in Hong Kong, the scholarship was high, and the phone bill was cheap, so without exception, she called the landline of my dormitory, and the academic discussion was never interrupted because of the distance between the two places, and the conversation for two or three hours at a time was commonplace, and the ideas and inspiration for the doctoral dissertation slowly took shape in it. Every time she went back to Beijing, her first request was for me to go to the west side of the Beixin store in the triangle to queue up to buy cool skins when she got off the plane, which was a continuation of the roundtable discussion in the dormitory. Then it's just a matter of seeing what new books I've bought, and once I like them, I'll take them. Every time I went to Hong Kong, the fate of her book was much the same. To add, the fate of clothes is the same.
During my Ph.D., I lived on the 2nd floor of the 32nd floor, which is the only floor where boys and girls coexist, and there are a total of 38 rooms on the second floor, only 4 of which are for women, and the rest are for men. I slowly learned that this level has almost the most complete set of social sciences in the university: sociology, economics, political science, law, philosophy of science, and of course, our education. What can male and female doctoral students talk about when they meet in the water room? In this way, the classic works of these mainstream social disciplines entered the bibliography of the mind in the process of brushing their teeth, washing their faces, and washing their clothes. If there are any good classes and lectures, everyone will also introduce them to each other. Later, I will inadvertently see reports on the Internet of some young scholars being interviewed and publishing feature articles, and if you look closely at the names, hey, the 32nd floor.
Nothing new under the sun. When I became a teacher, I began to think about how to deal with all the old problems I saw in my students. How to supervise students to read? Start a class, and set up a special course on literature reading! There is always an incentive to have credits. In fact, the teachers of the college have already played this routine, and I am the first student of the course "Selected Readings of Educational Classics", hehe. The list of books listed in the course is written by a big cow, and if you can finish one in a semester, you can be regarded as a big cow. A student chooses a book to be responsible for the guide and writes a book report, as a student, he naturally tries to be lazy, and others guide him, but he basically doesn't listen to it, and he hasn't read it anyway. It's your turn, and you don't expect others to listen to it when you read it. Therefore, when it was my turn to open a course on the selection of education policy literature, I was also faced with this problem of "one foot higher than the road, one foot higher than the magic one". The literature listed in the class is all in English journals, so everyone can't just read one article. At the beginning, when the guide was introduced, it was found that everyone was still struggling to face English directly, so everyone was asked to translate the few documents they claimed into Chinese as much as possible and then guide them, which could practice English translation skills, and could also gradually accumulate for the convenience of future students. Although the discussion was more lively each time, after evaluation, this kind of behavior with high labor input but low mental power was still found to be difficult to sustain, so it was decided not to offer credit courses the following year. Return to a loose organization.
The book club must be set up.
The main consideration for the first time was that you had to eat, drink, and have fun to read well, and you couldn't read too difficult books yet. Cheng Huaqin, who has a down-to-earth family background and is hospitable and good at Zhang Luo gatherings, suggested going to her home in Boya West Garden to study, and everyone could be regarded as witnessing the housewarming of her family. After eating a lot of delicious snacks and visiting the house and outside, I began to read "The Policy Process of the Modern State". This book had just been published at the time, and there were not many Chinese books on public policy, and most of the new ones were published since 2004, so we will follow one when the new one comes out. Maybe because the sofa is so comfortable, I don't remember what I read, but I remember that pecan kernels are the best. From the second time, the doctoral discussion room in the school was moved, and the number of participants gradually became scarce, and the participant who did not land at one time was Tu Duanwu. He guides almost every time, and can not only read the whole book, but also summarize the whole book. When he first entered the school, his eloquence was not outstanding, but he had the same ambition and purity for academics as Hou classmates. Gradually, the guide of each book does not need to be chosen, it is him. A series of classic books on public policy have been passed over like this. The eloquence of the Dragon Boat Festival gradually became impressive, and his calm personality also made him write plain language, but powerful, and became the backbone of many subject research.
The Policy Process of the Modern State, by Mitchell Heiyao, China Youth Publishing House, 2004.
People who study education policy, read a bunch of books on public policy, and they are always scratching their boots, and they are still unsatisfied. No, you have to dig deeper. At this time, the same bibliography recommended by different teachers in different classes at different stages is summarized in my mind, and there are probably a few masters that cannot be bypassed: Foucault, Hayek, Weber, and Bourdieu. Because when I graduated from the doctorate, I was quite tired of doing projects and holding seminars, so I made a vow in my heart at that time that in order to do a good job in learning, I must sit on the cold bench for five years and practice my internal skills. I really insisted on not going out to hold an academic conference for 5 years, and the first time I attended the conference happened to be 5 years after graduation. Since there is such an expectation of a long time, it can only be read honestly one master at a time. The first is Foucault, whose "Discipline and Punishment", "Madness and Civilization", and "History of Sexuality" are introduced by teachers in many classes, but this kind of difficult and obscure book can only be understood in class. I don't know how to read it, but I know that I can't just follow the practice of mixing homework in a doctoral student's politics class, which is to look at the review articles in journals, quote them everywhere, and end with a little bit of my own review. To put it bluntly, reading is an extremely simple job, just like a farmer farming, working at sunrise and resting at sunset. I read three of Foucault's books verbatim when I was visiting relatives abroad. When I started reading it, I felt quite irritable, boring and boring, and it was difficult to get into the author's path. But after enduring this stage, it gradually turned to love, then to marvel, and then I couldn't help but share, and I gradually wanted to write something. When I returned to the college more than two months later, I immediately reopened the book club, starting with Hayek.
