The university is the "camp", and the students are the "soldiers of the flowing water". This year's college freshmen registered, the campus was still crowded and noisy for a few days, and young people could be seen everywhere, followed by their parents who were holding hands and shoulders. According to my survey, less than one-third of the more than 8,000 new students who can send their children to my remote island school to report for 100 miles.
More impossible to come are farmers in the fields or migrant workers in various urban corners, they dare not leave the work at will, most of the migrant workers' families have more than one child, if they stop working, it is likely that more than one student in his family will not be able to pay tuition.
The posters of exaggerated slave-like parents dragging their luggage to their dashing and fashionable children on the Internet often attract scolding, and I have not seen it in this ordinary college. At the end of July just before the start of the autumn school, I stayed in the Forestry Bureau Hotel in Lushuihe Town, Changbai Mountain, Northeast China, for two days, two "meal points" at noon and evening, many people in the restaurant had a happy face, the fish came in for two hours, and the fish came out, everyone drank red-faced, and the restaurant was not open to the public because it was too busy. The people at the hotel said that every year at this time of year, they even held a "thank you banquet" every day.
I asked: Where is it? Answer: It's all on this street. I asked: What about the rural entrance examination? Answer: Below? Don't say anything below. I ask again: Did you come back after graduation? Answer: How hard did it take to get in and come back? Back to this crap place? At night, the local TV station broadcast a program called "Golden List Title", the student's head photo is matched on a big red background, each person stays for a few seconds, and the names of the schools in the examination are listed below, one after another.
In the blink of an eye, young people who crossed into the university from the "Xie Shi Feast" and the "Golden List Title" appeared around them. Relevant statistics say that in 2011, about 30% of rural students enrolled in higher education enrollment, of which the proportion of rural students in key universities was less than 20%, rural students at China Agricultural University accounted for one-third, Peking University was only 10% in 2010, Tsinghua University was less than 20% from below the county in 2011, and about half of rural students in Tsinghua in the 1980s. In today's grim employment situation, people generally believe that only the employment of students from "first-line famous schools" is more secure, and students from ordinary families and poor rural families in small places who have always been inferior in educational fairness are more difficult to enter first-line schools than 20 years ago or 30 years ago.
Our island school has admitted just more sons of farmers, more than half of them in a few years in a row, by my rough calculations. Rural students are concentrated into non-first-line schools, soon there will be a sense of loss, they find that there are too many unsatisfactory around them, both inside and outside the school have seen, and the TV network on the colorful and heartwarming life gap is very large, they sigh ah sigh, regret did not take the exam well, did not enter the famous school in the big city.
In fact, many cities in China today have rough and dirty urban-rural junctions, and it is not much better to go out a few hundred meters from the North Gate. But they are unwilling, suffering for 12 years should clearly survive a more fashionable and modern good life, open the computer can see those "tides", suddenly found that it is actually very far away, even farther than the previous vision. At the beginning of their short and tender lives, they encounter injustice, and many resentments will naturally breed. One noon after reading the index finger poem "Believe in the Future" in class, a girl left the building with me. She asked me: Teacher, do you believe in the future?
I had to tell the truth, I said: I don't believe it. She said: I believe, I have nothing, only to fight for the future. This is a Hubei girl, her father works in Beijing, and her brother is studying in her hometown. After breaking up with her, I thought that a year ago, the editor of a publishing house in Beijing told me that although he would tell me that every time he received a call from his hometown, he would tell him to read for his children, in fact, he also knew that this was no longer his heart, his hometown was also in Hubei, where they called the newly graduated college students "wasted people": hard work and technical work can not be done, can not do anything, spend money and study in vain, is not a waste? Lu Xiaoping, a student I taught two years ago, came as a guest, he is a junior in college and has been working at KFC since he was a university student. After sitting for two hours, almost all of them were talking, I was listening, saying that he had worked at KFC for more than a year, all kinds of interesting things, what kind of electric car he rode to deliver food, what kind of helmet he wore, what kind of customers he met, kind women and unreasonable rich people, how to assess promotions, and collectively organized tours. He said, teacher I know this, "tourism" is to take a car to a place to get off the car for a circle, and then get in the car and come back. The children from this poor family had not "traveled" before this trip.
I really didn't expect that the trivial details I saw in a fast food restaurant would be so interesting to this country kid. I asked him if he had been promoted. He said that he memorized the questions several days in advance, and finally did not get in. The old employee reminded him to give gifts, but Lu Xiaoping said that he did not want to "like that", did not want to learn that, he said: I still insist on this, even if I am not admitted, I do not complain. Before getting up and leaving, he suddenly apologized and said: How is it all I am talking, talking too much, delaying the teacher's rest. Lu Xiaoping came with a gift, two packs of local tea, and had to give it to me. I said how can you bring a gift? In fact, I should not say the word "gift", which made him a little uneasy, and even said it several times: it was my grandmother who said, look at the teacher can not be empty-handed, is to see the teacher.
