Logos Review · Issue 1 (Spring 2026) · Special Topic: Education
Liu Yunshan
Abstract: This article analyzes the group characteristics of the “inveterate exam-taker” (zuòtíjiā), exploring the growth predicament faced by contemporary Chinese youth under the multiple disciplines of the educational system, family structure, and social culture. The exam-oriented education, with its core focus on finding “standard answers,” obscures students’ subjective experiences, reducing learning to a formalistic exercise of solving given problems rather than a genuine exploration of the world. In family education, parents’ high expectations and high control, to some extent, strip children of their plasticity and capacity for dependence, leading to the loneliness of the “only child” and an absence of genuine relationships. Excessive self-control and goal-orientation inevitably lead to abstraction, self-enclosure, and a retreat from the world. The present self and concrete life are squeezed and devoured by the “known past” and the “preset future,” leaving students commonly trapped in the predicament of “second-hand time,” where passive learning causes them to lose their real connection to the world, to others, and even to themselves. This paper calls for the reconstruction of a foundation based on action and experience, to return knowledge to life’s scenarios, and to reawaken students’ sense of reality and agency through practice, thereby enabling them to overcome this predicament and achieve true individual growth.
Keywords: Second-Hand Time, Zuòtíjiā (Inveterate Exam-Taker), Growth Predicament
https://doi.org/10.64053/TPZS1698
I. The “Inveterate Exam-Taker”: The Absence of the “Present”
“Who am I? A small-town exam-taker, a champion of exam-oriented education, a lucky one under the gaokao system. The only thing my twelve years of schooling taught me was how to get the highest score when facing test papers and questions. I would even drill a single test paper ten times. Mastering all the knowledge points by spending 100 hours is completely different from spending 2 hours.” [2]
This gives rise to the “inveterate exam-taker” (zuòtíjiā). Between the world and words, words obscure the world; between the known and the unknown, the known expels the unknown; between the past, present, and future, the present is absent.
“Our language teacher showed us a TED talk by an Indian-American scientist, whose core message was that ‘all standardized tests must have standard answers.’ Therefore, even for subjective questions, we had to compare our answers to the official key and identify the differences.”
“‘Finding the standard answer’ was the central conflict of my life before the gaokao. For this, I could sit from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., endlessly cycling through the process of doing problems, summarizing, and reflecting.”
Symbols characterize the essence of the zuòtíjiā. They learn and master content that is unknown to them but already known to others and to humanity. Ultimately, however, the learner must return to their own experience and life, confront their real situations, and encounter their own problems.
Only then can the “known” be activated as a method or tool; only then does the “known” enter the learner’s world, establish a tangible connection with them, and acquire meaning. The “known” becomes a “coordinate” in the mind of an actor, a “map” in the hands of an explorer.
The cultivation of the zuòtíjiā replaces “problem-solving” (in a real sense) with “solving given problems” (on paper). They do not plant their feet on the ground and begin a real journey. Let us put ourselves in their shoes: how does a child enter the world? They must use their body—their most primal, reliable, and sensitive organ of inquiry. They touch everything, look around, and observe facial expressions. When happy, they gurgle and laugh—their first expressions. When hungry or uncomfortable, they cry and fuss, expressing their demands. They arrive in the world and at school with their body, emotions, and the concrete needs and fluid feelings of each living moment.
The zuòtíjiā is situated in a “knowledged school,” or more accurately, in the “knowledgization” of school education. A concrete, living, and ever-unfolding process of growth is transformed into repetitive circling on a one-dimensional, closed track of the “known.” They memorize maps on paper or rehearse scenarios in their minds but are never allowed to actually go out, not even to run free for a moment. Today’s school is no longer a place of leisure in its original sense but rather a system that implants its institutional DNA into common human nature through a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Driven by efficiency, it provides closed-ended question types and refined methods, but without real content. This is like a transitive verb in grammar that lacks its object, resulting in an empty action, a hollow motion, akin to an exercise that only trains the biceps. This is a new form of formal discipline.
Without real life, without the nourishment of content, learning, which should be full of growth, becomes drudgery. The learning process is filled with repetitive and monotonous drills. The spirited endeavor of learning also becomes a menial task, done to achieve an external goal without personal interest. A child’s growth has its natural resources, such as interest, which is the medium connecting a lively mind with external things, creating a circulation of energy and an organic cycle between intellectual passion and the world of objects and affairs. This process is at once direct and straightforward, self-sufficient and vibrant. The development of thinking is not the forced implantation of external materials, not even through high-level mental gymnastics. It is only in doing things, in action, that thinking gains power and vitality—action is the beginning of knowledge. Only when action and knowledge are unified can one’s vitality flow, one’s emotions be uplifted, and one’s spirit be invigorated. This is the crux of reducing the academic burden; it is not simply about cutting the quantity of knowledge but about making action and experience the foundation of knowledge, its living source.