Foucault's series of works published by Life, Reading, and New Knowledge.
At this time, I found that all the efforts will not be in vain. Hayek's spokesman in China can be regarded as Deng Zhenglai, who is a miraculous figure in academic translation and has tenacity beyond ordinary people. When I was reading Foucault, I carefully read Deng Zhenglai's "Rules, Order, and Ignorance" together, and I was so accustomed to his long sentences that stretched for three lines from time to time that I had long been eager to read Hayek specifically. Sure enough, with the experience of reading Foucault, the members of the reading club were recruited, and the response was numerous. This time, there will be no hesitation, just read it honestly, without paying attention to speed, without pressure, without caring about interpersonal relationships, and without asking for certain results, just reading! This time, the doctoral students and master's students studied together, and it was an unprecedented collision of ideas and mutual puzzles. Master's student Wang Yawen graduated from the School of Journalism and Communication as an undergraduate, never chatting or talking nonsense, but she is extremely serious in her studies. After Wang Youhang and Wang Shiyue decided to transfer from master's degree to doctorate, they participated in the reading club once and gradually became our recognized academic seedlings. Jiang Tao was a middle school Chinese teacher before his Ph.D., and he was always able to examine Western theories with his solid front-line education experience. Jiang Fengjuan and Liu Yan, the academic twins, are two good partners in the reading club who talk about cross talk, both of them are jokers, and they can quickly link classic works with emotional marriage, love, firewood, rice, oil and salt in life, bringing laughter. The two of them said that they most look forward to the three-hour reading club every Wednesday afternoon, and after each reading, all the questions accumulated in their hearts are vented. Until they graduated, they still rushed to participate in the reading club, even if the child was born, they tried to persevere. Hayek's book was read for a year and a half, and with the participation of these backbones, we persevered.
In this work, Hayek discusses in detail the relationship between law and legislation, and completes his grand liberal social philosophy system, from social theory to liberal theory to legal theory.
Reading is reading, and we have established several principles: the reading club is our Sunday, which is equivalent to living a pure spiritual life, so it does not involve material aspects; the reading club does not appoint a guide, believing in the natural integration, and everyone can read naturally with books and interests; the reading club does not specify a hard reading task, and can read as much as you can at a time; if you can't come, don't ask for leave, so as not to lie and make excuses; the reading club does not encourage participants to bring small snacks to eat, so as not to be embarrassed by those who don't only eat; and never have a meal together after reading, so as not to have any burden on the interpersonal relationship。 Every time I finished reading, I dispersed, and I went back to my own home, but I couldn't disperse the reading club, and I persisted for many years.
When he read Weber, Li Yin joined in, a female teacher who seemed to be weak, but was actually a firm standard-bearer. Weber's collection of works has 12 volumes, how to choose? By this time, we all thought that reading was a lifelong thing, so we should not be in a hurry, and start reading the first volume. Li Yin and I have completely different personalities, and the division of labor in the reading club has gradually become: I am responsible for stepping on the accelerator, and she is responsible for stepping on the brake. She has a wide range of books, especially in cultural psychology and philosophy, and she buys and reads a lot. In the process of reading, we would often intersperse some other literature, and she would suggest that we let go of Weber, read something else, and then continue to read Weber. This practice of making a fork in the road from time to time allows us to truly enter into the pure mental pleasure of reading. By the time we reached the third volume of The Sociology of Domination, Li Yin introduced the discussion of freedom in Chinese academia, especially Liu Xiaofeng's "The Meek Hedgehog", a single article of more than 30 pages, which we read for half a semester, the paper was almost worn out, and the notes were full of all the gaps. Later, we ushered in another brakeman: Chunping. She read "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" with us, and replaced the Guangxi Normal University version, so we followed her advice and re-purchased the Commercial Press edition, which we didn't expect to be so thick. Chunping said the book did not remove the enormous annotations that German scholars are best at. Li Yin and Chunping, the two brakemen, let us read the Protestant ethic very thoroughly, at least we think we have reached this state. I read this book for a whole semester, and sometimes the three-hour reading club is just to discern a concept, and the brake is a little hard, but the gain is huge. I read it slowly like this, and I actually read it to the end of the seventh volume. Unfortunately, Li Yin fell ill. The colleagues in the reading club unanimously agreed to suspend the reading club and wait for her to recover and get together again. Unfortunately, she struggled with the disease for 6 years, and finally failed to return to the book club until she died. Our book club has never been continued, and we have not been able to open the eighth volume so far.
Weber Manuscript.
