What to do with your life

One of my important classroom goals this year at Tsinghua has been to improve students' ability to communicate in Chinese.

True, I'm an English teacher. And admittedly, I don't actually know Chinese. Nonetheless, I hope I have partially accomplished my goal, at least with those students who have paid attention at least sometimes, and who have made some effort to understand what I've been trying to teach.

Tsinghua students tend to be passive receivers of information. They are inert. They do not ask questions, even if they don't understand, even if something makes no sense, even if something seems preposterous. This is bad for the students' personal and professional lives; bad for Tsinghua; and bad for China.

Your undergraduate years should be a special time in your life -- a time for personal and intellectual growth. It would be regrettable if your beliefs, attitudes, ideas and habits were the same when you complete your degree as when you began it. You should be open to CHANGE.

If you are among the majority of students who don't ask questions and don't expect the world around you to make any sense, perhaps right now would be a good moment to consider changing.

After 8 months here, I am familiar with several of the reasons why students ask no questions:

1. They think asking a teacher a question is impolite, akin to a challenge.

2. Their educational experience from middle school has trained them not to attempt to properly understand things, or even really think. As one of my top students expressed to me by email:

   This is China. We have to do a lot of exercises every day in high school and also at Tsinghua -- 100 math problems plus 100 physics problems plus 100 chemistry problems plus some English readings! All these have to be done in one day! Do you think it's easy to do? And could most students that have been trained like this be mentally awake as you hope? This is China, not Canada, not the USA.

   Most students don't use their heads, they never think why this problem should be worked out in this way, they just learn how to solve the problem by heart. Then when they see a similar problem, they know how to solve it. And then they can get a good mark in the exam.

3. Just like young people in the West, their social development has been stunted by television. Time that would otherwise have been spent communicating with peers, since their infancy, has instead been spent passively gazing at what we refer to in the West as "the idiot box."

4. They are, they tell me, "shy." They are afraid their classmates will be displeased or contemptuous if they ask questions. They lack confidence.

5. They simply don't have much of a desire to know the answers to questions, or to understand anything deeply. They're here not for education, but for the degree that will get them a good job. They are incurious. This too is partly a result of exposure to the idiot box, which tends to make people impatient and bored with anything that cannot be conveyed quickly in pictures, that requires real mental concentration, or that doesn't have frequent "cuts" and scene changes.

Skepticism is the most important thing that comes out of education, and the willingness to raise questions and the questioning of subjective dogma is central to intellectual life, and central to the contribution that intellectual life makes.

[Quoted in Lawrence Summers and His Tough Questions, by Martin Van Der Werf, The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 26, 2002.]

But who cares about an intellectual life? Maybe you just want the big house, the shiny car, the beautiful wife and the piles of cash.

A recent Canadian newspaper article reports:

The most popular film in China this year, Big Shot's Funeral, is a comic assault on China's new obsession with chasing money. China's emerging middle classes, especially the younger urban generation, have become irreverent, materialistic, and easily distracted. Critics say China has become a cultural desert, lacking any beliefs to fill the moral vacuum. Middle-aged Chinese denounce the younger generation as soulless and superficial. They complain that teenagers can recite lines from a Michael Jackson song but cannot recognize a quotation from Mao.

["China's middle class wants to be amused," by Geoffrey York, The Globe and Mail, May 25, 2002.]

What's wrong with materialism? Simply that it means you have been outwitted, outfoxed. You have allowed your life to be hijacked by others -- by tricksters using all the arts of cajolery and seduction known to man as they strive to convince you that your soul cannot be whole unless you buy what they are selling.

Just like animals, humans are driven by material needs when their insufficiency threatens survival. But once rudimentary physical needs are met, we have natural aspirations that distinguish us from the lower animals. The triumph of advertisers is to have persuaded materially comfortable people that they are still in a primitive state of dire need. Thus, millions of people have their human goals replaced with animal goals, and their lives are spent in endless servitude to the advertisers.

What are the higher goals? The essential difference between us and lower animals is our intellect. The "intellectual life" referred to by Professor Summers is what people need to avoid staleness, emptiness, tedium, aimlessness and boredom. An intellectual life is one in which reflection and ideas play a significant part.

This should not be a radical idea at China's top university. Yet, surprisingly, there are people who feel that the main purpose of a public lecture at Tsinghua should be to make people "happy" -- to please and comfort, to soothe and relax, rather than to stimulate thought or challenge preconceptions.

It's not only at Tsinghua that people think asking questions is impolite. This misguided, anti-intellectual notion is also prevalent in the West. Harvard's president finds people taking offense at his questions -- and finds it necessary to point out that "asking questions isn't necessarily being critical."

It's funny that some people admire America's democracy without realizing that democracy is completely meaningless without debate. The point of democracy is intelligent choice. But how can people choose if there is no debate about which candidate is best?

Debate is also at the heart of the intellectual life. Debate is an intellectual contest, a stimulating and pleasant mental exercise. You can win, or you can lose -- in which case you still win by learning something you didn't know before.

Again, examine yourself. Do you flee from debate? Do you shun people who express ideas different from yours? If you have achieved total wisdom, then this is a fine idea. Otherwise, the intellectual challenge and competition of debate are one of the best ways to progress intellectually.