Employment prospects
As a result, any schools or specialties capable of promoting "good" (read: high paying) employment is highly sought after and oversubscribed. In a system where everything is decided and judged by scores, an ideal student is a robot-like, self-centered thing endowed with the right kind of practical knowledge and skills but lacking empathy and conscience.
There's no lack of examples supporting professor Zhang's observations. The latest incident took place on May 18 in Wuhan, Hubei Province, where a college student riding a bike ran into a woman in her eighties. Appalled by the medical expenses and liability threatened by the victim's family, the student took a doctor hostage. The crisis was defused, but we can reflect on the incident in two ways.
First, the benefit of more than 10 years of education failed to equip the young man with principles and resources to deal properly with a traffic accident. Second, be wary of entering into any quarrels involving the elderly, for their family can use them as hostages to extort high ransom.
In deploring this new education philosophy based on employment, Zhang observed that typically a student no longer cares about the meaning of life, and they study like hell in hopes of attaining affluence and influence. In doing so, they have, in Zhang's words, "squandered the valuable time of youth."
Zhang explained in his lecture to middle school students that the philosophy informing the prevailing trend in global education is dictated by capitalist logic.
Capitalism, under the excuse of improving livelihood, has narrowed human values down to those that can add to capitalist growth and services, to the negation of everything else.
China’s weekly story
(2013.5.11-5.17)
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