反思：我们缺失怎样的教育？The Education We Never Got

"The pitiful thing about our generation: born in the '90s, 25 to 30 years old, deeply pragmatic yet shot through with idealism, a clash of plural values inside one head. Plenty of us have no real interests, don't know what to chase, don't understand what marriage is for — and yet the single among us aren't happy either. We've been through no great storms, no great luck ever struck; we lack nothing, and have nothing; lonely, too many of us can't sleep at night from the pressure, then go to work by day without a single wound on us — perfectly whole — where even confiding feels precious and staged."

Before we begin

The education I want to talk about this time isn't the education industry itself, nor the "user–goods–venue" logic of it. For one, I haven't studied education much, so I won't presume to wield an axe at the master carpenter's door in front of the experts and heavyweights around me; and two — to put it bluntly — much of today's booming "education" industry isn't education at all, just the education business. And in China, both before and now, education can't be over-commercialized.

So this time I only want to talk about the problems that social phenomena reflect, and the education that ought to sit behind them. This piece may draw a lot of controversy, or get dissed — since I don't think there's a particularly good solution right now; these aren't problems you can fix overnight.

That's right — many of these have no ready-made or good fix, and they'll stir up anxiety, and in the short term they're unsolvable. But the more that's the case, the more we should make more people aware — because anxiety can also spark action. More importantly, get more people to realize it, and then take action when the chance comes. What we need more is to try, from ourselves, to make some things happen and to change.

Take this epidemic: can't it make more citizens realize that how much attention and passion the public itself pays to local public affairs is an important — even the main — way for local governments to avoid this kind of failure down the road? In other words, the mindset and thinking of the people actually determine how the government governs, not the other way around.

My thinking here is imperfect; discussion welcome. Enjoy what follows.

We lack a proper education in love

China's education has many problems, and many of them need to be solved top-down. But among the ones we feel we can improve from ourselves, education in love is one.

What is "love education"? There's no such branch, no dedicated term. Strictly speaking, love education should cover a few things: a sense of belief and a sense of what's real; the best and worst of what comes after that reality; and the right way to communicate.

Our parents' generation had basically no love to speak of, let alone a love education. Not many of them fell in love freely; a lot were set up on blind dates or even had arranged marriages. That was the environment then — a legacy of history.

Us? We're now in a "golden age of being single." First, economic development has given the individual a basic guarantee of independent survival. Second, social security, welfare, and insurance mean the individual has few worries about the future. But more important is globalization: a person can live very freely, very richly. On the other hand, this carries a special meaning for Chinese people — because the only-child era came with an enormous shift in spiritual culture.

One result of globalization is fragmentation. Everything in our modern society is fragments: WeChat replies come in seconds, memory vanishes in an instant. Hardly anyone prints photos anymore; hardly any man keeps a photo of the girl he loves in his wallet. A man leaving a job thanks his boss, yet few thank their wives when they marry. We all live in the "electronic age," where records vanish at will, social apps are everywhere, stickers fly around — and yet we've lost the basic ability to express ourselves in complete language. Someone "barges" into your life and you think, hey, not bad; but inside that "not bad," your subconscious has no firm footing. So a lot of modern love has a parting mechanism built in from the start. Even while in love, everyone's at a discount, holding back a patch of distrust deep in their hearts.

That's exactly why, in modern society, we especially need a fierce eruption, a hundred-percent commitment. Because in a fragmented environment of chance encounters, only at a hundred percent can you present your whole self, and let another feel your entire life in the fastest, fullest way — rather than staying in a state of calculation, of gains and losses.

I used to always feel I wasn't good enough at anything, forever wanting to work at becoming excellent before meeting someone I liked; now I've found there's never any "excellent," the road to becoming a better me never ends, and the person I like is forever missed — out of timidity and low self-worth.

That's another problem with our education: from childhood we're used to gains and losses. In kindergarten, the teacher praises you and you perform better — that's a form of incentive. But real and fake are different things. Even if others say I'm not good, I'll hold my ground, because this is my truth. I have only one life; I won't give it up — this is my real life.