In the past seven or eight years, I have intermittently held, participated in, and guided some reading clubs, and the model is not very fixed. Sometimes it is because there is a good book, so I find several people to read it together, sometimes because I need to build a common knowledge base to do a certain research, so the research group reads it together, and sometimes it is an extension of the course content, after all, the teaching time is limited, and it is necessary to extend and expand the reading. In the past few years, I was invited to do an online live workshop on research methods once a year, each time for 3 full days, 6 half-days, and 1 half-day for 3 hours. There was a half-day course, and considering how hard I was talking, and the students didn't necessarily understand, I decided to bring them to the discussion of the original work, so I did a half-day literature guide, and the effect was surprisingly good. At the end of the workshop, in response to the demands of many students, I made a video of the introduction of the classic research works of 7 essential research methods, but the students still felt that they were not satisfied, and asked for a special Q&A course. So half a year after the end of the guided reading class, there was a WeChat group reading live Q&A class, and after each Q&A, there was a special person responsible for sorting out the text records and sending them to readers who were hidden all over the country and even around the world. However, when reading becomes a kind of knowledge payment, a kind of course, there is no way to find that pure mental happiness.
Five years ago, I went to work at the Confucius Institute in Egypt, and in the face of the human civilization that is older than China and the thriving and active internationalization at the intersection of Asia, Africa and Europe, I deeply felt that my worldview had been changed in this way. One of the reasons why I accepted this job was because I had been teaching a qualitative research methods course in the previous year, and every time I talked about "how to make observations", I felt empty in my heart, and it seemed that I understood it, but in fact there was a completely different and higher attribute or paradigm, and I didn't understand it thoroughly. At that time, I was searching for some "image theory" by myself, and the book "The Life and Death of Images: A History of Western Photography" written by the French scholar Debray opened my eyes, which mentioned that the origin of images in the Western world was in Egypt, and to understand how human beings use vision to capture information about the world and transform it into interpretable texts, we must start with Egyptian sculpture and painting. The ghost sent the gods to send such an invitation, so I thought about it for 5 minutes, then agreed, and half a year later, I went to Egypt. However, before traveling thousands of miles, I didn't read a few books, and this road was in vain, because after seeing so many statues, temples, obelisks, and mummies, I still didn't understand and couldn't remember. Along with Debrey's book, I found Gombrich's "The Story of Art" and a bunch of books on images by Michel, Kandinsky, and others, until I felt that I could re-prepare a lesson on "how to collect and analyze visual data" in qualitative research methods.
贡布里希经典之作《艺术的故事》,广西美术出版2014年版。
Egyptian architecture full of iconographic symbols.
In Egypt, every day when the children were picked up and dropped off from school, they had to pass through the heavily armed soldiers sitting on the guard (not like the Chinese armed police, they all stood straight) and the police booth, although there was a strange feeling at first, but I quickly got used to it. But what are they defending? This is completely inconsistent with my feelings in Beijing, and I am always in an inexplicably strange state. At this time, we can put aside our concern for China and care about the flow and pattern of the world as a member of the earth's people or human beings, so that we can get out of our "cave" and reflexively think about things that are not far away from us. The four-volume version of Tony Judt's "History of Postwar Europe", recommended by a colleague from the Confucius Institute at Peking University, was able to be read immersively. The great historian Hobsbawm's "Chronology Tetralogy" and the books written by foreign scholars whose names I can never remember were all obtained by mistake, and they all came to understand a little bit by reading them one by one, and it was not in vain that they went to Egypt and suffered so much. These books have guided me to have the confidence to do archival research on "the construction of higher education in New China", and I will no longer be so afraid in the face of the complexity and lack of materials.
Hobsbawm, a master historian, presents a comprehensive history of the world from 1789 to 1991, published by CITIC Press in 2017.
It is thanks to the recommendation, guidance and companionship of so many peers that the experience of reading has gradually become a kind of self-cultivation, which is tantamount to a rebirth for me, a person who has not had much desire for reading since childhood. At first glance, everyone around me doesn't look special, but every head contains fascinating wisdom and thoughts. Benefiting from the reading of so many people, sometimes I will be glad that I was born as a human being, can read, can read, and can feel the long ins and outs of the world that is revealed through books, and maybe die without regrets.
In this way, we record, remember and thank the people of my generation who have read together, and those who have read together.
Lin Xiaoying
Finalized on July 20, 2020
This article was included in Chen Hongjie and Li Chunping, eds., The Way of Academics: 40 Years of Education Discipline at Peking University, Beijing: Peking University Press, 2020.
Children in the County: The Ecology of Education in China's Counties
Written by Lin Xiaoying
With more than 50% of China's students receiving education in more than 2,000 counties across the country, should the counties adopt elite education or an inclusive education model?
To solve the problem of education at the county level, should we increase poverty alleviation or strengthen self-hematopoietic function?
Are the children in the county victims of the desperate learning model?
Can the county get out of the dilemma of high-quality students and teacher loss and revitalize it?
Education should not be a model for survival of the fittest, and the more economically backward the place, the more hope it should give people.