I don't know what kind of old man his grandmother is, and I don't know if his hometown of Jiangxi also offers the card of "Heaven and Earth Emperor". I know that this student is usually silent and shy, he comes as a guest or just wants to talk, freely and smoothly and happily expressed. For two hours, he didn't say a word about what books he had read at school and what classes he had attended.
I did a questionnaire survey for five consecutive years, and I read a statistic about extracurricular reading, and the most read was Lu Yao's "Ordinary World" that had long passed away. A sophomore said that when she entered college, she read the first book that was not a textbook: Wang Shuo's "Don't Treat Me Like a Human Being."
The group of college students I came into contact with, who have crossed the 18-year-old of life, have grown up, have almost no extracurricular reading before coming to college, their consciousness is filled with textbooks, even the township rules and civil covenants formed in the Chinese countryside for thousands of years, the most simple moral transmission is also missing, the empty nest of the countryside has no nagging, no stage, no inter-ethnic warmth and restraint, and the persuasive and trustworthy morality is empty for them.
Therefore, after watching Hollywood's "Smelling Women", some students said that the middle school student was very false, guaranteed Harvard, such a big temptation who can give up, what is the whistleblower, and what to protect is not family and friends. The value judgment standards of young people have been chaotic all the way back, leaving only instinct, both instinctive envy and hatred such as hatred and indignation, and instinctive practical philosophy of seeking advantages and avoiding harm, swords, guns and swords, which exercises to use, and there is no contradiction.
A girl went to Shanghai to see the Expo with great interest, came back to me and said that she had not seen many traffic lights, and was scared enough to go to Shanghai, so many people were afraid of seeing the wrong lights. China's 12 years of basic education, there is no text and teachers to tell rural children what is the traffic light, this kind of common sense is missing, how can they be required to have complete values and judgment? Once, discussing a piece of news, I asked, if you witness an incident where you know the facts, do you choose silence or tell the truth when you need to stand up and testify.
The reactions of the students in the two classes were very different, and the classroom in the third year was suddenly quiet, frozen, and silent. After class, a girl said to me: Teacher, the people who came out to testify were worse than dead. Another girl said: I have to ask my father, he asked me to say I will say. And the sophomore class has always been enthusiastic, and as soon as I heard it, one-third of the people immediately raised their hands: To tell the truth! I said to them who had just put their hands down: Please put yourself in the shoes of them, I believe that when the truth comes, you will be afraid, when there is no risk in raising your hand, this choice is not difficult, and insisting on justice must be risky. There is fear in one's nature, but there is also reverence for justice and heroes, and fear should be the norm of man more than the latter.
Reality often ends in the failure of idealism, because people cannot but be afraid, they cannot but protect themselves, this is more real, and now you only need to firmly believe that there is right and wrong in this world. Another time, I said in class that "to be alive is to struggle", and a few days later, I received a text message from a student asking how to find a scene that expressed "living is struggling", and she had to rush homework. Now that this classmate has graduated, she once wanted to go back to her hometown in Guangxi, find a job in the capital Nanning, and be closer to her parents in the countryside, but her father disagreed, saying that you don't want to come back, we can't help you when you come back, you have to go outside to break in, she found a job in Haikou.
In the four years of college, her father never took the initiative to call her, and the most her father said to her was: There is nothing to hang up. As soon as she worked, her father always called to ask about this and that. She told me that this time she understood that it was really a struggle to be alive. 20-year-olds, empty-handed, unable to see the future, these people who call themselves "little wretches" in their homework are almost frightened by the huge and completely uncontrollable society.
Someone told me that I received a text message from a classmate saying: Let's both die together. He replied, "Okay, come on, I'll kill you first." When he said this, he had a calm expression and a little smile. I said: How to talk about death, this is not casual play. He said, "Well, so I didn't pay attention to him." In September, I bought a few books to distribute to them voluntarily, and in October, one book was silently returned to the podium without receiving a single person's reading feedback.
Reading is important or eating is important, eating is important; righteous indignation is still important, or eating is important. They are trying to look forward and find that they can't see the path, and many students from the countryside have not yet realized that once they move their hukou to the university, it is impossible to move back to be a farmer, and the land under his name has been taken back: you have gone to college, you have become a person of the state, and the hukou can only fall in the town. Four years after coming out, the land was gone.
Therefore, the real question may not be whether the cold door is a noble son, but whether the cold door has no way out. They were a generation that grew up ignorant of instincts, and without a job waiting for him, he was very weak-minded. In this state, let them choose to defend ideals fearlessly, unreally, and even immorally. As for wanting to squeeze into the civil service, very few of the students I came into contact with moved that thought, which was the business of a first-line elite school.
They can have a job, they can get a monthly salary, rather than letting them take charge, it is better to wait for them to find a job. In the process of "feeding", the natural occurrence of waiting for the responsibility, let me see, is almost inevitable.
![Wang Xiaoni: "Lesson Notes"[fig]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACwAAAAAAQABAAACAkQBADs=)