This article is from the public account: Seeing Ideal (ID: ikanlixiang) , author: Xuying Jin (School of Philosophy, Fudan University Professor), from the title figure: the movie” Youth of you “

Last week, the “Beijing Girls Suicide” incident was exposed through the media and caused widespread concern.

In various discussions, in addition to feeling sorry for the victims, many people also made similar remarks: “This girl also has problems.” What about extreme treatments? “” Who told her not to break up early! “” One slap doesn’t make a sound “…

Because the information we have about this tragedy is still very one-sided, there is no way to learn more about the background of the victim’s choice, so it is not necessary to give too much speculation, nor is it necessary to use it. The way to condemn the victim.

What we should explore and pay more attention to is the problems and reflections behind this unfortunate incident.

For example, in addition to last week’s ideal (ID: ikanlixiang) , we warned of intimacy and mental control and emotional violence in intimate relationships, we It is also possible to think about such a problem on a broader level, which is also a question raised by many people after the incident: Why do many high-educated students often have problems with emotions?

Actually, this exposes a very big problem in the education system-that is, whether a person has a good judgment ability and whether he has a high education, these two things are actually not Too much relationship.

The reason why many people are fortunate to be the “Pride of the Sky” in a prestigious university is not necessarily because they have a strong ability to handle things, but often because they are the so-called “questionists””.

What is “Doing Homework”? Those who are very good at doing questions and good at getting high scores, that’s all.

There have been a lot of criticisms about test-oriented education. Here again, the meaning is the same. Many critics don’t really understand clearly that a fundamental problem of exam-oriented education needs to be understood from a philosophical level.

1. Harm to free will

From a philosophical point of view, what is the nature of man? The essence of man is an animal that can make free choices. This involves the concept of freedom, what is its essence?

Freedom is not a random movement. For example, if a grain of sand falls from the sky, can it mean that it is free? In essence, it is not free, but is determined by the laws of physics.

The essence of freedom is that the exerciser of freedom can measure and choose among the various possible results in the future, and finally choose a result that he thinks is more favorable to him, or more in line with it. The result of personal observations is called “freedom.”

So, freedom itself means that one has the ability to think about the consequences and then choose among them. Moreover, free will is by no means “whatever you want,” as some people say, but being able to realize what consequences your actions will have, and being able to restrain your desires at that moment.

So, why does our exam-oriented education actually harm the cultivation of free will?

First, what are the characteristics of exam-oriented education? The first feature is that it does not have (at least at the middle school level) giving students too much freedom to choose courses. From the perspective of curriculum setting, students usually have only a unified curriculum, and there may be a small number of high schools that have some freedom of course selection. However, under the huge “baton” of the college entrance examination, students have little choice.

Unlike the free course selection system in many other countries, in this learning atmosphere, everyone decides what kind of person they will become in the future, and there is not enough time and freedom to think fully.

Free will is also very important for intimate relationships.

At present, the marriage laws of all major countries have provisions on “freedom of marriage”, that is, the parties to a marriage enjoy the freedom to enter into a marriage relationship, which is based on the wishes of both parties, and no one may force or interfere. This reflects the domination of one’s free will, the embodiment of the intrinsic value of marriage, and the affirmation of free will.

But this sentence actually has a premise that most people in society are trained in free will, not spiritual slaves.

In other words, if you return to the past feudal society with today ’s “Marriage Law”, especially a society that is bound by very strict traditional etiquette, it is basically impossible to achieve, because the people at that time were not universal. Accepting this concept, most people do not yet know how to exercise their free will.

So there needs to be a kind of training in the society, and also some opportunities for everyone to know how to choose their “Ruyi partner”.

I have to admit in this respect that China’s exam-oriented education has played a certain degree of reaction here. Why?

First, it takes time to learn to interact with the opposite sex. In my teenage years, Cardamom is a period of youth development, and there is often a lot of interest between the sexes, but under the oppression of the “baton of the college entrance examination”, it can be said that very few middle school teachers or parents take relative love for early love Tolerant attitude, on the contrary, basically adopts a relatively suppressive attitude.

This makes the vast majority of young people in China simply not have enough time and resources to understand the opposite sex. They are relatively poor in their knowledge of the opposite sex. In our classrooms, there is often a lack of normal knowledge about gender, not only physiological knowledge, but also psychological knowledge.

This can easily lead to a situation where there is not much understanding and awareness of the position between two people. Because of the lack of understanding of scale, it is easy to produce extreme ideas.

One of the extreme characteristics is that you think that others are just a complete appendage of you, and you don’t realize that others are an independent bearer of will.

Why is this “extreme” idea easy to produce? Because we did not receive relevant training in education, it is easy to characterize him.

The other extreme is to materialize yourself-you don’t realize that you have an independent will, and you don’t realize that you have an independent choice in the position of love. If you don’t realize this, it will be very easy to be controlled by the mental manipulation performed by others, and become a “plaything” for others.

2. Vicious self-awareness

In addition, from the perspective of personality, there is still a big problem in exam-oriented education, that is, it can easily make us worship of authority.

