Illustration: Luo Xuan/GT

 

There's a saying in English: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." It expresses the belief that the best way to raise a child is to give a fully-rounded upbringing. Too much dreary grind and labor, the proverb suggests, and you will have a wet blanket on your hands instead of a person who is the life and soul of the party.

I mention this because this simple motto seems to me to summarize the most serious drawback of the Chinese approach to education: the fact that Chinese schools churn out young adults who have been pushed so hard to swot and pass exams that they have not been allowed to develop a wider range of skills, such as interpersonal communication and teamwork. There has been no time for all that stuff, Chinese students often explain to me. They have been too busy studying.

This aspect of Chinese culture, as is well-known, owes a great deal to the influence of the philosopher Confucius. Confucius emphasized the importance of learning in order to develop oneself as a human being. The problem is that after his death this perfectly acceptable idea became distorted over the centuries, until nothing was left of it but the necessity to force young people to sit hunched over books in classrooms. The goal of such activity is mainly to pass tests so that the children can get good jobs and support their parents in their dotage.

If we return to the English proverb, it is striking that it expresses the opposite of what Chinese parents appear to want for their offspring. It tells us that what we need to do, as parents, is to allow our children to experiment outside the stifling confines of the classroom, so that their personalities can develop in full. Otherwise we risk imprinting only the contents of textbooks on impressionable minds, making them, as the short years of their childhoods pass by, colorless individuals without inspiration or charisma.

As an educator at a Chinese university, observing and listening to my students gives me the impression that the Confucian-influenced education system here has produced a generation of dull Jacks rather than well-rounded personalities set up for the adult world of work. These young people are, on the whole, earnest and sincere, which is very good; but, on the other hand, they are neither inspired nor inspiring. They appear to be caught up in a process not of their own choosing and which they do not understand very well. Whenever they have the chance, they let off steam by skipping rope or playing other games which in my country, the UK, are associated with early childhood. It is as if they are seeking - alas, too late - to make up for years of lost play.

The point I am trying to make is that Chinese youth would be better served by an educational approach which emphasizes the development of the whole person rather than just the bookish scholar. Confucius himself would surely have agreed. It must have been a whole-person - and not a dull Jack - education he had in mind when he said: "Every truth has four corners: as a teacher I give you one corner, and it is for you to find the other three."

This article was published on the Global Times Metropolitan section Two Cents page, a space for reader submissions, including opinion, humor and satire. The ideas expressed are those of the author alone, and do not represent the position of the Global Times.