As a teacher of two universities, Huang Deng described his long-term observation and reflection on two students.
The following is the full text of the speech:
I'm Huang Deng, and I'm glad to have this opportunity to exchange my observations and thoughts on young people with you.
In August, 2020, I published the nonfiction work My Two Students, which is my teaching notes for more than ten years. Many people ask me, what about those two students? What's the difference between two students and children from key universities? Others say that two students are so difficult. What about those junior college students? What about those secondary vocational students? What about those who graduated from junior high school or even dropped out of school early to enter the society?
Faced with these questions and doubts, I feel that I have not actually explained the whole picture of the huge group of "Erben" through words. Although there are as many as four or five thousand students who have walked through my classroom, although I have really spent a lot of time with them, I can't give any overall description of this group. This book is not so much a summary of an attendee's teaching experience as a long-term private observation by a front-line teacher, which exposes my inner confusion, thinking and helplessness.
Graduated from Ph.D. in 2005 and entered two universities to teach. I became a class teacher for the first time in 2006 and took over a class. Their birth time is around 1987. In 20 16, I became a class teacher for the second time and took over another class. These children were born in 1996. In other words, I witnessed the growth of two groups of young people after 1980s and 1990s.
Although I graduated from two schools, I must first admit that because of the generational differences, before I really entered the university to teach, I also had some prejudice against the students I was about to face.
I am from Hunan, and Guangdong is a much richer place than my hometown in my mind. Before I went to the podium, I always thought that most children in Guangdong had nothing to worry about. It was not until an open class on May 23, 2006 that this impression was changed. On the same day, I gave a lecture on college Chinese to the students of planning department. Because of the typhoon, I asked students to write a composition on the topic of wind. A girl named Deng Huazhen handed in her homework quickly. From her story, I saw the truth of a family: she was born in a family with many children, and her parents earned less than 1000 yuan a month. She came from the countryside and didn't even know where her living expenses were the next day. She confessed her confusion in the simplest language, but it had a great influence on me.
I never realized that those students who are ten years younger than me are still suffering the same difficulties as my childhood peers. The word "poverty", I thought, has long been far away from daily life, but I didn't expect the children around me to be deeply involved. The meeting in this class not only adjusted my teaching perspective in the future, but also became a secret opportunity for me to further record and observe this group. Later, I learned that although most of my students are Cantonese, many people are facing the same dilemma as Deng Huazhen. They may come from remote villages in northern Guangdong and western Guangdong, or from some poorer and more chaotic towns and villages.
Before I stepped onto the platform, I always thought that my students could only be admitted to one or two universities because they were not diligent enough. Until the next semester of 20 10, I was in Zhaoqing campus, and Liu Wanli from Gansu told me about her growing experience. She is a child who grew up in the northwest. Since junior high school, she has studied hard for more than ten hours every day, especially in senior high school. In any case, she will grit her teeth and keep studying, even if there are many physical problems. Only in this way can she be admitted to the school where I teach. The so-called "Hengshui model" has always been an effective magic weapon for many rural children to acquire independently.
I have heard similar experiences from other children. A Chaoshan student named Chen Xue told me that when I was in high school, in order to have more time to study, I couldn't bear to delay even a few minutes of blowing my hair after taking a shower, and I always ran into the classroom wet. Another student, Luo, is from Meixian County. He directly took out the "all-purpose oil" that had bottomed out in the class and told his high school life that it was by this external stimulus that he was able to spend it smoothly.
Later, I noticed that many of my students did come from some ordinary families. Even if admitted to two such universities, the family behind them did their best. It is precisely because of their parents' efforts that they often fall into unspeakable embarrassment in the face of rural closure and unrealistic expectations of their loved ones.
Hao Yuan, who comes from Yunnan, is always asked by the villagers where he will be assigned after graduation. They have no idea that college students nowadays choose their own jobs. This mother from Chao Luo, Taishan originally thought that her son would be able to work, buy a house and settle down in Guangzhou after graduating from college. She never knew how severe the employment situation was, and she had no direct knowledge of the housing prices in Guangzhou. Her impression of university has remained in the 1980s when she was young. When the two children told me this, they could only shake their heads with a wry smile. Although they come to the city to study, they still bear a village that they can't get rid of.