Love is a category of true and false, not a category of gain and loss.

There's a question on Zhihu I love: what can couples talk about to deepen their bond? If I ever "play this game" in the future, I'd ask:

a. Where do your most important, most fundamental spiritual, cultural, and social values lie — do you know? Can you spell out what qualities they have, and how they differ from other people's?

b. What's your hardest sticking point right now — the biggest obstacle to developing that quality, that creativity, above?

This isn't a one-way question but a two-way one. When each knows the other's hard passes, you won't lose sight of what's big and what's small, you won't stir up needless trouble, and you'll each treasure the other.

At the same time, Chinese men's confidence and self-awareness about their own humor, sense of proportion in expression, and personal charm in front of women is basically catastrophic. And much of the time, they're trying to do the very things they're not good at.

When women talk, they're expressing emotion; when men talk, they're conveying information — and men are mostly numb to emotion. When a woman is wistful, low, angry, or sad, what she wants isn't a rebuttal, a fight, or an explanation; she needs to be understood, soothed, met emotionally, or touched — a deep hug, say, or a "It's okay, I'm here with you."

Picture this: a woman of twenty-five or twenty-six vents to a friend about her company — the pay's always late, one person doing two people's jobs, and lately, with a company campaign on, she's been working till three or four in the morning night after night. The friend says, aching for her, "That's awful — why not switch to something easier?" The woman is a little taken aback and says, "I never thought about switching jobs."

Guys, think it over: if you were that friend, how would you respond? And women can try asking their boyfriend or a male friend too.

At the same time, in feelings there's no right and wrong — mostly just understanding or the lack of it. This world isn't black and white; weigh everything by right and wrong and you form a combative mindset. Combat means opposition, and opposition breeds conflict. With conflict, feelings won't run smooth. What is opposition? It's this: in love, you don't want to lose out, don't want to be the one who actively loves, want to be the one who's loved.

Actually the one who actively loves, who actively gives, doesn't lose out much; it's the one who's loved who loses. Because when you break up, the one who actively loved loses only a person who didn't love them, while the one who was loved loses a person who did.

More and more, in recent years and lately, I'm certain of this: love is learned, not a gift of talent.

I used to not understand why the goddess-tier girls around me would pass over men with better worldly qualifications — the rich second-generation, the good-looking — and choose men who seemed less outstanding. Slowly I realized the men they chose had many rich dimensions: humor and the ability to love, firmness of will, breadth of knowledge — qualities that make a partner far more comfortable in the relationship than any external condition. And one crucial point, which I myself am rather lacking and now working to learn: good empathy — not even excellent, just good.

What kind of person you choose actually reflects whether you know what you want — and that's only the beginning. In building intimacy, there's much more to learn: how to communicate effectively and deeply, how to balance outside pressure against your own inner needs, how to resist short-term unease and temptation.

When I found I had such hard problems to solve, inside I was lonely, alarmed, afraid. But once I realized that learning to build intimacy is something everyone faces from 25 to 50, that anxiety eased a lot.

In truth, a person has just two goals in this world. One is to find the thing you'll love for life — a thing that makes you happy; and if it can carry social value, value for its era, that's the highest tier. The other is to find that person — someone especially attuned to you emotionally and spiritually, someone to walk forward with. In many cases, especially in youth, finding the thing first matters most: find the thing, and inside the thing there's a person. But the reality is that many people reverse the order and lose the thread of priorities, rushing headlong to find a person while the thing stays lost in the mist — which instead breeds enormous haze and enormous loss in their lives. So in our lives, not expecting is the best kind of waiting. Don't go deliberately looking for this person; put all your attention and energy on the thing first, and along the way, the person emerges.

I know full well: the fiery feeling can never last unbroken. In a sense, boredom and dullness are even part of love. Many people feel that after graduation, or as they age, it gets harder to truly like or love or accept someone; I've thought about this too.

I have two self-descriptions: an optimistic pessimist, an idealistic realist. And one more: a lifetime of deep feeling, sincere every single time. Dare to love, dare to hate, and dare to stay indifferent. Sincerity — always here.