The following is a student’s reflection on their confusion during their growth, a dialogue with both their parents and themself:
Student: “Why do I study?”
Parent:“To understand the world and yourself.”
Student:“Then are the things I’m doing now helping me understand the world and myself?”
Parent: “It seems not. I’m attending classes and doing problems. This process might help in understanding a part of the world and a part of myself. But the main task is to get the correct answer, the goal is to get a high score, and everything else can come later.”
Student:“(But) why does it come later? Why not spend more time understanding the world and yourself, if you believe that is the fundamental purpose of learning?”
Parent:“Because I should first be good at solving problems and getting high scores, so I can get into a better university, and then…”
Student: “And then what? What do you want to do?”
Parent:“Can we just focus on getting into university first?”
At this point, delayed gratification is used to cool their passion for things, while also breeding inordinate desires. A child who could have grown self-sufficiently on their own strength is thus distorted. Desire becomes a means of manipulating the learner; it replaces the goal of learning, yet offers no direct or immediate satisfaction. Their simple passion fades, while they are scorched by the flames of empty ambition. Their world shifts from one of mysterious wonders to a circus ring for trained animals. Like a young lion, they learn a set of skills through the cold-blooded training of a beast-tamer. These skills are neither in line with their nature nor for the legitimate purpose of hunting food, but for defeating—or more accurately, humiliating—their peers in competition to win rewards and climb the ladder of the system. They become “that other family’s child” or aspire to be one, simultaneously arrogant and fragilely empty. The gospel of success spreads like a plague.
On the timeline of past, present, and future, what the student possesses is the present. They should be living in the present. Yet, how is their present, their “now,” to be “endured” or “gotten through”?
“The inveterate exam-taker often ‘times their practice.’ Most not only live a monotonously regular life but also one of an almost stopwatch-like precision.”
Why, on the one hand, do they live with temporal precision and urgency, while on the other, procrastination is so rampant? Because the task at hand is disconnected from the dream in their heart. The task at hand is externally imposed; the dream is often illusory and fragmented. The future is beautiful, but the future is distant; the present is important, but the present is bitter. When the present is defined by a glamorous but hollow future, it is reduced to mere investment value. In each “day” that is endured, there are no beloved activities, no cherished relationships, and thus no autonomous motivation. How can the future be brought into the “here and now,” transformed into something one can start working on? Because the future is not an empty design or choice; the future emerges from the present, grows out of the current situation. The future is rooted in the present and should enter the present.
How does the past enter their world? As the “known,” it serves as a method, tool, and coordinate. But it can only be a toolbox for the “task at hand,” a reference for the “matter before them,” a compass for the “dream in their heart.” It should not be a dogma or a bible, a static, completed system that confines or restricts the student. If it is, the “known” of the past devours the feelings and knowledge of the present. Their mind have long become a racetrack for others’ knowledge.
Comenius, in The Great Didactic, vividly points out:
“Schools have failed to teach their students to develop their own minds… like the crow in Aesop’s Fable, they adorn themselves with the feathers of other birds. Schools have no patience to develop the founts of knowledge that lie dormant in the students, but water them with water drawn from other sources… The result is that the majority of people have no knowledge, but only a collection of quotations, sentences, and opinions, gleaned from various authors, with which they patch together their learning, like a successfully patched-up quilt…. They are a servile lot, accustomed to carrying burdens that are not their own.” [3]
A student reflects: Why is it that the zuòtíjiā can often score points precisely and seem logically clear, yet frequently speak nonsense?
“In humanities exams, the objective multiple-choice questions can be solved by drilling numerous problems and familiarizing oneself with common pitfalls. For material-based and subjective questions, in the pursuit of ‘differentiation’ and grading efficiency, the answering process can be broken down into several components: aesthetic presentation, organization, knowledge comprehension, and keyword memorization. Among these, only knowledge comprehension, which accounts for a small proportion, requires rational thought. Using a utilitarian logic to analyze materials, organize answers, and connect knowledge points—using such a string of rigid skills to tackle the subject—it’s no wonder that learning it feels meaningless and unrewarding.”
