Over lunch I watched Ma Dugong’s “Bedtime News” #440, “Took Ten Years to Revise — Who Actually Cares About Textbooks?”, and it left me with some thoughts. I posted them in the show’s comment section and sent them as a direct message.
I was born in 2001 in a village in Henan. I did primary and middle school in the countryside, moved to the county town for high school, and I am now a third-year undergraduate at HUST, on the science track. I want to share some of my experience. My father was born in 1968 and my mother in 1966; both finished middle school but never went to high school. My father was a good student, but the family had no money and my grandparents did not care. He was also going through a rebellious phase, and figured that if he was not going to school, then so be it — though he has plenty of regrets now, and when I was in high school he would often pour his heart out to me after he had been drinking. My mother stopped for the same reason — no money — and also because her mother fell seriously ill and needed looking after. Still, my parents took my education very seriously. Their main concern was simply that I should not stay in the village or end up doing nothing but manual labour, though my father had higher hopes than that. Ultimately, he wanted me to fly out, to see the wider world, and not to be boxed in by a small village.
My father was in the habit of reading, but he never bought me any books of my own. We had a crude little bookcase holding the martial-arts novels he read and the like, and as a primary-school kid I naturally had no interest in any of it. In my second or third year of primary school, my father got hold of a computer from one of my older cousins — one he had bought when he was at vocational college. At first there was no internet, so I played the offline games on it. I found those games myself; there were probably shortcuts sitting right there on the desktop. In any case I just clicked around blindly, with nobody to guide me, and got to Plants vs. Zombies, Grand Theft Auto, and Warcraft. I could never make sense of the latter two, but Plants vs. Zombies I loved, finished, and understood thoroughly — it left a deep impression on me. Later my father found a way to get a network line hooked up — that must have been in third grade — and I started playing mini-games on 4399. Some of the older students would coach me through games back then, and I made it to Roco Kingdom. I think Roco Kingdom had a huge influence on me at that age: I explored this quasi-open world to my heart’s content for a year or two, until eventually I knew every region, and could remember every spirit’s key attributes, skills, evolution forms and nature, along with all sorts of other details. I may have been precocious in that period; my memory was very good, almost photographic. In short, Roco Kingdom and the other mini-games did train some of my abilities, and had a positive influence on my sense of aesthetics too. Besides that, coming home every day at noon during primary school, I was drawn to the cartoons on CCTV’s children’s channel; I never tired of Jackie Chan Adventures, Spider-Man, or Lolo’s Adventures. So in my primary-school years, the most important food for my mind was 4399 mini-games, Roco Kingdom, and CCTV cartoons. I read nothing at home, and I now have very little impression of my primary-school textbooks either — I only remember a few passages and illustrations from the Chinese-language reader.
From middle school I began boarding. The school was about eight or nine kilometres from home, and I went back every weekend; on weekday evenings the school gathered us together for evening self-study. The ratio of boarders to non-boarders was roughly 2:1. At home, my time was monopolised by Tencent online games like CrossFire, QQ Speed and League of Legends, though if my parents saw me playing for too long they would shoo me outside to run around. I studied League of Legends lore a lot too, and I knew every champion’s skills, but my exploration became focused mainly on technique. I would watch a lot of tutorials, though my actual skill stayed mediocre (a matter of hand speed and reflexes, I think). But I was boarding, after all: there was no computer at school to play on, and a phone was something I only got after graduating high school. So during evening self-study my only diversion was homework and reading. At school I would read my textbooks carefully — the middle-school history and geography books. I nearly wore out the geography atlas, reading it over and over, and I still keep it. There was also a small library in middle school, not many books, secured for us by the grade supervisor; you could borrow roughly two per semester. I read one book carefully that argued Bacon was Shakespeare, then went around championing the idea everywhere and arguing about it with my English teacher. I think the middle-school textbooks were actually quite good, history and geography especially. After I chose the science track in the second semester of Grade 10, I hardly studied history or geography again; whatever structure my knowledge of those subjects has was laid down by those textbooks and their companion atlases in middle school, with some credit also going to documentaries — I liked watching CCTV’s documentary channel back then. So in middle school, my intellectual diet came from textbooks, games and documentaries; extracurricular books played very little part.
After I started high school, my reading came mainly from the magazines and novels passed around among classmates — Reader, Yilin, Youth Digest, Vista, and the like. I also finished The Three-Body Problem and One Hundred Years of Solitude, and drew myself a character-relationship chart for the latter that I was rather proud of. There was some inspirational “chicken soup” writing and novels by Keigo Higashino too. All told, over three years I read no more than thirty extracurricular books, though I was a diligent reader of magazines — Yilin and Reader almost never missed an issue, all of it freeloaded; before university I had hardly ever spent money on a book apart from textbooks. In high school everyone boarded, and we went home once a fortnight for a day or two; when I got home I of course gorged on games, which was also proper relaxation.
It was only at university that I first walked into a library, and it came as a shock. I spent a very good stretch of my university years in libraries, borrowing more than 120 books a year, though I probably did not read even a third of them. I loved rummaging through the new-books display case and the carts in the self-service borrowing area, and my horizons naturally opened up enormously. My roommates and classmates also introduced me to more excellent games from abroad; the nourishment I got in that period was beyond comparison with anything before. From my first year, because I found reading the textbook very hard going, I also began hunting down reference books on my own, following the reading list the teacher handed out in the first lecture and advice I found online. So the textbook as a concept gradually faded out of my world: my way of studying now is to take the suggestions of the teacher and of the internet, and then go find several textbooks to read as references.
In high school I felt the textbook content was just right for me — I could understand every part — but I rarely wanted to read ahead, and spent a lot of my time grinding through workbooks and study guides. There were also periods when I did not want to work through the guides at all, my mind tangled up in feelings, and I never made notes or summaries. When revision started in Grade 12, my mock exams came out very low, and I felt my foundations were terrible, that I had forgotten a great deal and never really understood it properly. So in Grade 12 I revised conscientiously, kept good notes and summaries, and did plenty of problems, and in the end the results were decent. Now that I have come to university to study mathematics, I feel that the maths we learned in middle and high school was pitifully little — at my current pace it might take less than a semester to cover: nothing but continuous functions, a bit of differentiation and the definition of one integral, plus some plane and solid geometry. A semester of calculus should be more than enough. But thinking this way cannot be right from the standpoint of educational psychology; judging the past from where I stand now is obviously unfair. Still, it is a serious problem. Many of the classmates I have observed — the ones who were in the top stream with me in high school, some of my current university classmates — also feel that we should perhaps have learned more in middle and high school. There really is far too much to learn at university, and learning it well and thoroughly takes a great deal of time; I always feel time is running short, especially in a subject like mathematics. To accomplish anything you of course need solid foundations, and solid foundations mean studying ahead of the syllabus. Simply following the training programme step by step — I do not think that produces any great mathematicians. From our second year, those of us at the top of the class, those hoping to go into academia, had all started to feel “undernourished” and had to go find books on our own. By our second and third years we felt the time had been frittered away, and that there was simply too much to learn!
I have kept watching Dugong’s show. As a young man who came out of the countryside, I wholeheartedly — with both hands and both feet — support socialised child-rearing. Speaking for myself: my family already gave me the best education it could, and yet I still have many gaps in art, in reading, in information technology, and in interpersonal communication. Along the way — through primary school, middle school, high school and university — I have also seen far too many classmates and friends whose talents were buried, and who sank into the mire too early, because of their family circumstances.