Love, in the end, is anti-rational. For people in love, sometimes it's just a few points, a few moments in a whole life, that you can never give up on — and when something happens, you think of that moment, and inside you feel a reluctance, a warmth, a resolve. It's a thing built up after big events, big experiences, after storms. On this point, I actually think it's a little like the spirit of sport.

We don't really need a love education, because love can't be taught. What we need is an education in love.

May you live in the hope that true love will arrive tomorrow, while preparing for the truth that true love is hard to find in a lifetime.

We lack the sex education we should have

Professor Li Yinhe has said that sex education in China today is at the "flirting stage" — nearly zero. Most picture books, too, are doing everything they can to dodge it. Sex education isn't simply education about the physiology of sex; it's also gender equality, human relationships. In China, what kind of sex education do we need? First, I think, achieving the most basic respect.

Sex education shouldn't become merely a tool for preventing negative outcomes — letting young people know and understand that there may be all sorts of risks, and then the fear, the intimidation, that comes with it, until some people can only associate the word "sex" with the lewd, the dirty, the dark, the perverse.

In 1969 an American doctor wrote something like this: among the patients I've seen, almost every one of them lives in the space age but has left their sexual organs back in the Stone Age. Thousands of years of accumulated civilization, of technological progress, have advanced few people's understanding of sex by much. Today you can buy pornographic books on the street, adult videos play in theaters, and there's no end to the sex on the internet in all its endless variety. Yet most people's sexual knowledge has barely grown at all.

Sex education in China is, to a large degree, still tied to Chinese society, culture, and education. China's family education, school education, and social education are always ashamed to talk about "sex" — the mere mention makes them blanch.

Most parents are probably like this: they change the channel the instant a kissing scene comes on, or don't watch. Bring up words like condom, porn, masturbation, and some still feel shame. How many kids only learn where they actually came from through their own exploration? I want to say: we must make sex education universal — it's a vital required course in the process of growing up.

If we don't make changes, we'll surely be run ragged handling the fallout later. When we're young we need to learn about gender, to understand what equality and respect mean; in adolescence, we feel our bodies change and learn to embrace a different self; grown up, we need to learn how to get along with the people we like.

If I had a daughter, I'd tell her there's nothing wrong with wanting to try intimacy with a boy she likes — but first, it has to be by free will, and second, remember to use protection. I'd also tell her that everyone says a boy should take responsibility for a girl after they have sex, but that framing isn't quite right, because it has no subject. The right way is: whoever proposes it takes responsibility. Sex isn't a favor a boy grants a girl, nor a mark that a girl now belongs to someone; you are two equal people pursuing pleasure, and even if you're not together in the future, don't carry any psychological burden because of it. Never, at any time, engage in body shaming.

If I had a son, I'd tell him it's best not to lightly try anything with a girl before adulthood, because not every girl's parents will have told her the things above, so your recklessness could cause her some harm and negative effects — harm you can't foresee.

The attitude toward sex should be: whoever chooses, whoever proposes, takes responsibility. And on this, both men and women need to set their positions and attitudes right. In this, the woman isn't subordinate and the man isn't dominant; the two are equal partners. Each should be their own first responsible party. Not to please, not to grant favor, not to control, not to conquer — only for one's own feeling and expression.

There's much reality in this society we can't change; I hope girls aren't harmed by sex, and boys don't harm others through sex. Of course, all of the above is hot air, since I'm still a single dog right now.

Also, most men actually understand sex far less than women do; they don't understand women at all, growing up and learning from adult films — this self-satisfied fantasy is really nothing to be pleased or proud about. Not understanding is the root of prejudice, and prejudice breeds arrogance and disrespect. Most Chinese men and women, from childhood, don't know how to get along, don't know what the other is thinking or how — and that growth doesn't come from films.

Likewise, beyond sex, in many people's eyes the word "sexy" is equated with "coquettish," "frivolous," or "lewd," and whoever likes "sexy" is "unclean," "impure." That idea, seen now, is truly laughable; "sexy" long ago stopped being a word to belittle women — on the contrary, if someone of the opposite sex is described as "sexy," it fully shows she's charming, quite alluring.