Similarly, consider the current trend in gaokao essay training: “Accumulate a large number of famous quotes and materials—and not just any quotes, but preferably unfamiliar, esoteric ones to enhance the ‘tone’ of the essay. The essence of a high-scoring essay is likely just ’a successfully patched-up quilt.’ What’s more ridiculous is that most of these quotes are used for the sake of being used (after all, memorizing them is tiring, so they must be used multiple times), and are therefore often ill-fitting, superficially connected but spiritually divorced from the topic, distorting their original meaning.”
They pluck “the feathers of other birds” to adorn themselves instead of entering the hearts and experiences of the ancients, connecting the modern heart with the ancient heart. All men’s hearts are the same, and what is true for one is true for all. The standard foundation is the stream of culture and the practice of experience. By entering the past from the present, the humanistic light of the past opens up spiritual territories; exemplary figures reveal different ways of life. But without the stream of life, without the vivid experience of the present, the past is dead, enshrined. If the past devours the present, if there is no “presentness,” how can they participate in a world that is already completed? Their mind is that of a spectator, even an indifferent one. Dewey, in Art as Experience, explains:
“The world is finished, ended, and there are no traces of suspense and crisis, and no opportunity for choice. Where everything is already complete, there is no fulfillment.” [4]
The future is rooted in the “un-”: “unfinished,” “undefined.” From another perspective, it is “to-be-defined,” “to-be-completed.” This is growth and plasticity. Growth comes from the crevices of the present, the difficulties faced, the methods used, the energy mobilized, the conditions created, the momentum gathered. Intelligence is an adverb, derived from the degree of concentration on the task at hand, from the sustained pursuit of the light in one’s heart. The future grows out of the present, like a stream emerging from rock crevices and soil, then following the terrain, appearing and disappearing, becoming an underground river, a mountain brook, a stream in the world. The future is not a hollow blueprint in the mind; growth is not a choice between a few preset tracks, nor is it about crafting oneself or managing an image according to an imagined persona. Growth is using one’s own feet to forge a path where there was no path.
The “present” is mortgaged to the “past” and pre-spent on the “future.” Between the past and the future, the present is absent. This is a “second-hand time.” [5] In a world that is already completed, in a second-hand time that lacks the rhythm of temporal change and growth, there is no difference between being asleep and being awake.
The paradox lies in how the mind can be simultaneously dormant and yet sensitive and shrewd.
How are these dormancy and sensitivity so twistedly entangled? Moreover, how do they establish relationships with their surroundings, with their world?
II. “The Only Child”: The Absence of “Relationship”
How does a child enter this world? A child is fragile, dependent on those around them, and on their tangible physical needs. Moreover, how does the world enter a child’s heart? Dewey observed children: “The child has a primary social capacity. He is flexible and sensitive, sympathetically responsive to the attitudes and actions of those around him, to a degree that few adults can maintain.” [6]
A child has dependence. “This dependence is a power, not a weakness; it signifies interdependence.” It is open to the creation of reliable, trustworthy, and warm relationships. A child has plasticity. “This plasticity is different from that of wax or putty, which is entirely shaped by external forces. Human plasticity includes the ability not to change form just because of external pressure.” [7] Human plasticity is a supple elasticity, involving both adaptation to the environment and adherence to the self, a balancing act between the self and the environment. Plasticity comes from experience, from which one gains the ability to deal with difficulties in future situations.
A student from Beijing reflects:
“My mother was the one who raised me, and naturally, she couldn’t escape anxiety, becoming a ‘Haidian mom’ like everyone else. In my childhood, academic setbacks were resolved too early, while life’s setbacks came too late. When I had trouble memorizing poems or texts, or performed poorly in a subject, my mother would diligently share her experience, find tutors, and provide timely help. For daily life difficulties, she took care of everything she could. My mother treated discipline as the norm and freedom as a privilege. Care and companionship were absent in between.”
The “Haidian mom” is a classic example of Chinese parents. The driving force behind this phenomenon is the conflict between the “ideal self” and the “real self” for generations of Chinese people, a struggle between the “present” and the “future.” Who does not stumble in life? Who has not missed opportunities and felt regret? The impulse to “do it all over again” is channeled into the practice of raising children. The “future” thus acquires a concrete and immediate “near future”—something tangibly approaching.
