Seeing Education Through Freedom

I remember him introducing himself simply as a middle-school Chinese teacher—the kind of weary, plain-faced man students meet every day from first grade to senior year. He said he wanted to share his thoughts on education.

Education, he began, has already become a kind of national tragedy. Whenever people talk about it—parents, students, teachers—everyone brims with anger, as though the sins of education could no longer be counted or forgiven.

While preparing this talk, he had come across a video spreading online. It looked, to anyone unaware, like a pyramid-scheme rally; but those who knew recognized it as the oath-taking ceremony of a famous high school in Hebei. Watching it, people laughed, sneered, made jokes—but inside, he felt sorrow. “It reminded me,” he said, “of an essay I once wrote titled Because You Don’t Understand My Sorrow. What is it that drives our innocent, creative, free-willed children to the edge of madness?”

He recalled another moment of mass frenzy—the anti-Japanese-goods protests the previous year, when waves of irrational excitement swept the nation. To him, the fevered faces at those rallies and the faces at that exam-oath ceremony were frighteningly similar. “Why is it,” he asked, “that generation after generation of our youth keep turning into angry patriots? Why does each new wave drown the one before?”

“We were raised on poisonous milk.”

The phrase carried both literal and metaphorical meaning. Literally, this is a country capable of hosting the most spectacular Olympic Games, yet unable to produce a can of safe baby formula. But the poisonous milk also stands for something deeper—the spiritual food our children consume in school.

“Don’t think,” he said, “that because it’s the twenty-first century our textbooks have advanced with the times.”

Back in 2009 and 2010, he and several friends examined the three most widely used Chinese-language textbook series—the People’s Education Press, Jiangsu Education Press, and Beijing Normal University Press editions. Their conclusion: our children were still taking the wrong medicine.

When their research report was published in February 2009, Southern People Weekly first picked it up, then major national media followed, igniting a public reconsideration of elementary Chinese textbooks. The discussion even triggered a brief revival of pre-1949 textbooks between 2009 and 2011.

Why had they done the study? Because in 2008 his own child, nicknamed Cai Chongchong, had turned three and was soon to start primary school. Indeed, by 2012 the boy had entered grade one—and when he brought home his new books, his father found the very same materials they had once criticized, unchanged in a single word.

During the winter vacation that year, the school issued People’s Education Press Chinese Vol. 2, along with an audio tape. The child listened on the recorder; from inside came lessons like Never Forget the Man Who Dug the Well and Anti-Japanese Hero Wang Erxiao.

After listening, Cai Chongchong asked, “Dad, what does great sweep mean?”

He froze. Great sweep?

For a moment he didn’t know how to answer. Then he said, “It’s… like hide-and-seek.”

Why answer that way? Because, first, explaining the historical term great sweep to a child born in 2013 would be complex. Second, he didn’t want his child to fall into hatred too early. He wanted to protect his son’s right not to know.

Then he retold the story of Wang Erxiao: a boy who, while herding cattle, led the Japanese into an ambush, helping the Eighth Route Army destroy them—but losing his own life. A little hero, they called him. There were many like him: Little Soldier Zhang Ga, Young Hero Yu Lai, Liu Hulan, and, after 1949, Lai Ning. All of them, he noted, shared one trait—they were minors.

Later, reading the Law on the Protection of Minors, he noticed Article 40: in any emergency occurring at home, in school, or in public places, minors must be rescued first. “So,” he wondered, “how could they be sent to die first?” Was a battlefield considered a public place? Was war a sudden incident? And by international conventions on child protection, clearly such dangers should never fall on children.

Years ago educators had already discussed what to do in a fire: we teach children not to rush in and save others, but to escape and call for help. Yet the 2013 primary-school textbooks still included the martyr stories. “These values,” he said, “are outdated—and even if they weren’t, they contradict the law protecting minors.”

Through education, through these textbooks, through such deliberate sequencing, the system molds children from kindergarten onward. Using hollow stories and grand narratives, it occupies their minds—innocent when they enter, hysterical when they emerge.

When Cai Chongchong was in first grade, his father did several experiments.