These ordinary fragments of getting along with students have greatly disintegrated my prejudice and let me see the background color of the two students. In 20 18, when I was teaching in 13, I suddenly felt that I had a lot to say. In my mind, there are always many young people walking around. Although their faces are blurred, in my miscellaneous vision, they have stepped on a more and more clear road. I realize that I have accumulated too much intuitive observation and thinking about this group. Although this intuition makes it difficult for me to draw a clear conclusion, it is this time-filtered impression that makes me realize that these fragmented observations may carry some important propositions, which is why I decided to write.
First of all, in the mental state, I feel that the students under the podium, their youth, are less arrogant and presumptuous, and more silent and clever after discipline. As a generation of Internet aborigines, I feel that their lives are overhead by more concepts, symbols and too much information, showing a growing gap with the real world.
My students have never had any arguments with me because of different views, and have never asked too much about the current situation of young people and what is the connection with the times. The children under the podium are quieter every year, and the boys in the class rarely pursue the girls around them. That kind of rudeness and recklessness that belongs to the instinct of young people, that kind of desperate and desperate vitality seems to be held by an invisible rope.
Perhaps it is the inertia of exam-oriented education for many years. After countless tense classes, numerous sea tactics and numerous exams, although they struggled to break through from the huge team of candidates in the call of standard answers, this excessive overdraft has already quietly killed their youthful vitality.
For many years, I was most afraid of silence in the classroom. I'd rather the students in the audience be alive and kicking, stand up and talk back, and speak out their flawed views boldly, than see them quietly taking notes, being unknown and indifferent to people.
In the specific classroom, I fully feel that education is like a chronic inflammation. The harsh drugs, antibiotics and hormones used in primary and secondary schools have finally become indifferent, indifferent, thoughtless and inactive in college. The inner fatigue of students and the harsh pressure of universities constitute the background of their spiritual life.
For me, the biggest challenge facing all classes is not learning or knowledge, but not being able to reach a real group. They suppress themselves, and under the pressure of exam-oriented education, it is difficult to recognize the real individuals, and a deep loss will always cover my classroom inadvertently.
With the increase of my understanding of students, I found that the growth path of the generation after 90 is very different from that of the generation after 80.
This group of post-80s students did not bear too much employment pressure. They are more relaxed and respect their personal interests. There is a boy in the class who likes dancing very much. Sometimes in class, classmates coax him to dance, and he will come generously. There is also a boy who likes martial arts novels. He once wrote hundreds of thousands of words in his freshman and sophomore years. They are also more willing to communicate with me and ask me some questions that have nothing to do with study.
However, for this group of post-90s students, I still can't find the feeling of being a class teacher. They are so clever that I hardly need to pay attention to them. But they seem to keep a distance from everyone, not only rarely communicate with me actively, but also keep a tacit boundary with their classmates. I feel that they are always alienated from real life and real daily life, and virtuality seems to be their greatest reality. They were surrounded by videos and the internet since childhood, and their mobile phones hung on their bodies like indispensable organs. Even in class, looking down at the mobile phone has become the most common move.
They rarely talk openly about their origins and family situation, and have little interest in the real world around them-parents, the village behind them, the community where they grew up, the aunt who cooks in the canteen, and so on. They seem to live in a single value system created by the Internet, and their imagination of concrete life seems to be guided by the Internet.
The loss of young people's spirit caused by the double blow of exam-oriented education and network always makes me reflect. What can be done in a university that is more dynamic than a middle school?
Because the teaching is convenient, they don't want to say, I will try to change the way of communication with them, embed writing in any course, encourage them to abandon the routine of students' accents, find materials from the world around them, sort out their personal growth experiences, look back at the village where they were born, and get to know their relatives again through writing. I found that once students get rid of the shackles of finding meaning, writing has become an important way to talk in their lives.
At the same time, I will also use my teacher's identity and combine my own growth experience to guide them to face the ups and downs in life as much as possible, such as the harm caused by poverty, staying behind, lack of love and inferiority. In the process of taking students, I found that those students who can get out of this hurdle, face their past and face the truth of life calmly will integrate into society more smoothly and better bear the forging of society.
But more often, when students are confused and there is nothing I can do, I will encourage them to do something concrete. I will encourage them to hang out in the villages around the school and try to chat with the owners of fast food restaurants and takeout staff.