Fei Xiaotong observed this in detail: “Since children are often seen by parents as a part of themselves… a self that has been ravaged by reality finds a concrete opportunity to try again. Every parent will, to some extent, correct in their children all the flaws of their own past. They will be careful to prevent the misfortunes they encountered from reappearing in their second life.” [8]
This is human nature and a typical family dynamic. Fei Xiaotong vividly describes Chinese parents as both compassionate and strict. “The elders stroke their beards, tolerate their own mistakes, and lightly pass the responsibility on to the next generation. ‘You must do well!’” [9]
In this transmission of bloodline and responsibility, although parent and child are one body, a gulf between generations is almost inevitable:
“How do the children see it? Parents see their children as part of themselves, but do the children see it that way? Parents pass their ideals on to their children and have the right to supervise their children’s behavior, but are the children willing to accept the ideals imposed upon them by their parents?” [10]
This touches upon a set of dynamics in the parent-child relationship: “symbiosis” and “consensus.” Fei Xiaotong uses Parker’s concepts to reveal the complexity of this relationship. Symbiosis is a common phenomenon in the biological world, where two species benefit from each other’s existence, like ants and aphids. The ant does not recognize the aphid’s personhood, let alone care about its joys or sorrows; it protects the aphid and carries it to suitable places for its own benefit—the aphid is its puppet. The aphid, in turn, provides the ant with sweet secretions in exchange for guards and carriers. They use each other, coexisting in symbiosis. Humans have another kind of relationship: Consensus. They are willing to sacrifice some of their own interests to fulfill the will of others—fulfillment, not exploitation. This is where morality, not just utility, arises. This is where the principles of loyalty and empathy emerge, and with them, society and solidarity. [11]
The parent-child relationship is both biological and social, a mix of symbiosis and consensus that evolves over time. Pure empathy exists only in utopia. In today’s China, with its transition from tradition to modernity, social structural changes, and the rupture of lifestyles and styles between generations, the “parent-child unity” and the “generational gulf” face even greater difficulties.
Traditional Chinese education was about “burying the ‘seeds’ of life in the soil,” [12] placing the individual’s life within the continuity of generations—serving the ancestors above and continuing the lineage below, becoming a link in the chain of social succession. Nurturing, raising, and teaching—body, mind, and spirit—were integrated, unfolding sequentially from the physical to the emotional to the intellectual. As parents and as children, what the elders did, the young imitated, mainly through daily ethical interactions and observations. Traditional Chinese culture emphasized “lún” (伦) externally—the way people interact—and “jié” (节) internally—self-restraint. The key to conducting oneself was a sense of proportion. Here, “lún” is not merely synchronic but also diachronic; it deals not only with the comings and goings of contemporaries in the same space but also with the continuation between ancestors and descendants over time. This means that traditional society never understood a person as an isolated individual but as a “whole person” within a web of social relations passed down from the past to the future. [13]
In an agrarian society, learning (xué, 学) was the initial contact with unfamiliar things. The method of learning was practice (xí, 习). Xí meant repetitive doing, conditioning a person to a new way of doing things through the tempering of time. Xí was also a form of cultivation. Behind learning was familiarity, a sense of intimacy born from concrete, multifaceted, and frequent contact. This feeling was the result of being refined through countless small frictions. “Is it not a pleasure?” describes this feeling of intimacy after familiarity. [14] At this point, a person establishes a life form that is both intricately intertwined and deeply rooted with their environment and the people and things around them. Traditional China was family-centered and did not emphasize the autonomous individual. Above the family were the clan, the village, and the state. Coexisting in a large family required tolerance horizontally and patience vertically. Children were full of reverence for their elders. The life of a traditional Chinese person, in supporting the old and raising the young, maintained dense yet resilient relationships through complex dealings of affairs, emotions, and principles. They lived in relationships, with achievements, “face,” and reputation.
In a transitional China, education has become a ladder for social mobility. The bittersweet taste of life has turned into “the bitterest of bitters,” and the aspiration to be a “decent person” (rénzhōngrén) has become the expectation of being a “person above others” (rénshàngrén). Parents use their own “bitterest of bitters” to lift up their “person above others” child, and the child uses the illusion of being a “person above others” to endure the “bitterest of bitters” of the present. In the pursuit of “knowledge changing one’s destiny,” family and social education and growth are confined to the narrow scope of knowledge transmission in schools, distorted into a competitive screening process among peers. One must be “uprooted” to achieve upward mobility.
Parents believe their children possess “infinite” potential and “unlimited” ability, so they desperately provide all resources to induce and cultivate them, placing their “unlimited” expectations upon them. They bear endless anxiety, labor their entire lives, and earnestly tell their children that all their efforts and sacrifices are for their future and prospects, arranging their children’s education with meticulous care out of an immense sense of responsibility and morality.
