"Gentlemen do this, this standing and Tao Sheng." (Confucius <551-476> BC; "Analects? Xue而)
"First the world worries, then the world's happiness." (Fan Zhongyan<989-1052> "The Records of Yueyang Tower")
"There is no one who will not die in the ancient times of life, and I will leave the heart of the danwei to shine through the sweat and green." (Wen Tianxiang<1236-1283> "Crossing Zero Dingyang")
"Crossing one's brow to a thousand men, bending one's head to be a child's ox." (Lu Xun<1881-1936>)
"The sky is full of snow and wind, why should the revolution be afraid of breaking its head?
With Zixu's bravery, I will return in three years to avenge the king of Chu!" (Yang Chao<1904-1927> "Poem of Inauguration")
"A thousand teachings teach people to seek the truth; a thousand studies learn to be a real person." (Tao Xingzhi<1891-1946>)
"Our policy of education should enable the educated to develop in the areas of moral, intellectual, and physical education, and to become educated laborers with socialist consciousness." (Mao Zedong<1893-1976> "On the Correct Handling of Intra-People's Contradictions")
"I live for the sole purpose of being a useful person to the people." (Lei Feng<1940-1962>)
The excellent educational values of the Chinese nation always educate people to be a noble person, a pure person, a moral person, a person free from lowly tastes, and a person who is useful to the people.
Two
Schools are places where human civilization is passed on and talents are nurtured. The core of school culture is values. What are educational values? In short, it is the principal why the school? Why do teachers teach? Why do students learn? These were originally very clear questions, but now, it has become blurred.
Since the reform and opening up, the social value of education, the central decision is clear. We have established the basic national policy of "developing the country through science and education". "A hundred years of planning for education as the basis". "Basic education is the foundation project for developing the country through science and education, and has an overall, fundamental and pioneering role in improving the quality of the Chinese nation, training talents of all levels and types, and promoting socialist modernization." It establishes the policy of "deepening educational reform and comprehensively promoting quality education", with the fundamental aim of improving the quality of the nation, focusing on cultivating the innovative spirit and practical ability of students, and the task of "creating hundreds of millions of high-quality laborers, tens of millions of specialists, and a large number of top-notch innovators". "The task.
But, from the 1980s, China's basic education has entered the open, to the detriment of the physical and mental health of young students at the expense of the "education to the test" track, blatantly one-sided pursuit of the rate of advancement. The cultural examination results and the promotion rate have become the first and even the only standard for evaluating the effectiveness of school education. Those who score first-class school, regardless of its school behavior is in line with national guidelines and regulations, whether the overall quality of students, but only because of good test scores, the high rate of advancement, is considered a good school, which is no longer a local phenomenon, and has become the reality of China's mainstream educational values.
Three
In such a social context, what are principals running schools for?
Nowadays, many principals, although they also know the national education policy and education laws and regulations, but when the education policy and education laws and regulations and the rate of advancement contradict each other, the first to obey the rate of advancement. Some principals believe that allowing students to go to college is the only way to carry out the important idea of the "Three Represents" and to be responsible for the students. Some principals also said that if the rate of advancement does not go, the school's student population will be a problem, the school will be difficult to survive, therefore, the pursuit of the rate of advancement as the first goal, all the work of the school first to obey the test, obey the rate of advancement.
The state has guidelines and regulations for school education, but in practice they no longer play a role, here are just a few examples:
●The state's curriculum plan stipulates that students have 26 periods of class time per week: 26 periods for grades 1-2 in elementary school, 30 periods for grades 3-6, and 34 periods in secondary school (all of which should include classroom meetings, team activities, and other group activities), team activities and other group activities). Nowadays, many schools have more than 50 lessons per week. The number of hours for exam subjects has increased exponentially, with some schools having more than 10 periods per week for each of the high school language, math and foreign language subjects, while students do not have enough time for physical activities and free time. Some schools have classes even at noon, and even make it a rule that students are not allowed to go to the restroom during certain periods of evening study.
