Reading history of rural teenagers

Last year, I participated in a survey of the reading and writing status of primary and secondary school students, and found a very interesting situation: most primary and secondary school students now have no problem in owning books, interest is not a problem, the problem is "no time". Compared with my student days, I suddenly felt that it was really "thirty years of Hedong, thirty years of Hexi".

When I was young, I heard a song that said, "I want to go to Guilin, I want to go to Guilin, but when I have time, I don't have money." I want to go to Guilin, I want to go to Guilin, but when I have money, I don't have time..." I thought it was funny at the time, and now I am changing to reading, the same embarrassment.

Savage growth

As if, seeing the teenager, I sat on the threshold of the gate, grasped the last glimmer of light at dusk, and tried to quickly turn a shabby martial arts novel to the end to see if the heroine was married to the young hero, and finally I was full of regrets, because this was only the last episode, and tonight I had to return it to the friends in the village. This kind of time-limited reading and often only the upper episode without the next episode, or only the next episode without the previous episode, was the norm in my rural reading in that year. The story has no beginning and no end, but causes us to use our imagination to guess various endings, and even to make up various possible continuations, arguing with each other.

I was born in a small village in Hubei Province, there are more than a dozen families in the village, and there is only one "agency store" selling some daily necessities. There are only two or three families in the village that have a few books, and there is no shadow of books at all. My father transferred to the township middle school to teach and took me to the nearby New Street Elementary School, which is close to the township government and middle school, and the conditions are better than that of several other villages. A street not far from the school is the most prosperous place in the township. There are about a dozen shops on the street, and the most generous and large iron gate in the middle is the supply and marketing cooperative, the best, most expensive, most complete things are there, and the most books are also there.

When I was in the third grade, the supply and marketing agency entered some villain books, and my father spent a lot of money to buy me 10 copies and number them, from 001 to 010 yards on the desk, which I thought was a huge fortune. Every day, I choose a copy to take to school, thin and short I seem to have suddenly changed my appearance, become the king of popularity, students rush to make an appointment with me: after reading it, show it to me first, okay?

These 10 precious villain books have long been lost nowhere, I only remember that one is "Bi Sheng", one of which is a picture of A Xiangzhong arrow, very tragic, I feel a little scared; there is another is Gorky's "My University", because the paintings in it are foreigners, I inexplicably feel very strange, I have not read; the other is a little impression of only the storyline, to the effect that a primary school student picked up 5 cents on the road, and then hid under a large stone, and then could not find it. Mistaken for being stolen by another classmate who was fishing next to them, many conflicts arose between them... Later, from these remaining memories, I suddenly realized my father's good intentions, and he probably thought that these little people's books were educational, but he probably did not take into account a child's natural resistance to the miserable world.

Looking back now, when I was young, I didn't have any good feelings for the "Vanka", "The Little Girl Who Sold Matches" or even "The Emperor's New Clothes" in the texts, and there was an inexplicable and wonderful estrangement, probably because adults wanted to use them too much to educate us, but unfortunately the taste was too bitter. However, I bought a copy of "Pipilu and Rusisi" from the supply and marketing agency, and I still remember the magical setting of the "brain table", which can be hung on the ear to monitor the amount of thinking. I fantasized in my heart about being Pippiru and actually doing Lusisi.

In any case, these villain books caught my attention to books. In addition to the supply and marketing cooperatives on the street, suddenly there is another shop that does not know where to enter some villain books, the owner is very shrewd, 2 cents can read a book, 5 cents to buy a book, which is a series of only "Yang Family General" and "Xue Gang Anti-Tang", I am fascinated. My father often tossed coins in a small box in the desk drawer, and I took one or two out of them every three to five to buy books, so I had twenty or thirty little people's books, in addition to often taking them out to review, I could also use them as capital for exchange with people, which was a matter of reading villain books.

Of course, it was not clear to me whether my father knew about me taking coins to buy villain books, and he never asked me. But he seems to have been trying to educate me through books and periodicals, and once ordered me "Juvenile Science" and "Selected Excellent Essays for Elementary School Students" for a period of time, and the postman sent them once a month, which was also a very enviable thing at the time. When the green bicycles ring bells and carry school bags, it is like a festival. "Junior Science" is actually not for me, most of it is about technology production, and there are a bunch of symbols that I don't understand. I am most interested in the science comics serialized in it, the protagonist Sun Xiaokong and Inu Jiu Jie encountered various scientific phenomena, and when the next year there was no serialization, my father did not renew.