“Haidian moms” are often the first generation of university graduates in contemporary China. They hope to replicate their success in their children: using a strict method to implement their educational standards, planning their children’s academic path from age six to eighteen, pushing them to fight their way through the gaokao and enter prestigious universities, believing this will change their children’s destiny and that this is how they are responsible for them.
With their meticulous planning, high investment, and high accountability, they place their children in what seems to be a polished environment, rich in nutrients but sealed off from the natural light and temperature of the world—a giant bubble. In this bubble, the child becomes the parents’ “face,” the KPI of the family’s investment, and a puppet of the parents’ desires. These high-planning, high-control parents have all made a foolish mistake: they have deprived life of its most important characteristic: plasticity.
The synchronicity of a living organism with its surroundings is constantly lost and restored, through either effort or luck. By experiencing difference and resistance, life itself is enriched. If the gap is too large, the organism dies; if it is too uniform, the organism is not stimulated and cannot have a normal experience. Dewey particularly emphasized:
“In direct experience, doing, feeling, and meaning are one. Direct experience comes from the interaction between nature and man, an interaction in which human energies are concentrated, released, inhibited, frustrated, and fulfilled. Desire and fulfillment, the impulse to act and the inhibition of this impulse, repeat themselves in a circular and recurring rhythm.” [15]
In a perfectly designed bubble, the child’s life energy suffocates. The brighter the bubble is illuminated, the dimmer the flame of life within. They respond with indifference and numbness. A sense of burnout appears among the youth:
“I once told my flower-loving mother that applying fertilizer too early only burns the seedlings. Every child who tells their parents they are under a lot of pressure is hoping for proper communication and understanding, not for parents to adopt an unequal attitude and deprive them of the right to complain about pressure. Or perhaps they don’t consider our pressure to be pressure at all. Over time, this pressure and the lack of respect for one’s personhood will inevitably twist a person’s heart, even if we never notice it.”
Parents who are solely focused on lifting up their children, in their meticulous care, have also deprived them of the second crucial prerequisite for growth: dependence. The autonomy of a life independent of its environment is not only a false proposition but a harmful one. Behind seeming self-sufficiency and autonomy lies the mechanization of the person. Life is not only autonomous but also fragile. Its dependence on the environment, on relationships, is precisely the driving force of growth.
Today’s parents bear the responsibility themselves and entrust their expectations to their children. Yet this expectation is for the children to realize the parents’ dreams—dreams that are not about being like the parents, but different from them. Not about staying close, helping with daily chores, and thriving in familiar waters like a fish in water, but about leaving the nest, traveling far, and struggling in unfamiliar waters like a fish out of water. For a life that has been “uprooted,” where can it be cultivated?
“A cry and a smile, mutually responding; a pain and an itch, mutually empathizing—this is what makes a family. Among family, people rejoice in the joy of their loved ones, and their joy is amplified; people grieve in the sorrow of their loved ones, and their sorrow is not injurious. This is psychological resonance.” [16]
This is Liang Shuming’s description of family in traditional Chinese culture. However, in the present day, for the child who has been lifted up, “I will become you when I grow up”—is this an aspiration or a nightmare? “The mouth has the same tastes; the eye has the same sense of beauty.” [17] Without a shared life, without shared interests, there is no emotional connection between parent and child; their hearts are separated. The conflicting habits of attachment and resistance, of tenderness and contempt, plunge young people into an inescapable depression. How can they integrate with the common sense, familiar feelings, and standard principles of their family of origin? The phenomenon of “duànqīn” (cutting off family ties) has appeared.
They exist in a relational structure devoid of genuine relationships.
III. Mastering the Self: The “World’s” Retreat
A student who fled school and avoided society, finding it difficult to re-enter the world, wrote:
“I thought I had seen ‘the world,’ but in reality, I had only seen a ‘map of the world,’ only read the ‘travelogues’ written by others after they had walked through and seen the world. Textbooks and exams provided me with a theoretical world that was ‘completely certain, where everything has a standard answer, and everything can be found in the textbook.’ I could score first place, thriving in this theoretical world, unwilling and unthinking of stepping out of it.”
He stubbornly indulges in theory as one might indulge in a game. He misunderstands what good theory is: a theory rooted in life and experience, with explanatory power and tolerance for error. His “complete certainty” and “standard answers” are merely a system of “verisimilar” concepts, like the shadows on the wall in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” separated from the true light of experience and filling the mind. He lives in a “mirror-like cognition” and a “mirror-like life.”