For example, in education, students often write articles and dissertations, but thesis writing in exam-oriented education is not the same as university education.

The authors of papers in universities must put forward original ideas. They do not need to guess whether others like your ideas. What they care about is whether their ideas are logical and supported by facts.

As long as there is logic, factual support, and sufficient to advance scientific progress, you can boldly express your views and discussions.

However, the college entrance examination dissertation under exam-oriented education is not this idea. It pursues the need to figure out the intention of the questioner, learn the maggots in the stomach of the questioner, and destroy the self-will. Such a mentality can easily lead to the loss of self-subjectivity.

Personality is also prone to distortion when self-subjectivity is lost. In the long run of this method of educationUnder the immersion, if it is reflected in love, it is very likely that the “questionist” thinking in one party’s mind may be activated, and he / she will keep wondering what the other party needs him to do and how to cater This kind of demand, without realizing that you can also be the questioner.

Many people may also ask the question, why did the man become such an enthusiastic mind-controller during the suicide of a girl at Peking University? Why didn’t he become a pure “questioner” like his girlfriend?

There may be two reasons for this. On the one hand, men and women are more likely to be in a certain strength in the process of intercourse between men and women. This strength is based on some deeper biological and psychological roots. Not only that, the risk of loss faced by men during interaction is lower than that of women, so he is more likely to be unscrupulous.

On the other hand, it is related to the exam-oriented education we mentioned earlier. In other words, test-oriented education, after it has eliminated human subjectivity to a certain extent, will provoke another opposite psychological tendency, which is the “malignant publicity of subjectivity”.

Please note that the so-called malignant publicity of subjectivity does not in itself mean subjectivity. The real subjectivity is that “I” can realize that “I” is a subject of free will, and that others are also subjects of free will. I Respect myself and I also respect others. This is a kind of healthy self-awareness.

If it is a vicious self-awareness, that is, “I am the only one in the world, and you all have to submit to me”, and this kind of person does not take others’ desires, ideas, and dignity as one thing at all.

So, why is this loss of subjectivity related to exam-oriented education?

This is because the exam-oriented education process has accumulated a lot of psychological depression and resentment. Many people think that during the student period, they are tortured by various exams and examination papers, so once they are released, they must vent.

So you may notice that when the college entrance examination ends, a very common phenomenon of “tearing books” often appears. From the behavior of tearing books, it can actually be seen that this depression and resentment have accumulated deeply. degree.

Another way of venting is probably that after entering college, you need to verify the subjectivity of yourself through the pain of others, and to gain such subjectivity by suppressing and trampleting on people who are weaker than yourself.

But it must be emphasized again that this is a false subjectivity and a vicious subjectivity.

3. Learn to think more purely and rationally

Because of the limitations of exam-oriented education, for young people in the school stage, learning to recognize this “malignant subjectivity”, learning the correct knowledge of both sexes, and exercising their intellectual and judgment skills have been greatly weakened. This can be said to be a huge evil of exam-oriented education.

It must be pointed out that it is very difficult to solve this problem, because the reform of the education system is “moving the whole body”. Now we can only make up for the lack of school education through social education.

So, in social education, certain philosophical thinking ability is very important. In fact, philosophical thinking ability is actually a kind of ability to cultivate a sense of pattern. You have to standOn a larger scale, think about the different consequences of your different choices.

Philosophy is a kind of rational ability and a kind of reflective ability at the root. This also enables individuals to get rid of specific emotional constraints and conduct more rational and neutral reasoning when they are doing philosophical thinking. Relatively reasonable reasoning results.

If you use a philosophical way of thinking to try to understand that in this unfortunate incident, the girl who committed suicide already has such a high education, why did she still fall so deep, and even use an extreme method to solve it? ?

One possibility is that she is caught in the “sinking costs” of psychology.

The so-called sunk cost is when you have spent a lot of time, money, and a lot of emotions on one thing. Although it is irrelevant to do / persist in this matter intellectually, you still Will grit your teeth to do it, but instead waste more time.

Same reason, so-called sunk costs often occur in relationships. “He and I have been together for so long. The time and psychological costs, and even the cost of money, have been paid so much. If it is over now, will the previous investment be in vain?” So it is easy for some people to be here. The road gets deeper and deeper.

For young people, intuition is often unreliable, and they are likely to fall into a variety of mental confusion, the so-called “sinking cost effect.”

To solve such problems, we need to learn to think from a broader thinking framework. Can we overcome this psychological tendency and think in a more pure and cold way.

Learning to use logical reasoning and philosophical reflection is very important for us to deal with all kinds of complex situations in life.

But there is no doubt that exam-oriented education not only deprives everyone of the time to increase social experience, but also does not give young people the necessary psychological and gender education and counselling, and does not have time for them to talk about a first love or go to work, Really understand the society. At the same time, in our education system, we have not taught everyone how to correctly establish their own thinking framework and use rational and logical abilities to make judgments.

This may also be a helpless cause behind many tragedies.

This article is from public number: look ideal (ID: ikanlixiang) , author: Xuying Jin (professor of philosophy at Fudan University)