At that time, the teacher's most subscribed to "Story Club", and the circulation rate was extremely high. Children basically can't line up, they can only see stitches and needles, and in the interval between their reading, they will have the opportunity to read it in one breath. Because I was ready to return the book to others at any time, I read it faster and faster, laying a solid foundation for reading "Tianlong Babu" one day later. Now there is still an impression of folk tales, folklore and other magazines, there are no famous books, classics, people circulate these, very Chinese, very traditional.

When I was a child, I was not exposed to famous books, but I really lost my appetite at the beginning. I remember that the earliest was the 25 episodes of the TV series "Journey to the West" on TV, the children were fascinated, the mood was swaying, and they felt that their intentions were not exhausted, especially in the end, the bodhisattva pinched his fingers, and experienced ninety-nine eighty-one difficulties along the way, and we couldn't get together. It just so happened that a classmate had a broken copy of "Journey to the West" in his hand, borrowed it, and even crawled to read it with a rolling belt, mainly to see what monsters he encountered, what mana he had, and then sun wukong used what methods to deal with them. After watching for a few days, one day I came home only to find that I had left the book in the classroom drawer, and when I went the next day, there was no more, so I had to lose money to my classmates. He has no economic strength, so he can only find his father for pocket money every three to five minutes, lie about buying some snacks or something, one dime or two cents each time, and the "debt repayment action" has been carried out intermittently for several weeks. Since then, when "Journey to the West" is mentioned, this unpleasant experience will jump out.

Sneaking around in school

When I went to high school, there was no pressure in my freshman year of high school, and I was much more free to stay at school for the first time. In the county seat of high school, there is a Xinhua Bookstore, but in addition to various tuition materials, there are no good books, and the martial arts and romance novels circulating among classmates are all rented book stalls. Renting books is charged by the day, and we have all practiced the kung fu of reading several books a day, so that everyone can exchange with each other, which is equivalent to renting a book and reading three books. One morning in self-study, I was immersed in Wen Ryan's "Lonely Master", a hand suddenly reached over and took the book away, it turned out that the English teacher came in quietly through the back door, well, she is the master of silence. The teacher did not confiscate my book, it should be seen that it was a rented book, and if it was not repaid, the deposit would be gone. After breakfast, the class teacher called me to the office and wrote a review book several times.

In the process of writing the review book, I suddenly felt that martial arts was really not interesting, tossing and turning, wasting both pocket money and delaying learning. In the first semester of high school, the school library can suddenly do reading cards, you can borrow a book a week, and after less than two weeks, you will not borrow it behind closed doors. In the three years of high school, I only successfully lent out three books, "Ping Trace Shadow" (Part 1), "Red Flag Spectrum", and "Excellent Short story selection". Because in the liberal arts class, we intensively read history and politics textbooks, before the college entrance examination, as long as I close my eyes, I can turn the pages in my mind, even every note is clearly visible, I feel that they will fall out without the exam.

In fact, after the second year of high school, the school is aggravated, the time to read extracurricular books is not much, and the density and intensity of the teacher's inspection are greatly strengthened. My only reading opportunity was to guard the dormitory during the evening self-study, because the collective dormitory often stole during the evening self-study, so each dormitory sent people to take turns on duty, basically once every two weeks, only one person in the dormitory, you can fly, basically I use these three hours to listen to the radio and read extracurricular books. In addition, I read the "Selected Small Novels", because the students in the neighboring seats must buy every issue, and I have been wiped out. By the third year of high school, we moved to the newly built dormitory, and this time for the wind was gone. During this period, I found a treasure in the post office newsstand, that is, "Half Moon Talk", one is cheap, only 5 cents a book; the other is rich in content, which is conducive to the study of political science. More importantly, it can be read in the classroom in a dignified manner. Now that I think about it, those comments were written really excitingly, and I still remember a comment on the governance of corruption, so that officials should "not be greedy, dare not be greedy, and do not want to be greedy", layer by layer, and the momentum is magnificent.

