Cyberspace overexposure leaves troubling mark on young minds
- By Wan Lixin
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E-mail Shanghai Daily, March 2, 2016
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The new toy [By Jiao Haiyang/China.org.cn] |
It was warm and dry on Saturday, with a strong hint of spring in the air.
On that day, I took the 12-year-old son of some friends on a leisurely walk in the sunshine along the willowy banks of the Yangjing River.
His parents were engaged, thus he was entrusted to my custody for the day.
In Chinese culture, willows typify femininity and have long been an object of poetic reflection. Zhang Chao (1659-1707), a noted man of letters, once counted them among the four things in the universe that can truly touch a man's heart. My young companion did not share the same view though. In fact, he was bored almost to tears.
His knowledge of nature was also sadly lacking. He mistook a blooming camellia tree for peony, and wintersweet for sweet osmanthus.
But when the conversation turned to more mundane worldly topics, the depth of his knowledge chilled me. He rebuked the education system with a vehemence far beyond his years. He called some of his teachers "snobs" bent on courting the favor of rich students. When I asked how teachers learn about their students' economic circumstances, he replied: "through visits to students' home."
"And what's the good of pleasing the rich students?" I asked.
"For money, of course. If they get to make an additional ten or twenty thousand, it's good money," he replied.
More disturbing though was his cynical justification for this situation: "Anyway, they teach for money, just as with every other profession."
He went on to mention the national obsession with all things foreign, citing an example of a young fraudster who falsely identified himself as a returnee with an overseas education as he conned several women out of their money.
I asked how he learned about all this. "It was all on the websites," he said, trying to suggest he'd heard it all from "good authority."
Later in the day, I read one of his school compositions, in which he envisioned Pudong Avenue (where he lives) following a major renovation. It would, in his mind, become a state-of-the-art boulevard lined up with expensive condos and gardened villas, each priced at hundreds of thousands of yuan per square-meter. "I will work hard, so that I could afford to buy a few units there," he concluded.
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