“Because there is always a single answer, we see no need to question the conclusions our teachers present. Thus, without any extra effort, we can directly believe and memorize the knowledge in the textbooks. Over time, we gradually lose the ability to think independently and thus become afraid of uncertain outcomes, because uncertain outcomes mean lower exam scores, which, through psychological conditioning, instills fear in us.”
Fearing uncertainty, they reject reality. A real rose always has flaws; it blooms and withers. They want only the most perfect moment. They reject time, for time contains waxing and waning, chance and change. They live in a “verisimilar” world—an abstract world that should have been distilled from experience but has had experience deleted, a fictional world without impurities or flaws. He is infatuated with purity and certainty, a deformed power grown from an abstract conceptual world.
How did this come to be? In their upbringing, both inside and outside of school, educational theories of autonomous learning are prevalent. In contemporary learning theory, this is translated as Self-Regulated Learning (SRL), which refers to a continuous, goal-oriented process of cognition, emotion, and action initiated by the learner. That is, the learner sets and regulates learning goals, and monitors and adjusts cognitive and metacognitive processes to aim for those goals.
This manifests as goal-orientation. Teaching and learning are no longer an opening up to the unknown and the world, but a behaviorist S-R (stimulus-response) reaction, swift and accurate. Learning evaluation is fully utilized in the “process-product research” model of teaching. Teaching is seen as a functionalist system. The teaching process is not an open, creative, and enriching field, but a closed, functional pipeline for pursuing causal relationships and efficiency—this is the prototype of goal-oriented self-learning. Manabu Sato criticizes this model for ignoring the individual’s internal experience and breaking down individuality or wholeness into observable, quantifiable, homogeneous indicators. It inherits Bobbitt’s social efficiency ideology, using a production engineering analogy for the learning model (goals, achievement, evaluation); it inherits the educational research of Taylor and Bloom based on behavioral science, using production-oriented, efficiency-driven industrialism and behaviorism, and controlling the teaching and learning process in the classroom with the techniques of systems engineering. [18] In the goal-oriented process-product model, teaching and learning become behavioral engineering, teachers become behavioral engineers, and evaluation becomes extremely important. Mastering the PDCA cycle becomes an indispensable generic skill for teachers:
Plan → Do → Check/Evaluate → Act:
Predict and formulate a plan, carry out the task according to the plan, check and evaluate whether the implementation results match the plan, and improve the task that does not match the plan, thus forming a continuous cycle. [19]
Shulman criticized the “process-product model” in teaching research for lacking the “3Cs”: content, cognition, and context. It does not inquire into the teaching content, the cognition and thinking of teachers and students, or the social context of the classroom, limiting itself to validating the effectiveness of learning goals and educational technology. [20]
Goal-oriented learning neglects the specificity and contextuality of teaching, assuming the existence of an innate, abstract ability or potential detached from specific knowledge and disciplines. This is reflected in a shift in testing: from testing forms of knowledge with strong cultural constraints (specific knowledge) to testing abstract and supposedly fairer thinking skills (methods and thinking). A tension arises between achievement tests (knowledge already mastered) and aptitude tests, with aptitude tests assuming some transcendent, non-experiential qualities. [21] In the American Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SATs), there is little emphasis on learning content and a great deal on learning methods. In assessing ability and thinking methods, knowledge is diluted and weakened. In testing, potential is separated from past achievement, assuming the test-taker is knowledge-poor (no longer deeply rooted in a cultural context). The tests focus more on methods and approaches, such as testing vocabulary through thought processes rather than on whether the thought is correct. This leads to a separation of the process of thinking from the content of thought. Thinking devoid of content can only be operational, and it requires a spiritual superficiality. [22]
Without life experience, without inner understanding, there is only formal correctness. They often say things they do not understand at all, with a straight face:
“When faced with knowledge, if one only has a mind like ’a poorly patched-up quilt,’ they either fail to grasp it, grasp it in a wrong and chaotic way, or just copy others’ methods mechanically. Long-term, illogical application of random fixes can make one’s thinking increasingly chaotic and weaken one’s sense of logic. Many times, they just talk nonsense, not knowing what they are saying, let alone having any original insights.”
Either they are long immersed in a “verisimilar” abstract world, or they turn theory into dogma, or they reason simplistically from formal logic, easily developing a polarized mindset of all-or-nothing:
“Thus, we have countless ‘adult-infants,’ megalomaniacs, ‘chauvinists,’ and countless major and minor feminists or male-rights advocates who abuse freedom of speech on online platforms, launching fierce attacks and ridicule without regard for the consequences.”