Mistakenly entering the Chinese

During the college entrance examination, my volunteer was international politics and law, mainly influenced by the book "Half Moon Talk" and Fudan University's "Tongue Battle Lion City". Unexpectedly, it was transferred to the Chinese Department. At that time, the Department of Chinese of Peking University had three undergraduate majors, known as "literary talents, language gentlemen, and literature masters", and they thought that they did not read much, and they did not count the talents and masters, so they chose the language major. "Escape" to the language major, the reading pressure is still very large, most of the students look talented or full of economy, some people open their mouths Borges, closed mouth Kafka. In the first year of "wandering" in the Changpingyuan campus, the park organized several book fairs, which are said to be very favorable, but I think it is still quite expensive.

"The Wandering Sun" is the first book I bought at the Changping Garden Book Stall, which tells about all kinds of Peking University students, or take a fragment, or give a silhouette, everyone has their own differences, are an independent existence. I was originally dazed, but after reading it, I settled down. I really liked the way the articles in the book were expressed, and even imitated one of them and wrote a sketch of a character and published it in the park's own publication. Fortunately, there is also a library, although it is smaller than the Yanyuan headquarters, but it is larger than the high school library, and it can be freely chosen. The most pleasant thing is that the teacher talks about postmodernism on the class, I can read various books such as "Ordinary World" and "Ni Huanzhi" below, fortunately, the teacher also advocates miscellaneous, on all kinds of "chaotic stew".

After returning to Yanyuan in the second year, I felt that I really went to college, various lecture activities are the best advertisements and guides for reading, listening to the debate between Zhu Suli and He Weifang, I will naturally buy "The Rule of Law and Its Local Resources"; after participating in the Haizi Memorial Poetry Conference, I went to buy "Haizi's Poems", Haizi is a genius poet, the grasp of Chinese rhythm and imagery is unparalleled, those poems are the only contemporary ones that do not need to be interpreted, just pick a poem to read, you can feel the poetry coming.

On weekends, you can visit the book stalls. In the 1990s, the Peking University stalls were mainly on the side of the east gate under the triangle and boya tower, the nearest bookstore was the wind into the pine of the south gate, and a little further away was the Haidian Book City that crossed the Tiger Cave, and often a few classmates visited together and could recommend each other. The white-skinned "Towards the Future Series" still has more than a dozen copies in my possession, and I bought a lot of "Reading" for 5 cents a year. George Orwell's 1984 was also read during this period, and later it was often read, and it is probably best read with the author's other book, Animal Farm. Perhaps the best interpretation of this book comes from Peking University professor Li Zero's book "Birds Singing", and even the title of the book comes from a sentence in "1984" that "birds sing, proletarians sing.". It's a combination of totalitarianism, hoping to have a K.O (knockdown) effect.

Read freely

I began to study in favor of language and popular science classes, in addition to the influence of professional courses, but also by the influence of classmate Lu Cheng. He had studied medicine, liked to think about scientific problems, once claimed to have invented a method of deriving special relativity formulas using elementary mathematics, and then found a Ph.D. in the physics department of the same club to deduce it in our dormitory, although I could not understand it, but I thought it was very interesting. The book "Pop" was recommended to me by Lu Cheng, a great scientist and philosopher, whose falsification criteria hit me at once. For a judgment that "all swans are white", falsification requires only "one black swan". Scientific assertions must be falsifiable, that is, simple and powerful.

In my junior year, I was preparing for graduate school, and I often studied with Lu Cheng, who was a literature major, and we can talk about a piece that mainly stems from the common recognition of science. We all scoff at the nonsense, therefore the esoteric things, which basically become the golden rule for us to judge whether a book is worth reading. Wang Mingke, the author of the book "The Edge of China", usually defines himself as a historian in his introduction, but in fact he shuttles between disciplines. The most powerful research must face the most basic concepts, what is Huaxia, in the long river of history, how is the Yixia discernment dynamically constructed? Pull a hair and move the whole body. When the book is read to this extent, the so-called disciplinary boundaries are basically gone, only the distinction between readable and unreadable.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first foreign masterpiece I read in one sitting, and perhaps it is the book's famous beginning that is repeatedly recited with an inexplicable magic. I vaguely remember reading it one afternoon, and then looking at the campus outside the window, feeling that everything is so unreal, hooking up with the smoke of those "jumping gods" in my hometown and burning incense when I am sick, and it is too real to be true, which is probably the charm of literature beyond science.