The first was to take him to Beijing—at the boy’s strong request—to see Tian’anmen. There was a text titled How I Long to Go and See It; after reading it, the child insisted they go. So he took him, took pictures, watched his son posing joyfully—yet inwardly felt uneasy. “It was the first time,” he said, “that my son was captured by a big word.”

How could a boy born and raised in Shaoxing, Zhejiang, love Beijing more than his hometown?

He recalled being moved to tears earlier that day by another speaker who had spoken with genuine affection for his homeland. “Love for one’s hometown,” he said, “comes from the heart. Maybe our textbooks are wrong.”

Another time, during the Lunar New Year in Malaysia, he told his son proudly, “You’ll have your birthday here this year.” The boy exploded: “No! I want to have it in my Motherland!”

He was stunned. The word Motherland had never appeared in any of the books he had given his child. It was the first time such a grand term burst from the boy’s mouth. He began drafting an essay he wanted to title Examining the Motherland—to ask when, where, and how this word had entered his son’s brain, his vocabulary.

“Why are our children like this?” he asked, then shared a true homework story.

A friend’s second-grader had an assignment: Write your reflections on studying the 18th Party Congress Spirit.

That friend—a bar owner with a liberal mind—told his son, “Write this: The sky and earth are vast, but the Party’s kindness is vaster; father and mother are dear, but not as dear as the Party’s General Secretary.”

“That’s an individualistic father,” he laughed, “but most children turn out like the over-zealous Huang Yibo, covered with merit badges, who loves watching Xinwen Lianbo and whose vocabulary overflows with grand words.”

Then we can understand those students in the Hebei video: they too are products of such education. Besides the single-direction value system imposed by schools, there is another reason—our traditional notion of education itself. Most parents, when teaching children, focus on one word: obedience.

He considered that concept deeply flawed. He called his own approach “education through freedom.” Many friends misunderstood it, equating freedom, love, and tolerance with indulgence. They would lecture him: “Rules must be made.”

To them, teaching a child meant imposing order. Through discipline and punishment they sought obedience, not the nurturing of a free nature.

He grew up in Zhejiang, where people say of a mischievous child, seven days unbound hands. It refers to wrapping a newborn tightly for seven days so the baby will grow docile. He himself was scolded by his grandfather as a seven-day-unbound-hands child.

That memory always reminded him of the Oroqen practice of “taming eagles.”

They capture a wild male eagle and, through pain, turn it into a hunting bird. The method, he said, could be summed up in one word: corporal punishment. They break the creature’s body to make it obey. “There is no essential difference,” he said, “between that and our own ‘seven-day binding.’”

We like to see ourselves as noble—parents, teachers, engineers of souls—but in truth, we are animal trainers in a circus.

Once a child grows up—enters adolescence, gains reason and independent thought—when indoctrination and control begin to fail, another weapon appears: the merciless exam system. The entrance tests for high school and university, the endless drills and mock papers, drive every student to the brink.

“Nothing matters but exams,” he said. “Before you get into college, life holds only those two words—tests and scores.”

Most parents, unable to grasp the essence of education, echo the system instead, becoming accomplices in harming their own children. Children are born craving freedom; parents torture them in the name of love. Tension grows between generations—exactly like that lyric, the one who loves you most hurts you the deepest.

That, he said, is why there are oath-taking rallies like Hengshui No. 2 High School’s. They believe in a grand narrative, in absolute obedience to authority, drilled since childhood. Under the unmatched pressure of the college entrance exam, they imitate the aesthetics of brainwashing seminars and “Crazy English,” and become what we see now.

In 2005, Lian Chan visited the mainland for the first time since leaving Taiwan. Because he had graduated from Xi’an Houzaimen Elementary School, the pupils there performed a song-and-dance number called Grandpa Lian, You Have Come Home!—with exaggerated gestures and voices. Taiwanese media mocked it. Writer Long Yingtai responded: Don’t laugh. In 1972, she wrote, her Berkeley professor watched from behind a fence as they, twenty-year-olds in military uniforms, goose-stepped, shouldered rifles, sang anthems, shouted patriotic slogans—and his eyes were full of pity. The same pity we now feel for these children.

