(Post on behalf of Duan)
In
the past year, the meaning of my work has become the most common topic of my
thoughts. So far I have established about 15 schools for young children, and am
currently working with more than 260 children (the numbers is still growing), I
have to remind myself to be careful about what our schools are providing to
them. Are we doing really good things for them? Do they need what we are
giving? Do we really know what we are doing for the children? Do they want to
be the way we want them to be? Who gives us the right to cultivate the children
as we want? Do we really have the rights? I have so much doubt about my work,
because I really hope my students could be a good person and have a good life
in the future and I want to contribute the positive power for our education system.
However,
what is a good life? Nowadays in China lots of people are in a terrible
circulation of their desire and anxiety. The desire makes them feel more
anxious, thus they think if they had more they would then worry less. This
negative circulation also influences our education philosophy.
For
example, when the parents are thinking about sending their child to our school,
usually they have worries about what and how we teach. Normally most of them
have strong preconceptions about early childhood education. Such as learning as
preparation for primary school, learning to be skilled, learning for being a
beloved one in the community, learning for being smart enough to protect her/himself,
etc. Behind all parents’ opinions there are their unresolved desires and
anxiety. They want to be a rich business person, a professional expert, a
superstar, a governor, a doctor, a lawyer, even the housewife of a magnate, all
in all they want to have an easier life, but now they do not, and they are bearing
the powerful pressure with great effort! I also partly understand why they
yearn for all this. The main cause is not the greed or the vanity of human beings;
it is the unfair social system. As an ordinary person, everything is hard in China, such as finding
good schools, hospitals, safe food, even clean air, while the rich and powerful
people have the convenience of all the fine resources. On the other hand, the
media is encouraging the consumerism because our government wants the GDP to
keeps growing quickly. So the parents are also suffering with these problems. Their
income is not high enough, their apartment is not like they want, their skin
and body shape is not perfect ( more and more mothers ask our teachers to not
giving too much food to their daughters because they worry the young girls
would be not slim enough in the future. Other parents force their children to eat
more, and there are many parents who do not really care what their children eat
in the school, instead their concern is what kind of skills they learn in school).
Therefore the parents have an unhappy life in this society. I think
psychologically most of the parents from a grassroots family have subconscious
guilt for their children because of all the reasons above. Now they pass their
unrealized desires to the young generation. Because they think it is too hard
to provide the fine conditions and friendly environment for the children they
are then so afraid their children will lag behind in the competition with
others for the limited resources. Under the pressure and feeling guilty, they
have very incompatible requirements for our schools. They want their children to
learn as much as we can teach without facing any difficulty in our schools. They
ask our teachers to take care of their children as best as we can; they worry
we let them eat too much or too little; the parents are not satisfied with the
air conditioner, it is always too warm or too cold; they ask us to not let them
get any little hurts in the school; ask us to teach more words and math. They have
forgotten the famous proverb that every Chinese person knows, “becoming the
greatest needs suffered of all the bitterest difficulties.”
This
is one my biggest my career challenges. Not like the manufacturing production
or service industry, where they focus on the satisfaction of their customers,
we need to persuade the parents to concur with our education philosophy while
also trying to improve our education quality. More and more we noticed that
educating the parents’ thoughts and behavior even is more urgent than for the
children.
That’s
why I often ask the parents same questions I ask myself everyday: what kind of
person do we want the child to be? Are we sure s/he would be satisfied in the
future with being that kind of person? How can we design their future without
asking their thoughts? Are anyone of us really perfect enough to have the right
to ask our children to be perfect?
In
our school, our plan is to supporting the students being a good person. What
does a good person mean? We, all of our staff, have discussed and concurred the
values of our team as this: Firstly, to be a good person. That means to be
honest, kind, thinking of others more; first of all we need to be a better
person for our children.
It
is not easy to be a good person though, for adults or children. To be a honest
person, we take a higher risk to be cheated by a less honest person; to be
kind, we are more easily been hurt our softter heart by a harder one; thinking
of others more means thinking of ourselves less at the same time. These are not
parents want to happen to their children. It is maybe reasonable, to protect
their children parents would like their children to be less selfless. But in
our schools, we try to educate the children to be a good person. It is so different
compared with most of the schools in China. We do not have the
ready-made textbooks for the children, there is no the writing homework for the
students, no primary school teaching style classes, no exams. Meanwhile we have
a thousand well-chosen picture books from the world; our art teachers are also
excellent artists; we introduce the best classical Chinese articles to the
children. The students also experience real occupational experiences as a
postman, doctor, chef, police in the real working offices in our schools; on
the other hand, we never hand feed the children and instead train them to eat
by themselves; we remind them to talk and sing gently to avoid disturbing
others and also feel the beauty of singing. In the other schools, teachers ask
the students to talk and sing very loud. We ask our students to eat slowly and
learn to appreciate the food where as other school teachers ask them eat quickly
as a competition. When some students are crying we never just ask them to stop
as in other schools, we usually agree they cry for a while until they have expressed
all the negative emotion and then remind them there are more effective ways to
solve the problem because crying can not solve any thing. When someone broke
toys or wasted food, instead of preaching or rebuking them, we ask them try to
fix by themselves as our only rule is “ take care of and be responsible to
yourself, others and the environment”. We even expend lots of effort to make a
small field with the children to plant some vegetables when other schools ask
them work hard on the textbooks.
We
are doing this because we believe if each of us could be a better person then all
of us would have an easier life in the future. Not so many parents really agree
with our education philosophy, including the educational department of the
government. People often are more concern about what they could have now. So
besides the daily communication with the parents, we also host free workshops
for learning parenting. The good news is they have more sense about it gradually,
even slowly. That is really nice hope for my work so far.
As
I am writing this, I am facing another big challenge. Since Chinese economic
situation is going down since last year, the company I am working for has a
serious financial problem like many other companies in China. All the
staff have not been paid for three months already, and for me even almost one
year. Many staff already left or are leaving, but our education program team is
still working for our dreams so far. I don’t know how long we can maintain
since so many of us need the salary for the regular life.
I
have written too much above maybe. Whenever think of early childhood education
I always have too much to share just like I did during APLP. That is my
passion, my dream. I believe I am working for a better world for our children.