The book "On Language and Culture" made me decide to follow Professor Chen Baoya to study linguistics, and you must rarely see a linguist start a linguistic work like this: "Language is air, it is sunshine, it is water." We are deeply immersed in the language, immersed in the culture melted by the language. Language is so close to us that we turn a deaf ear to it, we turn a blind eye to it, and we never doubt that 'the sun rises in the east'. "I think this kind of beginning can be compared with "One Hundred Years of Solitude.".

I heard that Professor Chen Baoya's postdoctoral supervisor was Mr. Fei Xiaotong, so I went to read "Native China". Now, because the unified high school Chinese textbook identifies it as one of the only two books to read in the whole book, various interpretations and versions are surging and dazzling, and for a sociological masterpiece, I don't know whether it is a bad thing or a good thing. "Vernacular" is an objective generalization that has its own academic significance, but I feel as if it is now directly equated with a positive word. From a linguistic point of view, when science becomes right and replaces itself, its original meaning has been dissolved. Well, let's go read the original book.

Education is life

From teaching for so many years, I have most appreciated John Dewey's concept of "education is life". Education is not just about preparing for life, education itself is a part of life. Reading is part of education, and naturally it is also a part of life.

Mr. Wang Li and Mr. Zhu Dexi, the predecessors of the Department of Chinese of Peking University, are linguists, they are all concerned about language education, following their footsteps, in recent years, I have also tried to think about the problem of language education from the perspective of linguistics, I think the first problem is to figure out what language is. Starting from this idea, I think teachers and students can read "Invitation to Linguistics", the original literal translation should be "the language in thinking and action", the book vividly explains how we use language and words to think and communicate; in terms of language alone, Mr. Lu Shuxiang's "Language Talk" uses 8 topics to explain the past and present lives of Chinese clearly, as a language teacher, if you have not read it, it is very likely that teaching language to produce the effect of "less slow and bad fees" is very likely.

Now is the era of information explosion, the selection and screening of information has become a prominent problem, so more and more people began to call for the cultivation of critical thinking or critical ability. Interestingly, the books on this subject are also mixed, but "Trade-offs: The Inquiry Path of Critical Thinking" is simple and practical, starting from the examples that can be seen everywhere in life, and comprehensively introduces the way to achieve "understanding compassion".

If you count from the beginning of reading freedom, I have more than 20 years of experience so far, encountered many good books, made me feel the happiness of existence, and I really hope to get to know them sooner. One day in his senior year, Lu Cheng returned to his dormitory and told me excitedly that someone was selling the old version of "The Complete Works of Lu Xun" and quickly took it. Yes, this is the set of books recommended for the finale. When you're speechless, you can turn over the book and open it from anywhere.

(Wang Feng, Professor of the Department of Chinese, Peking University, Deputy Director of the Center for Chinese and Chinese Linguistics research at Peking University, Researcher of the Institute of Language Education of Peking University, Expert in the Development and Guidance of Language Curriculum of the "National Training Program" of Peking University, mainly engaged in linguistics research, has been committed to promoting the combination of linguistics and language teaching in recent years)

Ten book lists:

Pipilu and Rusisi

Zheng Yuanjie

Beijing Children's publishing house, 1989

The Wandering Sun

Huang Jiangang Zhang Liming Editor-in-Chief

Jiangxi People's Publishing House, 1993

"Haizi's Poem"

By Haizi

People's Literature Publishing House, 1995

《1984》

By George Orwell

Flower City Press, 1985

Pop

By Brienne March

Translated by He Minghong

Chinese Social Sciences Publishing 1992 Edition

"The Edge of China"

Wang Mingke

Yunchen Culture Industrial Co., Ltd. 1997 edition

"One Hundred Years of Solitude"

[Colombia] by García Márquez

Translated by Gao Changrong

Beijing October Literature and Art Publishing House, 1992 edition

On Language and Culture

By Chen Baoya

Yunnan University Press, 1993

"Native China"

Written by Fei Xiaotong

Triptych Bookstore, 1985 edition

The Complete Works of Lu Xun

by Lu Xun

People's Literature Publishing House, 1980

China Teachers Daily, July 15, 2020, 8th edition

Author: Wang Feng