But that's just the surface. I'd wager that if you raised the topic seriously, there'd still be a fair share of people who can't accept the "sexy" label. Go watch a matchmaking show: what men and women demand of each other is no different from a middle schooler's ten years ago. So has this society really progressed? As long as sex education falls short, "progress" can only be a mirage.

We lack a cultured education

Our education now — intensely pragmatic, egoistic, nihilistic — is cultivating a batch of so-called absolute, sophisticated egoists. By "absolute" I mean their own interest is the sole, absolute, direct driver of everything they say and do; doing anything for others is all a form of investment. By "sophisticated" I mean they all have high IQs, high cultivation, and everything they do is reasonable, legal, impeccable. They are astonishingly savvy, seasoned, worldly, deliberately striking a posture of loyalty, very good at going along, at performing, very good at using the power of the system to reach their own ends.

PKU professor Qian Liqun once said: some of the top students Peking University produces today — these "talents" — are welcomed by our system, because they can cater to the system's needs, and do so with high efficiency and high IQ. That's exactly where the danger lies. The clumsy ones who can only flatter and boast, the system doesn't actually need; it's these sophisticated egoists the system needs. Such people are being cultivated by us into the next generation. These words aren't meant to criticize these students; they're the fruit of our own pragmatic, egoistic, nihilistic education. They're the evil fruit borne by our deeply flawed primary, secondary, and university education — a "poppy flower," beautiful and poisonous, impossible not to set off alarm.

We should seriously ask ourselves what exactly we want to pursue, what kind of character we want to shape ourselves into. Don't neglect the shaping of character. The grave harm of the sophisticated egoist lies in having no faith, and no great concern, great compassion, sense of responsibility, or sense of duty that transcends one's own private interest.

1. Whatever divides people by difference is bound to trigger conflict.

2. The social sciences and humanities, or the natural sciences, each describe the shape of the world from their own vantage point — glimpsing the whole through a tube.

3. Education, environment, and labels shape people, so the three years of politics-history-geography or physics-chemistry-biology education correspondingly shape humanities and science students. This game ends after the college entrance exam; for greater breadth and completeness, both humanities and science students should add broader content — including a deeper, wider, more dialectical range and development of the knowledge they study, including the humanities and science knowledge outside their high-school scope, and more vantage points.

(Figure in original.)

We lack a workplace education

The workplace education I speak of here has no clear definition or description either; more accurately it should be called vocational training.

Education now is more of a service and a product: you buy a school-district home to get into a key primary school, the key primary school is for getting into a key middle school, the key middle school is for getting into a good university, and the key university is for finding a decent job. Then, once you enter university, it all comes to a screeching halt.

The essence of education is one person lighting up another, and the greatest source of this is the family. Education is one soul awakening another, a process of life influencing life; more than that, it's the process of seeing every child, sparking their potential, letting them become the best version of themselves.

Precisely for this reason, education is an extremely complex thing — the more you do it, the humbler you become. I'm always pondering: where does strength come from, what drives us forward? Only later did I realize the ultimate source of strength comes from facing real life.

In fact, education is not only curriculum, not only school, but a social experience nearly all of society is forced to take part in.

And right now, the trinity of family, school, and society has all along ignored whether the child is truly happy, what their strengths are, their advantages and shortcomings, and whether they can really become someone useful to society, someone interesting, with an interesting life.

There's an ad slogan that goes: how you see the world is how the world sees you. Likewise, the way of thinking with which you view results will, in turn, affect your mindset and conduct in the process.

There are many metaphors for life: life is a journey; life is a long-distance run; life is a marathon, etc. To sum up: life is a process.

The process is what most deserves attention. The process is the whole process; the result is a single point in time. So do you want to be happy only at that point and then sink into endless emptiness, or be happy throughout the whole process? Think carefully: when you reach that juncture, is it really the result that makes you truly happy, with a long half-life?

The result, more often, is just there to give you a label. To be truly happy, joyful, and to do something, in the end you still have to return to self-knowledge.

