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Cyberspace overexposure leaves troubling mark on impressionable young minds
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IT was warm and dry on Saturday, with a strong hint of spring in the air.
On that day, I took the 12-year-old son of some friends on a leisurely walk in the sunshine along the willowy banks of the Yangjing River.
His parents were engaged, thus he was entrusted to my custody for the day.
In Chinese culture, willows typify femininity and have long been an object of poetic reflection. Zhang Chao (1659-1707), a noted man of letters, once counted them among the four things in the universe that can truly touch a man’s heart. My young companion did not share the same view though. In fact, he was bored almost to tears.
His knowledge of nature was also sadly lacking. He mistook a blooming camellia tree for peony, and wintersweet for sweet osmanthus.
But when the conversation turned to more mundane worldly topics, the depth of his knowledge chilled me. He rebuked the education system with a vehemence far beyond his years. He called some of his teachers “snobs” bent on courting the favor of rich students. When I asked how teachers learn about their students’ economic circumstances, he replied: “through visits to students’ home.”
“And what’s the good of pleasing the rich students?” I asked.
“For money, of course. If they get to make an additional ten or twenty thousand, it’s good money,” he replied.
More disturbing though was his cynical justification for this situation: “Anyway, they teach for money, just as with every other profession.”
He went on to mention the national obsession with all things foreign, citing an example of a young fraudster who falsely identified himself as a returnee with an overseas education as he conned several women out of their money.
I asked how he learned about all this. “It was all on the websites,” he said, trying to suggest he’d heard it all from “good authority.”
Later in the day, I read one of his school compositions, in which he envisioned Pudong Avenue (where he lives) following a major renovation. It would, in his mind, become a state-of-the-art boulevard lined up with expensive condos and gardened villas, each priced at hundreds of thousands of yuan per square-meter. “I will work hard, so that I could afford to buy a few units there,” he concluded.
In my time, such a composition, conceived through misguided ideology, would certainly lead to a severe reprimand. But his teacher did not make additional comments apart from the mark “read” (meaning “I have read it”).
As a matter of fact, the boy is considered a bright student and now attends an elite middle school.
Many children today have been exposed prematurely to the state of worldly affairs. Having been brought up on principles of efficiency and utilitarianism, their respect is often reserved for those who have mastered the art of accumulation. They believe that anything not useful is irrelevant and wasteful. They also quickly learn to appreciate the difference between what is preached and what is practiced.
One day last week, my son announced to me, with unusual solemnity, that “a most extraordinary event has taken place today.” I was all ears, for, being reserved, my son rarely volunteers any information about his school.
“MC has been updated, at last,” he announced. For the sake of politeness, I managed some perfunctory exclamation. MC, by the way, stands for “Minecraft,” an online game where players stack virtual bricks. For many children like my son, immersion in the online world and estrangement from nature have shaped their perception of the real world.
An intimate understanding of nature is essential to a correct understanding of the world.
However pessimistic our affairs appear, it does not elude someone with a healthy exposure to the elements that our troubles diminish in the long perspective. To an urbanite buried in his energy-sapping pursuits, the perennial process of budding and leafing affords a glimpse into eternity. Similarly, overexposure to cyberspace makes our children bitter and pessimistic.
Educators have yet to fully wake up to the challenge of inculcation of ideology against the cacophony of the Internet.
Being defenseless, our kids in their impressionable state had already been overexploited by online operators. Children see things in black and white. If you have children, you known how vigorously uplifting or debasing a message can be for a child.
Negative online input can only be neutralized by a stronger dose of moral orthodoxy from parents, teachers and everyone in between.
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