Empty education sends students to false gods
- By Wan Lixin
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Shanghai Daily, November 24, 2011
Any pursuit of meaning and justice, and the idea that justice is more important than profit, are being challenged by capitalism, particularly by market forces. "The forces stem not only from the market and economy, but are also rooted in people's ceaseless pursuit of success," Tu said.
Under such conditions any values that do not contribute to the immediate maximization of profits risk becoming obsolete.
The Confucian conception of universal order proceeds from filial piety.
This is so important that in the ancient times a son who had committed a grave sin of filial impiety could be flogged to death.
These principles were instilled in pupils at the very beginning of their education.
Uprooted
The educated, few in number as they were in those days, were expected to exemplify these virtues in their daily life, exerting powerful influence in their agrarian community.
But today's mass migration of prime-age rural residents to the cities has fundamentally undermined the rural social fabric.
Here scholar Liang Qichao's observation over 90 years ago about the triumph of industrialization and science in Europe is still insightful.
He summed up several features that distinguished city life from rural life in the wake of industrialization in Europe.
First, a large number of strangers gathered in one marketplace or factory where their only tie was material.
Second, they were kept alive by selling their labor, and lacking anything substantial to connect them to the soil, they drifted along, in constant fear of being uprooted.
Third, their nerves were constantly frayed in dealing with urban life in its myriad complications.
In their unending struggle to survive, the only thing meaningful is to gratify by whatever means their constantly created material needs.
This is also true of the plight of Chinese migrants today.
In the anonymity of the urban life, in a city of strangers, law becomes the only, feeble tool to keep order.
When philosophy becomes uprooted from reality and is reduced to exercises in sophistry within academia, our educators need to worry more about how to inspire and fire up the students.
Failing to find meaning of life, many of them get lost, and find false gods in a few Hong Kong stars.
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