●Students' daily study time (including self-study) is set at no more than six hours for primary school students and no more than eight hours for secondary school students. In the case of secondary school students, for example, students now generally have to get up at 5:00 a.m., arrive at school a little after 7:00 a.m., 5 classes in the morning, homework at noon, 4 classes in the afternoon, 3-4 hours of homework in the evening, and after 11:00 p.m. to sleep, the student's day of study time should be in more than 15 hours. In some elementary schools, senior students are required to be at school at 7:00 am. This kind of learning intensity is unbearable even for adults.
● The amount of daily extracurricular homework required: no written extracurricular homework for grade 1, no more than 30 minutes for grades 2-3, no more than 45 minutes for grade 4, no more than 1 hour for grades 5-6; no more than 1.5 hours for middle school; and no more than 2 hours for high school. And now the amount of extracurricular homework for students, especially in middle school, has become too much to count.
●Regulated daily sleep time: 10 hours for elementary schools, 9 hours for middle schools and 8 hours for high schools. And according to 2002 statistics from the Ministry of Education, 67.7% of middle school students sleep less than 7 hours a day, and 22.2% less than 6 hours; 41.6% of students have less than 0.5 hours of discretionary time a day, and 19.4% have none.In a survey conducted by the Jiangsu Provincial Committee of Youth League in 2006, the proportion of high school students who sleep less than 8 hours a day was as high as 97.4%, and those who slept for only 6 The proportion of 49.2% of the -7 hours. 80.3% of the high school students are sub-healthy.
●Regulations require that students be guaranteed one hour of physical activity every day. The survey report of Jiangsu Youth League Provincial Committee shows that 25.1% of high school students, except for two physical education classes per week, never exercise, 43% of them exercise less than or equal to 2 hours per week, 22.2% of them exercise 2-4 hours, and only 8.8% of them exercise more than 4 hours.
● The regulations require strict control of the number of exams: elementary school language and math subjects only two midterm and final exams or one final exam per semester. Secondary schools only conduct midterm and final exams or examinations each semester, and not too many subjects per examination. In elementary school, except for the graduation examination, no unified examination shall be organized by the higher education administrative departments. Compulsory education shall be conducted in the vicinity of the school without examination, and no various forms of examination, assessment or test shall be used to select students, and no results of various competitions shall be used as the basis for enrollment. Secondary schools in addition to enrollment and graduation exams, without the approval of the provincial and municipal, autonomous region education department (bureau), do not carry out any purpose of the unified examination. But now the examination is a disaster, the school generally have the beginning of the school exam (check the learning situation during the holidays), weekly exams, monthly exams, the city unified exams, the promotion of simulation exams, to the graduation class, almost every day, sometimes four or five a day to take the test.
●The central government has stipulated that from the national to the local level, there should be no ranking in the school entrance examination, and no targets should be given to the localities and schools, and no rewards should be given to the schools and teachers only according to the rate of advancement in a one-sided manner. However, some education administrations are still issuing promotion targets to schools. Urban education administration generally every semester to engage in the unified examination, rankings, and according to the promotion rate of rewards and punishments for schools and teachers. Some county committees (e.g., Yuji County, Shanxi) have removed education bureau chiefs and principals because of low promotion rates.
● Provides that during the summer and winter vacation period to ensure that students rest, in principle, no remedial classes; students who need to make up for the exams can be necessary tutoring, but the time should not be more than one-third of the days of the holiday, the average daily elementary school to two to three classroom hours appropriate, secondary school should not be more than three hours. And now many students do not have double holidays, no holidays, no summer and winter vacations. Saturday classes are normal. Some schools usually have only one day of vacation a month, and there is no vacation for May Day or National Day, and only one day for Chinese New Year. Summer and winter vacation classes are already a normal thing, school classes, all kinds of tutorials in the community, and tutoring, are pressed on the students.