But to what extent these measures can slow down the alienation of students' minds caused by the flood of standard answers and information, I am actually not sure. I don't even know if this excessive sensitivity and worry just exposed my inner conservatism and anxiety. I just hope that through concrete work and contact with the real world, they can temporarily get rid of their dependence on the internet and have a firmer connection with people, things and things around them. I hope that this nourishment from the earth will make young life more practical and more fulfilling.
Apart from the gap with the real world, I also feel that compared with my college days, my students have no ivory tower-like college experience, which is followed by a lower sense of identity. This is also the second observation I want to talk about.
I was born in the 1970s. In the early 1990s, I was admitted to a local university. A few years later, my alma mater was merged by another local college and became two colleges. In terms of the difficulty of college entrance examination, there is not much difference between my college entrance examination and my students' college entrance examination, but the college time in my memory is sloppy and leisurely.
In contrast, my students are getting busier and more tired under the pressure of employment. Sometimes I even think it's a waste of their time to talk to them one more time and say a few more words to them. I also noticed that my students seldom feel sense of honor and pride because of their university status. When I was in college, although I attended a junior college, my status was obviously branded as "the favored son of heaven". Walking in the street, when someone asks, I will tell others about my university generously. This obvious identity difference obviously comes from the change of students' identity before and after the merger of universities.
At present, most of these two universities in China are merged from the original colleges. Under the planned economy system, college students before the merger are regarded as "talents" trained and reserved for the motherland or society, and are recognized as "national cadres" in the personnel system. Schools will pay more attention to students' professionalism and long-term development potential, and will pay more attention to cultivating a "complete person". As for my students, under the background of marketization, they have long been positioned as the main body of employment. Their existence has been internalized as the decimal point of school employment rate, and independent individuals have unconsciously become statistical data.
Because of the increase of market uncertainty, the talent training goal of most colleges and universities has actually become a process of simply catering to jobs. In order to save costs, employers always hope that the recruited students can bring direct benefits to themselves immediately, unlike state-owned enterprises, which objectively undertake the task of continuing to train talents after graduation from college.
Therefore, under the pressure of reality, in order to improve their employment chips, college students now have to fall into the process of intensive class schedules and endless marking, textual research, double degrees and internships. It is difficult for them to have real time to examine their interests, let alone have a calm mind to enjoy their leisure time in college. Busy has become the norm in their lives. Their growth presents a more and more serious homogenization tendency, and the degree of instrumentalization is getting deeper and deeper.
Faced with a huge amount of application information, in order to save the cost of selecting candidates, employers have become the most important standard, paying unprecedented attention to prestigious schools, which objectively intensifies the formation of academic discrimination and the promotion of exam-oriented education. This reality in turn affects the choice of colleges and universities. In the seemingly lively, reasonable and free competitive atmosphere, colleges and universities unconsciously fall into the obsession with ranking, and words such as "high-end, top-notch, first-class, double-class, super-first-class, world-class ..." have become clear school goals.
The evaluation criteria for teachers no longer focus on intangible qualities such as their enthusiasm for teaching, cultivating students' ability and willingness to pay for students, but on their ability to handle papers and topics and whether they have glamorous titles, which has become the ultimate yardstick for measuring teachers' value.
In this situation, limited by school resources, more and more senior two students are caught in the vicious competition of ranking anxiety and academic qualifications. Although they overcame many difficulties and came to the university, they could not break through their predicament through decent university education. On the contrary, it has become cannon fodder for the expansion of colleges and universities, bearing the disproportionate consequences of pay and gain, and also becoming the consequence bearer of disorderly marketization of education.
Next, I want to talk about my third observation, which is also the most difficult part for me to let go and the strongest part for me. I have observed that it is becoming more and more difficult for junior two students to stand on the society and face more and more uncertainties. Especially for rural children, the belief that "reading changes fate" from primary school seems to be more and more difficult to fulfill.
When I was a head teacher for the first time and was about to graduate in 20 10, no one in the class chose to take the postgraduate entrance examination. Eight years after their graduation, I paid a return visit, and found that 90% of the 52 students in the class had been well settled, including 17 students who stayed in Guangzhou and Shenzhen for employment. For them, although the way to find a job mainly depends on self-employment, rather than the national distribution of college students of my generation, the two diplomas 11 years ago have a prosperous economy, many employment opportunities and relatively stable housing prices, which fully shows the benefits of going to college, and their cost performance is not much different from that of my college graduates 1995.
