A Question
When we chatted in the office, my colleagues liked to ask one another a question: “Is school education eventually useful or futile?” What we really meant was students’ manners rather than their academic grades. It was bizarre that we teachers were skeptical about our power. Still we discussed. Some teachers said students more or less improved their behaviors after attending school. Others disagreed. They regarded school education as futility. “Teachers are not as influential as we expect any more”, one said, “Students stay how they were. They just don’t change.”
I said nothing. I liked to keep an aloof stance when the topic was controversial. But in my bones I was for the former: kids are teachable. So to me it was more like a question of how and how hard a teacher tried. Students didn’t change because teachers neither tried enough nor touched their students’ hearts. In my long teaching career, I believed I did affect some kids and changed their ways of thinking as well as behaving, which always made me proud. Students tend to stick to their old bad habits, I decided, but unchanged they won’t be.
I had, however, made my conclusion too soon. Academy education turned out to be less and less authoritative. In the meanwhile, I gradually lost my confidence. I knew it was never easy to change one’s habits, especially bad habits. But lacking of motivation to change was the most depressing part. Take cursing for example. I used to announce strongly and clearly to my students that I disliked to hear people cursing in face of me. I tried very hard to convince them that saying bad words is not only insulting to others, but also degrading to the sayers’ own status. A decent person should, therefore, develop self-discipline of no cursing. Furthermore, the effects of saying bad words increase according to ages. Fewer people feel offended or hurt when hearing a small kid curse. Whereas an adult’s dirty words can quickly ruin his good image. Since a grown man can be a parent and have a career, he has to take responsibility for his own words. Consequently, the ruin of a good image can bring him great loss. “Very soon you will be grownups,” I warned them.
My students respected my rules and feelings. They watched their manners whenever I was present. I was grateful. But that was not what I only wanted. I wanted them to care about themselves and their future like I did to them. I expected them to become great adults. Did I overestimate my students, or myself? The other day, on my way to leave school, I heard a loud curse shouted fluently ahead of me. Raising my head and looking around, I was stunned to see one familiar face continuously spitting big dirty words among a group of party-hearty students who couldn’t wait to go home. I found him one of my favorite ex-students. Despite the fact that I esteemed myself a persistent teacher, I took a shameful action at that instant: I pretended not to hear him.The hilarious students slowly disappeared into the dusk, stepped into their future, and immersed into a society where degrading trends I could never fight against prevailed, and I–I belonged to yesterday. I was a dinosaur. I was defeated.
If you ask me the same question again: “Is school education useful or futile?”, I will tell you that I know no more now. And if students’ ill behaviors stay changeless eventually, should I try as hard as before?