They live in their own opinions and cannot face the real world. Their emotions are also prone to dream-walking: “perfect protagonists, perfect family and romantic love, perfect lives, perfect worlds.” Emotionally, they demand intensity and extremity; intellectually, they demand purity. When interacting with others, they are prone to “intimate tyranny”—either they open up completely, seeing the other as another self, and at the slightest displeasure, harbor resentment, or they close off completely, seeing the other as an enemy or as nothing. In getting along with others, one should practice the path of empathy and forgiveness, knowing one’s own shortcomings and recognizing others’ strengths. By understanding one’s own strengths and weaknesses, one can be forgiving towards others, and in forgiving others, one can forgive one’s own ordinariness, and thus accept and enter an ordinary life.
More likely, they live in a state of numbness and insensibility. They receive an excess of stimulation, an excess of information. In the present, excess has become true poverty. The overload of information, in particular, creates a severe cognitive burden. The granularity is higher, the data more abundant, the details more precise, but this vast amount of information makes it harder to grasp the overall picture and understand intuitively. Their body and emotions cannot keep up with the excessive and fleeting information in their minds; they feel suffocated. Intense external stimuli, a rapid and excessive flow of information, the interruption of a momentary glance, or a sudden sense of the unexpected…
How can an individual resist the (spiritual) degradation or (emotional) erosion brought about by a socio-technical organization? Before World War I, in Germany, Georg Simmel posed such a question.
“The metropolitan man develops an organ to protect himself from the dangerous currents and external environments that would uproot him. He reacts with his head instead of his heart; this reaction to the metropolis makes the organ numb and impersonal.” [23]
E-motion, gǎn-dòng (感-动), is the “movement” (dòng) of the heart brought on by “sensation” (gǎn) as the world rushes toward you. However, the world no longer touches me, and I can no longer touch the outside world. In the state of depression where all resonance has fallen silent, everything external is deathly pale, cold, and empty, and even everything inside my heart is silent and numb.
From “autonomous learning to understand the world” to “self-monitoring to master the self”: before this highly controlled self, the world retreats, and the self retreats too. They live within an algorithm, at once ambitious and fragile as a puppet, both manipulated by and manipulating the algorithm. In their world, scores and GPA are the currency:
“Scores become the sole recognition. The sense of accomplishment from doing something, from doing it well—the prevailing currency is scores and GPA.”
In the world built by GPA, everyone has their rank. They become devoid of personality, yet highly similar. They share a race with no exit, and though they are on the same path, they are distant from and disgusted with one another.
“Free will: choose what I choose, love what I love. But I do not know what I like, nor do I have any real motivation to cast aside the ladder and walk into my own wilderness.”
Without joy, without anything to cherish… We often say that to know and judge a person, one must observe what they are at ease with and what motivates them. However, if they are at ease with nothing and motivated by nothing, their self has also retreated.
The world and the self have begun a mutual retreat. Life is organic to its environment; life is situated in a specific environment that belongs to it, that it grows with:
“Life goes on in an environment; not merely in it but because of it, through interaction with it…
At every moment, the living creature is exposed to danger from its surroundings, and at every moment, it must draw something from its surroundings to satisfy its own needs. The life-experience of a living creature is destined to be an exchange with its surroundings, not in an external, but in the most intimate way.” [24]
Without this internal, organic exchange of energy, how can the self and the world, in their mutual retreat, ever meet? The world of ACGN (Anime, Comics, Games, and Novels) becomes popular. They put on masks, craft personas, and treat the world as a stage, checking in at various locations. Dressed in splendid attire, with heavy makeup, holding props, they travel through time and space. The world is but a stage, and the protagonist is an imagined persona. The distinction between virtual and real is irrelevant. The world is not even a stage; a stage is not ethereal enough. A stage and a play have scenic limitations; actors must interact with each other and with the audience below. There is a plot to be immersed in, a complete narrative to be enacted and served.
Their life can no longer bear a story with a beginning and an end. Their life is but a fleeting dream in a garden.
A student who finally found the courage to take a year-long leave of absence wrote:
“The reason a young person’s life is so full of lies is not that he is too arrogant, but precisely that he is too humble—he is always governed by what he thinks he ‘should do,’ rather than what he truly wants to do.”
“The young person looks at the pie in the sky drawn by those who have come before, at the path they point to, but forgets that he too has eyes, the ability to discover, to see.”
“The world is so big, I want to go and see it. And, I have been walking too hastily; I need to stop for a while.”