● Provides that schools shall not organize full-time remedial classes for higher education, and shall not absorb former graduates to insert into the graduating class, or let them apply for schools in the name of fresh graduates. And now many districts, in order to increase the rate of advancement and high scores in the college entrance examination, a large number of repeaters are recruited. According to the former principal of Jiangsu Taixing High School, including some key high schools, a large number of repeaters are recruited to insert classes, and some run special college entrance examination cramming classes.
● "Compulsory Education Law" stipulates that the people's governments at or above the county level and their administrative departments of education shall not change or disguise the nature of public schools in any name. And now some local governments have sold both county middle (school) and county primary (school) to private enterprises and become private schools, a practice that is still supported by the provinces and cities concerned.
What's more noteworthy is that some people openly promote the idea that school education should "put the interests of students and parents first" and "do not argue about whether it is quality education or test-based education, and effectively help solve the problems faced by students in furthering their education and employment, in order to change their destiny. "It is only by helping students to find jobs in higher education that their destiny can be changed. That teachers only such "seize" (qiu), in order to "stand up to the students, stand up to the conscience." Is this a socialist value of education? Can such education be said to be in line with the national education policy?
The teachers who work under such educational values are no longer "engineers of the soul of mankind" but only machines that make test machines. This kind of education will inevitably lead to "students die of pain, teachers die of exhaustion", the teacher's job has become and migrant workers, as one of the occupations that are not protected by the Labor Law.
Four
The essence of education values is to educate young people to set up what kind of life values, why people should live, why to struggle, this is the most basic question of being a human being, will affect a person's whole life.
But what kind of life values can we cultivate in students under such an "inculcation" of educational values? Let's look at what today's students are learning for.
Not long ago, I read the book "Left Hand Reflection, Right Hand Years" written by the author Guo Jingming, a middle school student, in which he wrote:
"The whole meaning of our existence lies in the college entrance examination, and the whole meaning of the college entrance examination lies in the future to be able to live a little bit better, and live a little bit better in order to be able to die comfortably and gracefully in the future.
"But if I die now I can still die comfortably and gracefully. The only thing I need to do is jump from this window. I live on the twentieth floor, sixty meters above the ground, and through the free-fall formula I can calculate that I can enjoy three to four seconds of flying before I die.......
"So what's the point of studying so hard now? I was confused. There is no one to point me in the right direction.
This is the value of life that most secondary school students in China are now pursuing. The test has become the only motivation for the vast majority of secondary school students to study. What will be produced by such education will be the successors of the socialist cause who are truly idealistic, moral, cultured and disciplined? Don't we think this is terrible?
In fact, the evil consequences have long been produced.
●First of all, they don't even love their parents who gave them life, how can such people love others, people and the motherland?
Yangtze Evening News once reported that a 13-year-old boy asked his mother for money in order to go to an Internet café, and she scolded him for fear of affecting his studies. Where to know the child immediately to the kitchen to bring a knife, even cut his mother twenty knives, but also from the mother fell in a pool of blood turned out 1,000 yuan, and classmates to play in Anshan, and when he left, but also the home phone line cut.
In November 2001, a 16-year-old boy, stole more than 10,000 yuan from his family and ran away, and a month later, was found home, his parents taught him a hard lesson, he harbored a grudge, and five months later killed his mother, but also tried to kill his father, because he was caught in jail and attempted to do so. The father, who survived, couldn't figure out how, they never treated him badly, his mother made him good food every day in different ways, two eggs every morning, meat for three days, made a mistake and taught him a lesson, but also for his own good, how could the boy hate his parents, who loved him to the bone, to such an extent? And for such a person who can even kill his parents, his homeroom teacher thinks "is the most gifted and best student he has ever taught, no problem to get into a major university in the future, it's too bad." The principal of the boy's school, who has been teaching for 17 years, brought up the incident and said with tears in his eyes, "This is a mistake in our education."