"What's gained on paper always feels shallow; to truly know a thing you must do it yourself." School and books really are limited; going out to touch society, gaining true knowledge through practice, paired with reading, blending the plural together — that's the optimal answer. But in the current environment, things seem to be moving in a rather "deformed and extreme" way.

University students now are forced to start interning in their first year, because fall recruiting comes in the third year, and before fall recruiting you need 3–4 internships or you become an also-ran. When postgrads enroll, the research proposal says they'll study hard with their advisor and do serious "research"; after enrolling, almost all their time goes to interning and job-hunting (science and engineering students, forced to be in the lab, can't get out for now). Schools and advisors take no clear stand on this state of affairs, because everyone is a community of shared fate: the employment rate.

University has in some sense become a plain trade school — but this "trade school" hasn't served its true function, only guaranteeing each year's employment rate year after year. The ultimate demand of study is, of course, a job; otherwise there'd be an impact on the individual and on society. It's not that all university students, all elite-school students, should serve the grassroots, hold the world in their hearts, and take reshaping the nation as their own duty — because the times are different. Back then, university students had no job worries, were assigned work upon graduation, and could talk of poetry and guitars; now, with university expansion and higher education universalized, first you have to make a living.

Is vocational training wrong? No. The real question is whether it's a good vocational training school — and that's the problem with many universities now. What is students' actual vocational ability? Can they better create value for society, enterprises, and industries? How can the knowledge taught be better applied? How fast is the teachers' knowledge updating?

The problem with our education is that our education and universities lack the proper, qualified, up-to-date vocational training — and lack the emphasis on, and guidance for, students to continually explore and plan their own careers. That's the most missing link in university education right now. And this comes back to the earlier point about result and process. Our education probably can't answer well what work is, what good work is, work suited to oneself, work that lets an individual's energy shine.

Family, university, and society should be a "community of shared fate," but the current reality is all three passing the buck: parents think education is the school's business, the school thinks getting students to graduate smoothly means it can wash its hands of the rest, and once you step into society, every problem starts to surface:

a. the loss of self brought by the individual's ego;

b. little thinking power or judgment when job-hunting;

c. wanting to switch jobs not long after starting, often because of unhappiness;

d. not knowing your own value and energy in the workplace, what you like, what you're good at, etc.

I've seen many people "wake up" midway, but many more choose to keep going wrong.

School education isn't all-powerful. DNA > family > self-study > school; before the internet the last two might swap places. Talking about school is less useful than talking about the person, and education itself. Learner–family–community–school is an ecological cycle where none can be missing. School and family have the biggest influence on the learner, and among them family is the most fundamental.

Many people back then chose their majors with the utilitarian mind of how easy it'd be to find a job and whether it made money, but the major you chose then is a sufficient-but-unnecessary condition for the rest of your life. For a child whose family situation has no surprises, an interest can accompany them for a lifetime; through fair weather and foul, as long as it's something they're interested in and chose themselves, they'll be able and willing to persist, and know how to be strong. But if they're driven only by money and status, then at the first setback it's easy to fall into doubt and fail to persist.

Our education, overall, prizes efficiency and lacks patience; it can't see the process that truly inspires and motivates a child's growth.

Where a child spends the most time, that's where they're most influenced. The most an ordinary person can do is extend a child's education time, so they can free themselves to take part in labor.

I keep thinking: the aim of education is not, and should not be, to create uniformity. The aim of education is, while acknowledging individual difference, to create an atmosphere and a resonance that can embrace difference — an environment in which children, once out in society, still hold a sense of social norms that applies.

The common sense of education isn't a question of advancement rates and employment rates. It's whether you like to learn, and whether you know how to learn. What comes after is just a matter of probability, which we largely can't change.

Education is a thing that moistens all things silently — and all of it has to start from the family.

We lack a proper family and parent-child education

A person's character, beyond innate nature, is the sediment of interactions across several intimate relationships — including but not limited to parents, lovers, spouses, friends, colleagues. And the longest, most influential, still comes from the family.