But when I was a class teacher for the second time, when they graduated from 20 19, as many as one-third of the students chose to take the postgraduate entrance examination. No child is confident that he can stand firm in Guangzhou with a diploma. In the past, I thought that it was a lack of academic pursuit for students not to take the postgraduate entrance examination, but now the soaring postgraduate entrance examination rate has become the direct basis for me to measure the employment situation. More importantly, even if you take the postgraduate entrance examination, it will become more and more difficult. In the so-called contempt chain of colleges and universities, those students who compete often become practical obstacles to their further study because their first degree is not 985,211. In fact, compared with my original postgraduate entrance examination, the proportion of graduate students in prestigious schools is getting higher and higher, and the postgraduate entrance examination team is also growing year by year. Compared with my last year, the difficulty for students to "go ashore" has increased.
In addition, many post-80s people choose to start businesses, but after 90s, their enthusiasm for starting businesses is greatly reduced, and "the end of the universe is compilation" has become their unique employment slogan.
From the teacher's point of view, facing the multiple pressures of students, I personally feel that young people nowadays are too difficult and tired. I think about my family and learning experience, which is actually similar to that of a starting point student. But when I 1995 graduated from college, I didn't have to worry about employment at all. The state was directly assigned to a large state-owned enterprise, and later I was laid off. I still have the opportunity to study as a laid-off worker from the starting point of my undergraduate course, and I was admitted to the graduate school of Wuhan University through independent review. When I graduated with a master's degree in 2002, civil servants were almost the most disdainful choice when we were employed. Foreign companies, private enterprises, news organizations, publishing houses, universities and emerging Internet companies are more attractive to us.
I graduated from sun yat-sen university in 2005. Because I was afraid of renting a house for a long time, I began to look at the house casually in the second year. Never realized the pressure of buying a house. With only 5,000 yuan in hand, I borrowed money to buy a second-hand house, then married and had children step by step, and inadvertently settled in the south. Come to think of it, because there are many employment opportunities, many choices and cheap housing prices, many peers seem not to be afraid of the risk of failure. Whether the job is stable or not and the salary is not the most important bargaining chip for employment, but whether it is in line with personal interests, whether it provides opportunities for personal growth and whether it fully releases personal pursuit of dreams is the fundamental reason for our choice.
In other words, employment, postgraduate entrance examination, buying a house and getting married, which are extremely important to me, are being quietly replaced by the scarcity of employment opportunities, the restriction of the first degree, the soaring housing prices and the difficulty of getting married. Any seemingly ordinary link requires those young people to bear unimaginable pressure, and these are just things that I have naturally completed with the passage of time and have always taken for granted.
As a teacher, facing the children under the podium, I am really distressed. I know that behind their overly self-disciplined faces, the scarcity and uncertainty of choice increase. I am unwilling, but there is nothing I can do. The education I have received makes me believe that the most basic goal for a young person to enter a university should be to grow up together professionally and spiritually, to breed a substantial and powerful force in his heart and to become a "complete person". However, faced with the pressure of employment, survival and study, I feel that this unquantifiable goal is not only vague, but also has no way to develop. I know they are busy at school. Just for a beautiful resume, in order to increase some employment chips and open a long life time and space, perhaps this is not worth the trouble, but in the face of the pressure of reality, I have to agree with their choice.
I have observed that among the students I have taught, those few individuals who are difficult to gain a foothold in society are hardly limited by their personal abilities, but more because of the intangible fetters of the values they have developed since childhood, which makes them unwilling to be flexible and compromise with life. For more than ten years, I have often fallen into a realistic contradiction, and I don't know how to convey certain values to them: in the extremely utilitarian context of exam-taking and personal success, I am afraid that students will be thrown into the abyss of survival by the ubiquitous reef, and I am also worried that they will become accomplices of certain values after achieving secular success.
Observing students for more than ten years, I always unconsciously take myself as a reference and see through the fate changes of the student groups in comparison. I want to know, how did the transformation of higher education collide and connect with these three youth groups during their growth? Is there a secret and complicated relationship between the path of the fate change of young people of different generations and the marketization of education?