●How can people who don't even know how to value their own lives go on to serve society?
In October 2005, a senior boy named Li Yuan from Qidong Middle School in Jiangsu province, after coming off his evening self-study, quietly climbed up to the roof of an experimental building by himself, and under a star-filled sky, jumped down and ended his young life. This parents in the eyes of the good boy, neighbors in the eyes of the good boy, the teacher in the eyes of the good students, how can not think so? How so desperate? Did not say goodbye to his parents, did not leave a word? The reason is very simple, just because the monthly examination did not do well, in the class rank behind a few, afraid, secretly changed the report card, was found by the teacher, was criticized, he dared not go home, the tragedy arose.
December 20, 2006, Nanjing this year, another 14-year-old flower girl, junior high school third-grade students, jumped to his death from a 24-story building ......
May 16, 2006, the Renmin University of China Department of Journalism, a doctoral student jumped to his death. This is a bitter child from the rural areas of Shanxi, she studied very hard, got excellent grades, and in 4 days she would defend her dissertation and could get her doctoral certificate. It was because she was already 40 years old and had a hard time finding a job, and after hitting the nail on the head a few times, she chose to die, leaving behind a 13-year-old son and her husband, who was also studying for his doctorate.
In recent years, there have been many reports of suicides among college students. In March 2006, the Beijing Youth Daily carried a story that a male doctoral student in the 03rd year of Peking University's School of Physics had jumped to his death from Building 2 of the Science Department. And it was in this Building 2 that two student suicides had already occurred in 2005.
●Nowadays, many parents and young people want to look forward to going to Peking University and Tsinghua University, thinking that if they go to Tsinghua and Peking University, they will go to heaven. Many school teachers say the same thing. Is this really the case?
One Peking University graduate said, "I graduated from Peking University in 1997, and let me tell you, we graduated 110 people from our department that year, and 99% of them, including myself, were losers. I know a lot of Peking University alumni are now mixed up in a miserable way ...... These people have not only lost their humanistic spirit, but their vitality is in question." He himself feels that many words are rather radical, but it is not without a little truth. He was also the top student of the college entrance examination in Tangshan. There is not a BeiJing University students after graduation to sell meat, sell sugar gourds? He said: "Chinese people study so hard, no life, but after graduation can not find a job, is not a waste and what is it? If you study for more than ten years just to sell meat, then why bother?"
Not long ago, a year short of graduating from Tsinghua University, a doctoral student in computer science withdrew from school, but also wrote a "10,000-word book", saying that China's education has repeatedly stifled the creativity of the students, China's education has become the scourge of the buried talent. It is said that he withdrew from the school for two reasons: first, do not agree with Tsinghua's doctoral training model, and second, is not willing to act as a tutor to earn money tool. A reporter interviewed another Tsinghua automation department "top" students, he said: "the society mentioned Tsinghua students, think should find a very good job, get a very high salary, have a very good way out, in fact, it is not."
Look, it's these "top students" we've trained who are questioning China's education.
Liu Haiyang, the man who mutilated a black bear in a zoo with sulfuric acid in 2002, is a senior at Tsinghua University who has passed his graduate school exams.
It seems that Tsinghua and Peking University, there is also the problem of optimizing the education system, otherwise, they will also lose their luster in the competition.
Things like this, these years, frequently seen in the press. People seem to have become numb and are no longer surprised. But many of them are minors, and we can blame them, but why don't we, the mature adults, reflect on our education? Because the root cause is not on them.
On January 11, 2006, a 14-year-old junior high school student in Dongzhi County, Anhui Province, set fire to his school's student dormitory because he didn't want to take the final exams because the school exams were too frequent.