She has stopped to look carefully. I believe she can walk out of her confusion, out of “second-hand time,” and truly forge her own path and life.
Footnotes
[1] Liu Yunshan, Professor and Doctoral Supervisor, Faculty of Education, Peking University. Areas of specialization: Sociology of Education, Higher Education.
[2] The author has been deeply engaged in research on university student development for many years. The italicized content in the text comes from interviews, student-written autobiographies, as well as class discussions and coursework. The primary purpose of this article is to elaborate on a viewpoint; the student materials serve to raise questions, provide examples, or advance the argument. As they are not presented as case studies, their specific majors, years, and identities are not disclosed, and they are identified only by font and quotation marks.
[3] Comenius, John Amos. The Great Didactic. Translated by Fu Rengan. Beijing: People’s Education Press, 1984, p. 124. \ [Note: This is a translation of the Chinese citation provided. \]
[4] Dewey, John. Art as Experience. Translated by Gao Jianping. Beijing: The Commercial Press, 2010, p. 19. \ [Note: This is a translation of the Chinese citation provided. \]
[5] The concept of “second-hand time” appeared in the eponymous work of documentary literature, Время Second Hand, by Nobel laureate and Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich. The author states: “All of today’s ideas and all the words are from someone else, as if they were clothes worn by someone yesterday… Everyone is using what others have known and experienced before, which is why it’s called second-hand time.” See S. A. Alexievich, Second-Hand Time, trans. Lü Ningsi, CITIC Press, 2016, postscript. This article uses “second-hand time” to describe the growth state of current university students, who are constrained by the “past” and the “future,” as if living in “second-hand” time.
[6] Dewey, John. Democracy and Education. Translated by Wang Chengxu. Beijing: People’s Education Press, 1990, p. 51. \ [Note: This is a translation of the Chinese citation provided. \]
[7] Dewey, John. Democracy and Education. Translated by Wang Chengxu. Beijing: People’s Education Press, 1990, p. 52. \ [Note: This is a translation of the Chinese citation provided. \]
[8] Fei Xiaotong. From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society & A Chinese Village. Beijing: Peking University Press, 1998, pp. 202-203. [Note: The Chinese title is 《乡土中国·生育制度》. This is a standard translation of the title.]
[9] Fei Xiaotong. From the Soil, p. 203.
[10] Fei Xiaotong. From the Soil, pp. 203, 205.
[11] Fei Xiaotong. From the Soil, p. 206.
[12] See Lin Yueh-Hwa, The Golden Wing, Chapter XXI title and the end of the story.
[13] Pan Guangdan. The Collected Works of Pan Guangdan, Vol. 6 (M). Beijing: Peking University Press, 2000, pp. 112-124.
[14] Fei Xiaotong. From the Soil, p. 10.
[15] Dewey, John. Democracy and Education. Translated by Wang Chengxu. Beijing: People’s Education Press, 1990, p. 18. \ [Note: This is a translation of the Chinese citation provided. \]
[16] Liang Shuming. The Essential Meanings of Chinese Culture. Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 2005, p. 77.
[17] See Mencius, Gaozi I.
[18] Sato, Manabu. Curriculum and Teacher. Translated by Zhong Qiquan. Beijing: Educational Science Publishing House, 2003, pp. 309-310. \ [Note: This is a translation of the Chinese citation provided. \]
[19] Zhong Qiquan. Ten Lectures on Core Competencies. Fujian: Fujian Education Press, 2018, p. 114.
[20] Sato, Manabu. Curriculum and Teacher. Translated by Zhong Qiquan. Beijing: Educational Science Publishing House, 2003, p. 312. \ [Note: This is a translation of the Chinese citation provided. \]
[21] Abbott, Andrew. The Future of the University and the Future of Knowledge. Translated by Wang Tong et al. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2023, p. 213. [Note: This is a translation of the Chinese citation provided.]
[22] Sennett, Richard. The Culture of the New Capitalism. Translated by Li Jihong. Shanghai: Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 2010, pp. 89-91. [Note: This is a translation of the Chinese citation provided.]
[23] Simmel, Georg. The Philosophy of Fashion. Translated by Fei Yong et al. Guangzhou: Flower City Publishing House, 2017, p. 248. \ [Note: This is a translation of the Chinese citation provided. \]
[24] Dewey, John. Art as Experience. Translated by Gao Jianping. Beijing: The Commercial Press, 2010, p. 15. [Note: This is a translation of the Chinese citation provided.]
This is the English version of an article published in Chinese in Logos Review (汉语学志). Read the Chinese original (中文原文) · All English articles