At twenty, she hadn’t understood; now she did. And we, too, understand—why our children turn out like this, why our education system is such a vast machine that allows no deviation.Adolescence, he continued, is precisely when the human mind is most active and energy is at its peak. Einstein’s great scientific breakthroughs all came in his twenties. It is the most creative period of life. If at that time we bind young people with useless or even harmful tasks, if we trap them in relentless exams, then where can their energy go?

He mentioned a friend, a PhD from Nankai University known online as “Teacher Rabbit.” That friend once told him a story about Cinderella.

Cinderella longed to attend the prince’s ball, but her stepmother stopped her—scattering a basin of peas into ashes and commanding her to pick them out. If she finished within two hours, she could go. Picking peas was meaningless, but it effectively prevented her from doing the truly meaningful thing—attending the ball. “Education,” he said, “is like that.”

He recalled a line from Dead Poets Society: “Seize the day.”  The Chinese subtitle rendered it as extract the essence of life.  What a perfect metaphor, he thought.  Education is the pile of ashes filled with peas—pointless in itself, yet capable of consuming our best years and brightest energy, grinding away our free will, stopping us from doing what requires creativity.  In the end we never attend the prince’s ball; we attend the oath ceremony of Hengshui No. 2 High School.  A pure black humor.

Faced with such a rigid educational machine, everyone sighs that they are powerless—because no single person can change the world.

That phrase—you alone can’t change the world—was what he himself heard endlessly in youth, spoken by elders with heavy earnestness.

But he had always been an optimist, a bit naïve.  His wife called him McDull, and a colleague who had just watched Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons said, “You’re that exorcist who fights monsters with Three Hundred Nursery Rhymes.”

Because of that naïveté he never surrendered completely to the system.  In his own teaching he tried to insert his own thoughts, to test his ideas of education.

He screened films for his students, encouraged extracurricular reading, held book clubs.  His film list had a deliberate order: Dead Poets Society, The Shawshank Redemption, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, V for Vendetta, The Truman Show—and more.  Because of these practices, different from most teachers, local media interviewed him, portraying him as a “topic teacher.”

At an education salon, a parent recognized him from the newspaper.  “Oh, you’re that teacher!  My husband said if he ever meets you, he’ll beat you up.”

He smiled: differing views on education needn’t be solved with fists.

That lightheartedness, he thought, was precisely his McDull optimism.  He truly believed we are not utterly powerless.  If we blame everything on the system, we forget—we are the system.  Each of us composes it.

Lu Xun once wrote that we must shoulder the gate of darkness and let the children pass into the light.  At first he found the sentence grand and tragic, and searched for years for that gate, never finding it.  Now he realized: at least we can do one thing—stop adding meaningless burdens to children.

Returning to Cinderella:  she finally did go to the ball.  In The Truman Show, Jim Carrey’s Truman escaped Seahaven to seek freedom and love.  In The Shawshank Redemption, Andy spent twenty years digging a tunnel to freedom with a small hammer.  Each scene, he said, is thrilling.

He believed in miracles.  Those who endure hardship, persist, and finally reach freedom embody the very meaning of miracle.  So, he said, forgive his McDull-like naïveté—miracles happen exactly this way.  As long as you believe they will, they do.  Education too requires that faith: always keep the dream of miracles alive.

What is the value of education?  Is it examinations, good universities, good jobs, good marriages, reproducing the same life in the next generation?  Far from it.  To him, education guards the freedom of one’s nature, awakens potential, helps a person discover and become themselves, and grants courage to live by one’s own will—to act with the energy to create.  In essence it is Kant’s call: have the courage to use your own reason in all matters.

Before children grasp this—before they have the strength to create—the duty of parents, teachers, guardians is to help them.  Yet many parents behave even worse than Cinderella’s stepmother, scattering more peas.  Cinderella reached the ball because she finished picking them—with help from doves, pigeons, birds, and fairies.  We adults, teachers, parents, should become those little fairies.  That, he said, is the greatest challenge he now faces as the father of a first-grader.