A 15-year-old female middle school student named Ranran put it this way: "I'm a good kid and an excellent student in the eyes of my parents and teachers, studying well and being obedient. But no one knows that what I hate most now is going to school. I often want to throw my books into a pressure cooker, cook them on a low flame for a day, take them out and then smash them with a hammer, and then immerse them in concentrated sulfuric acid to disfigure them completely, and then put them into the fireplace and burn them to ashes in order to solve the hatred in my heart." "It was reading that deprived me of everything, my freedom, my hobbies are all gone, there are only 4 words in my ears 'read, study'."
A child of only six years of age said to an adult that his greatest wish was "to retire as early as my grandmother." Because now he has been talking so tired: every day to literacy, memorize poetry, learn English, learn speed calculations, writing brush strokes, practicing the violin ......
Nanjing Gulou District has done a survey of 329 elementary school students in grades 4-6, titled "I'm afraid of ......", the results were, in order: exams, parents, bad people and rats. By some counts, 85 percent of students are now bored with school, the vast majority.
School is no longer a happy paradise for young people, but a sea of misery that deprives them of a happy childhood!
Now the moral education function of school education has been greatly weakened, has been impoverished to the point that can only use "rely on knowledge to change their fate" slogan to stimulate students' learning enthusiasm, which is actually "rely on the university to change their personal destiny," is the This is in fact "relying on university entrance to change one's fate", which is the same essence as the old slogan "don't forget that your household registration is still in the countryside". Can students trained with such values become the mainstay of the Chinese nation's future?
In the last 20 years, tuition fees for higher education in China have risen 25 times, and the average monthly cost for a college student is more than 2,000 yuan, which is difficult for the average middle-income family. Rural children are even more unable to afford to go to school, they can only rely on loans or social assistance, and after graduation, if you can not find a job, or the income is too low, and how to afford to pay back the loans for school? For the average student, how can they recover the cost of schooling? So not all jobs are willing to be taken, which in turn gives rise to the problem of employment difficulties.
Again, the competition for secondary school education is even more intense, it is more difficult to find a job if you can't go to college, and it is even more difficult to find a good job if you can't go to a good college, so there is a qualitative change in the values of secondary school education, you have to go to college, you have to go to a good secondary school, you have to pay high tuition fees, one hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, or even more; in turn, the school collected so much money from me that you should have high On the other hand, if the school charges me so much money, you should have a high promotion rate, you should send my children to university, and you should run the school according to my opinion and catch the promotion rate. In this way, schools and parents have formed a kind of contractual relationship of sale and purchase, and as for the guidelines and regulations of the state, the purpose of education is not so much a concern. In this situation, making education more and more become the citizen's own thing, and the relationship with the state is more and more diluted, the state's influence on education is also less and less.
In fact, the majority of young people and students are the biggest victims of "exam-oriented education".
I have been in education all my life, and I really doubt that the education we have now can still be called education.
Five
Some people believe that "modern society is essentially a secular, civic, and public society ...... and quality education, which embodies the humanistic spirit and ideals, is difficult to be recognized by the increasingly utilitarian social values, and is difficult to compulsorily integrate into the social psychology and social cognition. into social psychology and social cognition." I do not agree with such a view. Human society, in any period of history, is characterized by pluralistic values, and there will be conflicts among them. The key depends on what the dominant values are, and what kind of values are used by the leading group in control of the state apparatus to educate the public and guide society. In fact, in all periods of history, the majority of students, parents, schools and teachers have only been in a passive position. At the early stage of reform and opening up, our Party warned people to grasp both sides of the issue, namely, the construction of material civilization in one hand and the construction of spiritual civilization in the other, and to do both, have we really done so? I think, quality education, not only does not and the construction of modern society there is a fundamental contradiction, on the contrary, it is the inevitable product of the development of modern society, and the construction of a harmonious socialist society must be, without the harmony of people, social harmony is impossible, and the harmony of people must rely on the harmony of education - quality education.
Excellent educational values, the Chinese nation are inherited for thousands of years, how to our hands but lost, this is not the reason for the times, but our work mistakes.