I don't deny that the phenomenon I mentioned above can't include all two students, but more point to those individuals from rural areas and ordinary families like my starting point, but I don't deny that the situation I described is not just an accidental case.
1992, when I was in college, there was only a general difference between undergraduate, junior college and technical secondary school. The number of students enrolled in that year was 750,000. As for my students, the university level is getting finer and finer, the proportion of enrollment expansion is getting higher and higher, and the number of students admitted is increasing. In 20 19, the number of people admitted to the national college entrance examination was 8140,000. In this huge group, the proportion of one college is only 15.8%, and about 84% of colleges and universities belong to two or less schools. In other words, there are 30 million college students in China every year, of which more than 25 million are in two or three universities. In fact, they constitute the main body of higher education in China, bearing the largest youth group.
But in sharp contrast, it is the extreme imbalance of education funds. In 2020, the total budget of the top ten universities will reach164.048 billion, including 3107.2 billion in Tsinghua University, 2 162 billion in Zhejiang University, and all other universities are above 100 billion. What about the budgets of two local colleges and vocational colleges? Take Guangdong F College, where I once taught, as an example. The budget for 2020 is about 800 million yuan. Converted, Tsinghua University's annual budget is equivalent to 39 F colleges in Guangdong. The present situation of universities in China is that a few key universities occupy most of the educational resources, while more than 84% of local universities cannot compete with key universities in school resources.
It is no exaggeration to say that the consequences of the dilution of diplomas and the lack of teaching resources are mainly borne by two or less institutions and their huge groups. An obvious fact is that although popular education has long been a consensus, the trend of enrollment expansion has not had much impact on key universities. In addition, they have always received the vast majority of investment, which fundamentally guarantees adequate teaching conditions. Diplomas from key universities are still very strong. From this point of view, the academic qualifications that are flooded because of enrollment expansion are actually mainly ordinary two colleges and universities.
Elite education and mass education go hand in hand, and are clearly placed on the clear chain of colleges and universities. Although the different functions undertaken by universities objectively allow universities to be properly stratified, the prejudice and indifference of society to the second university and other ordinary universities have brought great problems. The truth of the matter is that these neglected young people, who are accepted by ordinary colleges and universities, are actually the backbone of China society because of their close ties with China and huge numbers.
When the employment situation is good, they often stay in the province, locally, and even return to the grassroots in their hometown to become a new force in local development; When the employment situation is depressed, they often become the most confused and struggling group under the market-oriented self-employment situation. It is becoming a reality that some young people become migrant workers and repeat the path taken by their parents. In any case, they all exist in a silent and firm way and become potential energy that affects reality and the fate of thousands of families.
That's why I hope more people can pay attention to the second-year students. As the most ordinary college students in China, their beliefs, ideals and mental state, their survival, fate and prospects, opportunities and conditions provided by society, and the possibility of realizing their life aspirations are the most basic background of China and the key to China's fate. As a teacher, my recognition of the world security boundary comes from my intuitive perception of the fate of the student group.
More importantly, although the dilemma I described comes from two students I am familiar with, it is not only for them, but for all young people. The rising channel of young people is increasingly constrained, which is actually a structural problem they face after the globalization process spreads all over the world. Elegy of the Country People tells the story of the struggling fate of young people at the bottom of the United States. Japanese people with low desires have already appeared, and the employment difficulties of Indian youth are shocking. The group I described is just a limited expression and examination from a personal perspective as a teacher in China in this global common dilemma.
No one can predict what will happen in the future, and the future seems more and more uncertain. But the fact that all people still live on the same planet will certainly provide the greatest certainty for this community: that is, young people are still the most important force in the world, and their way out is related to everyone's fate. How to eliminate obstacles on the way forward is a reality that we need to face. When our children are involved in a compilation and have to curl up in their youthful bodies, when they have to give up their inner dreams and enter a silent struggle for the basic living conditions, this is not only their dilemma, but also the dilemma and crisis that all of us face.
Living in a fairer, more tolerant, friendlier and more comfortable environment through the information bubble, the noise of success and utility, and one-dimensional values is not only their victory, but also everyone's victory. My simplest idea is nothing more than hoping that young people who start like me now will have more opportunities to change their destiny like my peers and firmly believe in the rich possibilities of tomorrow.
Thank you. Thank you for meeting you.