Primary-school textbooks still seize children’s minds with grand narratives and hollow stories, and the exam pressure begins ever earlier.  But if parents remain open-minded—if their example speaks louder than words—the burden lightens.  At least, he said, stop buying endless workbooks and guides at bookstores.  Understand that education is not the same as testing.

And if the child is already captured by those “big words,” already worrying about the country while eating gutter oil, what then?  If his mind is filled with lifeless stories like Never Forget the Man Who Dug the Well and Wang Erxiao, what then?  Even if we cannot stop the transformation, we must understand how it happens during those twelve years from grade one to grade twelve.  Only then can we step into the process of a child’s growth.

If their sense of beauty seems ruined, fill their minds with far more first-rate classics than any textbook provides.  The human brain is vast, an ocean of bits; even if we cannot purge the garbage completely, we can dilute it nearly to zero.  Before literacy, the best reading is picture books—the true nourishment of early childhood.

He remembered how, in their own childhood, they read lianhuanhua comics.  Now there are picture books, giving children the richest aesthetic nurture.  Once they can read words, offer them the finest texts: The Little Prince, Charlotte’s Web, Peter Pan, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Little John, and others.  These pure aesthetics, aligned with human nature, will thrive within them.As a not-so-lovable middle-school teacher, he said, he too had long knelt before the altar of exam-based education, writing books merely to make a living.

But he was grateful that he had always stayed stubbornly loyal to his own ideas.

He admitted he was willful—yet thankful for that willfulness.

Now, at forty, he finally began to understand what education truly means.

There was a sense of “awakening to the present, regretting the past.”

That’s why, he said, his Weibo signature reads: “At forty, rediscovering ideals.”

He confessed that twice he had wanted to leave education entirely.

The first time was in the 1990s, when teachers’ salaries were so low that even temporary workers in bicycle factories earned more.

The second time was in the 2000s, when the internet and new media were booming—he wanted to go into media work.

Because in China, people often say: “Through writing, you can serve the nation; with iron shoulders, bear moral responsibility; with sharp hands, write piercing words.”

Yet in the end, out of laziness perhaps, he never left.

Now, he said, he feels lucky for that choice.

Because he finally understands what education and life mean to him.

He is sure he will remain a teacher for life—but the kind of teacher he wants to be.

When he was younger, those who advised him that “you alone cannot change the world” had misunderstood him.

He never wanted to change the world alone.

His wish was simply this: not to be changed by the world.

To change the world is a kind of defiance; and, as he half-joked, “defiance isn’t allowed in this dynasty.”

So, he said, “I don’t protest—I just refuse to be transformed.”

That, to him, was a gentler rebellion.

Those who dream of changing the world often carry a hero’s complex—wanting to rescue the suffering, to “establish truth for heaven and earth, to secure life for the people, to inherit lost wisdom from the saints, and to bring peace to all generations.”

But if you think too much like that, you become an ambitious schemer.

That’s why, he said, the Chinese have long harbored both a savior complex and a savior fantasy:

the ambitious believe they are saviors;

the unambitious sit still, waiting for a savior to appear—doing nothing themselves.

In truth, he said softly, none of us are saviors.

We’re not heroes.

We are ordinary people—plain, fragile, and real.

All we can do is persist in being ourselves without expecting to change anyone else.

Even what he said today, he emphasized, was only personal reflection, not a sermon.

He had no desire to preach.

Some of his students, after watching Dead Poets Society, secretly called him “Captain.”

In the film, students called their teacher, John Keating, Captain, my captain.

But he said he wasn’t Keating.

He was Andy—Andy Dufresne from The Shawshank Redemption—a prisoner of the educational system.

He had spent sixteen years digging a tunnel toward intellectual freedom.

His tools were reading, thinking, and writing.

And as a middle-school teacher, he wished to be the small lamp that glows beside his students during the darkest stretch of their journey.

He wanted to tell them:

“Beyond the road the system prescribes for you, beyond the values it shouts about, there are other possibilities. You can choose to be yourself as much as you can. You are your own captain.”

He fell silent for a moment, then smiled faintly.

To teach, he said, is not to command others to obey, but to help them recognize their own wings.

And if one day they fly further than he ever could, that will be the proof that all his stubbornness—all his naïve belief in freedom—was worth it.