The current education evaluation system is not what we have developed, as long as the academic performance is good, high test scores are good students, the high rate of advancement is a good school. The "top student" is not also our media propaganda copied?
Some of the abnormal tendencies in young people nowadays are not all the "credit" of our media? For example, many young people can not remember their parents' birthdays, but holding up pictures of "Supergirl", hysterical shouting, inexplicable crying, excited to faint. Is it normal that a dirty rat, which used to be a common enemy, has become a symbol of love, and that the song "The Rat Loves Rice" has become so popular that even kindergarteners know how to sing it? In Japan, the image portrayed to the youth is Astro Boy, Ichigo, volleyball players, while we are "Supergirl", "rats", "Little Swallow". The consequences for the Chinese nation are unimaginable!
Why have our children lost the good old traditional standards of beauty and ugliness that have characterized them for thousands of years? Why is there a confusion of moral values? Why is the national spirit, which has been honored generation after generation, forgotten today? Shouldn't this start with introspection by our leadership?
Nowadays, the decadent sounds of breasts and navels, buttocks twirling, and love, love, love, love, fill our stages. The promotion of money and beauty, messy false advertising, but also everywhere. Today, how many elegant works of art that can purify people's minds are left for people to enjoy? Mao Zedong in May 1942 "speech at the Yan'an forum on literature and art" really only become a "red memory"?
What is the real spirit of the Long March? Now the emphasis is on the spirit of not being afraid of suffering, not afraid of sacrifice, to guide people to repeat the Long March road, to experience the hardships of the Long March, but was ignored is our revolutionary ancestors, why not afraid of suffering, not afraid of sacrifice, that is, they seek liberation for the masses of life values, and this is the essence of the spirit of the Long March.
People *** and the country has been established for 58 years, the reform and opening up has been more than 20 years, but, if the officials are not clean, from the business people have no integrity, there is no order, there is not prohibited, there is not in accordance with the law, the gap between the rich and the poor is growing, the vast majority of workers and peasants, is still at the bottom of the society, but also be called as "vulnerable people! "
How can this be socialism with Chinese characteristics when more than 90 percent of China's billionaires are the children of top officials?
Thousands of ****producers and revolutionaries have sacrificed their lives for the creation of a new China, and they will surely die in peace if what they get in return is only a secular and utilitarian so-called modern society.
Practice has already proved that people will still not feel happy in their lives if they pay attention only to the growth of GDP, the gross domestic product, and ignore the improvement of GNH, the gross national happiness. This is also an important issue that Chinese society in transition must seriously address.
If a country's education pays attention only to quantitative development (which is necessary) without quality assurance, such education cannot really play a positive role in the great cause of revitalizing China and building a harmonious socialist society.
Confucius said, "A gentleman is a man of honor, and the way is born." Its original meaning should mean that, to be a man, we must first set up the root, the root is to have a heart of love and benevolence, to filial piety and respect for parents, respect for older brothers and sisters, pay attention to etiquette, and with the root, the correct method will be generated. If we put it in the context of education nowadays, it means that we should first establish the value of educating people first, and then we will have the correct education method, otherwise, our education will go to the wrong way. China's education, especially basic education, is in such a critical historical period.
Currently, the problems of Chinese education have their complex social reasons, as well as profound reasons of education itself. To retrieve the lost values of education, it is still necessary to rely first on the Party Central Committee, to unify the thinking of leaders at all levels to the decision of the central government. For education, not only should there be correct guidelines and policies, perfect education laws and regulations, but also practical measures and effective supervision mechanism to ensure the implementation of the guidelines and regulations, and these are the current most missing.
Another new year has come, as a principal, what are we thinking? In pursuit of what? Although our power is limited, but we are, after all, an important aspect of education, will affect the entire education process. People are looking forward to the new year, China's education will have a new change. (Written in January 2007)