A big problem for Chinese people is that they haven't figured out or thought through their own lives — and this shows up especially in the family.

Take a big current social problem: marriage and childbearing. In recent years, expert talk and policies encouraging childbirth have sprung up like mushrooms after rain — but it's all thunder and little rain.

Why? Because women don't want to give birth, don't dare to. If you want to raise young people's marriage and birth rates, shouting isn't enough; you need real, all-round supporting policies. Has anyone tried to lower the economic burden of marriage for the young a little? Tried to keep easing this generation's anxiety about future life?

Or again: if parents want their children to marry, have they tried to cut down a little on the elaborate rituals of marriage? If you want to marry your partner, or your partner wants to marry you, have the two of you tried talking through the tangles of raising kids after marriage, the mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relationship, caring for aging parents?

In the expectation of love, family makes up a big part. So how do you tell whether this expectation is wanting to build a family with her, or whether this love is founded on building a family?

On this, Chinese parents give their all to their children, pouring their whole lives into devotion — truly, silkworms spinning silk until they die. So we should be especially grateful for and respect this wish and feeling of theirs. But on the other hand, we must also understand what gratitude and respect really are. Happiness is the core of respect; that you live happily is the greatest respect to them — not that doing as they say is the greatest respect.

This generation of '80s and '90s kids, especially only children, have borne all their parents' expectations and care. Many of us, much of the time, have to hide away the self that would disappoint them — when really we want to tell our parents, but can't ourselves bear that excessive love and control.

Understanding filial piety correctly matters a lot. Of course Chinese people have things passed down over thousands of years, a deep-rooted presence within. In my own thinking, if I have a child someday, I'll tell them: the first thing to do is respect your parents, respect each other, then do what truly makes you happy, what you like, and just bear the corresponding responsibilities and consequences yourself.

A great many Chinese parents lack this "sense of boundaries," often using emotion as a weapon, invading the child's comfort zone as if it were their right.

a. "In my eyes you'll always be my child."

b. "I gave birth to you, so of course I can control you."

Behind these "tender" monologues lies a nameless kind of violence. Even more, don't demand change in the name of love, don't intrude improperly in the name of love, don't arrange everything at will in the name of love. Since you're family, just love — don't ask for so much.

Don't use love to manufacture a sense of hierarchy. Everyone is an individual; respect them — their orientation, their preferences, their good and bad. Whatever is theirs, you must respect and accept.

Start from a single family; only then will everyone have a baseline for peaceful coexistence in modern society, a baseline of pluralism that respects the individual.

The goal of education is to make a child happy, joyful, inwardly strong — the strength within, and the growth of the whole personality. Too many parents treat a child as a study machine: in the middle-school stage, the adolescent stage, the child's task is to study, is to grow. But in growth, what matters more is the growth of personality and psyche. Little do they know how much of grown-up children's troubles, misfortunes, and tragedies come from the family's influence and the lack of education in childhood.

A closing word

For the love-education part, the big principle is surely that true knowledge comes from practice — date more when you're young. Many of us can't date much more, so we'll pass this experience and lesson to the children of the future. It may take until the post-2000s generation grows up before a real love education appears — but we can and must become aware of the problem now.

For vocational training, at the national level there's not much of a problem right now, but the constraints an individual runs into after (especially in university) instantly narrow so much for a person. A fairly good solution to this is raising the proportion of general-education and elective courses — but from what I've observed and understood, apart from Tsinghua and Peking, no school in the country has the ability and level to do it.

The country's current broad direction and trend is not much of a problem; education is, of course, an important means of management. One current reality is that '70s, '80s, and '90s parents keep increasing their investment in their children's education; to completely negate the domestic education system is to go to another extreme. You can see society's and parents' attention to well-rounded quality growing and sustaining more and more. We're still in a process of iteration and upgrade.

What the country as a whole truly needs most is vocational training, and not everyone needs to have their own ideas (that's impossible, and inconvenient to manage). But amid the growing "predicaments" and "problems" appearing now, that some people who have this ability and the will and awareness go and master it, go and reflect on what kind of person they want to become — that, for this society, is certainly nice to have.