Why "now rural children seem to have no ambition and can't fight"?

✪ Yin Huihui|School of Sociology, Wuhan University

Today, more and more educators are discovering a new problem: schools are paying more and more attention to safety management, and children's worlds seem to be more closed, so that teachers can't figure out "what children are thinking now." What has happened to the generation of teenagers who grew up in an environment of abundant materials, advanced technology and convenient Internet?

Based on what he saw in his hometown, the author of this article analyzes why the post-00s in rural areas have lost their sense of "crazy" youth compared with the post-90s. The school life of the post-90s generation is accompanied by school violence, which is not exclusive to "bad boys who have no interest", on the contrary, there are many outstanding people in a group of fraternal organizations. For students without capital, "learning" is a future, and "mixing" is also a future. In contrast, children after 00 basically have no village life experience, and their correlation with the surrounding world is very low since childhood, they fight less in gangs, and the biggest problem is playing with mobile phones. With mobile phones as the carrier, the whole society directly poured into the campus, and the adverse impact on students was more hidden. The teacher-student relationship is becoming weaker, and students lack useful spiritual guidance.

It is worth noting that the rural post-00s also went to "ambition". They have witnessed the rapid development of the country and are also experiencing a bottleneck period of development. The post-00s, who have slightly worse grades, are not willing to enter the factory to earn a fixed salary like their parents, and they know that the opportunity to become a boss is becoming less and less. The effect of the accumulation of weaknesses has also widened the gap between urban and rural education levels, which makes the rural post-00s no longer believe in slogans such as "knowledge changes destiny" and "become bigger and stronger, and create brilliance again". According to the author, the great difficulty facing rural education is that the place where education is provided has become "the neighborhood without a sense of proximity", and the object of education has become "teenagers without a sense of youth". This, in turn, becomes a major difficulty in education.

This article is transferred from "New Countryside", the original title is "No More "Crazy" Rural Teenager", which only represents the author's views for readers' reference and analysis.

No longer "crazy" rural teenagers

On the eighth day of the new year, I had dinner with a group of relatives. One of the relatives was a long-time rural middle school principal and was conscientious and responsible. When I asked what was the difference between today's junior high school students and those of ten years ago, he replied with a simple sentence: "Now rural children seem to have no ambition, and they can't fight." "I've heard similar answers when I've researched elsewhere. For teachers, compared to the post-90s, post-00s teenagers of the same age are becoming more and more "well-behaved", they no longer pull gangs, no longer fight in groups, and the biggest problem is just playing with mobile phones. At the same time, they are also losing their sense of vitality and youth, and in a popular saying, rural teenagers are no longer crazy.

▍School violence and teenagers

I am a post-90s, born in southeastern Hubei, compared with the post-80s, my junior high school campus environment has been much better, but school violence is still a mark of that era. When I went to college, I was surprised to find that classmates who grew up in other parts of the province also called campus robbery "fat beating." To briefly list two typical scenarios of fattening:

First, after evening self-study, I rode home, and I was stopped by several big children at a certain intersection, and I directly asked for money, and I would be beaten if I didn't give it.

Second, secretly go to the Internet café or game machine room, and the strange social youth pats himself on the back to signal him to go out. Internet cafes and game machine rooms generally dare not directly ask for money, because Internet café owners at least ensure internal order to expect a stable source of customers, so there is an agreement with the social mixers who often come, if they do not go out, these social youth will always guard, and will be greeted with a violent beating after going out. If he went out, he would pull to the toilet, pass a cigarette, ask to meet new friends, give him some money to pay for the Internet and snacks, and signal that he could become his little brother in the future, and he could call him if he was in trouble. If you don't give it, they will search your body, and if you really have no money, they will ask you to refund the Internet fee to him.

The former scenario is accidental, establishing local violent suppression for monetary gain. The latter is more typical, turning a violent scene into a social connection. Unlike one-off robberies by strangers in society, this "fattening" often becomes a new starting point for a gray relationship. It can be speculated that the robbed person may think that through this recognition of the big brother, get rid of the next violent oppression. Over time, gray spaces will form inside the campus. Drivers in the county town once told me that after nine o'clock in the evening, drivers were almost afraid to let a few junior high school students get on the bus together, "Usually they went to the Internet café together, and when they arrived, they slipped away and couldn't catch up with them." ”

In the central region, an ordinary post-80s and post-90s junior high school student is roughly like this, his parents went out to work, and after attending junior high school, he began to live in the township. They have fully understood the way of action of Ho Nange and the mountain chicken in the DVD player, and quickly have the shape of an adult after the second and third years of junior high school. The township implies initial freedom of movement, free from the supervision of the society of acquaintances in the village. Township means more temptation, renting a DVD player, playing billiards, surfing the Internet, playing game consoles, these temptations for junior high school teenagers are unimaginable. Townships also mean the expansion of peer groups, competition in achievements, hazy between the opposite sex, and all kinds of novel experiences begin to enter the brain.

For this group of youth, school violence is diffuse and constructive. School violence is not exclusive to bad boys, but a group of brotherhood organizations with high achievers, who are even responsible for diverting teachers to create space for other friends to fight. Fighting is severely punished by teachers and parents, but for this group of youth, school violence is the distribution of power within the gray space of the school. A small contradiction can cause both sides to constantly look for "big brother" support, primary school can find junior high school, junior high school can find social youth. When planning a group fight, in order to compete for victory, it is necessary to carefully assess the strength of the opponent, whether there are weapons, steel pipes or knives, and so on. The criterion for evaluating the strength of the "big brother" is very simple - "how many people can be called at one time". After the big brothers in the society have gathered enough younger brothers, they can collect protection fees for dormitories, Internet cafes and game machine halls, and even forcibly contract projects from the local area. In a sense, for these students who have no capital, "learning" is a future, and "mixing" is also a future.

This also means that there is a high degree of connectivity between school and society. Junior high school students and society are extremely closely connected, two dinners without eating can save six yuan, go over the wall to the Internet café from ten o'clock at night to six o'clock the next day, other people's big brother may bully themselves, they think that their big brother can protect themselves, which closely links social youth and junior high school students. At that time, the implementation of compulsory education was not strict, today's junior high school students may be tomorrow's social youth, and the number of junior high school students near me was half of the number of junior high school students at that time, which was not a special phenomenon. In this close connection, the logic of the gray space of the whole society fully permeates the junior high school.

▍ Good child generation

The post-00s who do not fight face a new space for growth.

Children after 00 have little experience of village life, and their connection to the world around them is very low since childhood. When I chatted with my younger siblings after 00, I found that they had classmates from the same village, but no playmates in the same village. When the post-90s were young, they followed their eldest children to play slingshots, secretly fight landlords, play marbles, baked sweet potatoes, and fish for lobsters, and the post-00s almost never experienced. The post-90s generation can still attract friends after the same village, and for the post-00s, these non-playmate classmates are basically strangers when they grow up. The important basis for identifying village social relations after the 90s is the parents of a certain companion, who went to their house to play when they were children. The lack of social games makes the post-00s extremely strange to the entire village, staying only among a few relatives. The "loss of the neighborhood" mentioned by Xiang Biao can describe the sense of loss that many people feel when they grow up and enter the society of strangers, but for the post-00s, they seem to have no neighborhood since childhood.

From the beginning of entering elementary school, the post-00s also encountered an extremely pure campus. After round after round of anti-gang crime operations, the campus is becoming safer and more pure. The perimeter of the campus is no longer full of dark Internet cafes and game machine halls, and for a while, there were public security stationed at the entrance of the campus. Occasional disputes and fights are inevitable, but the systematic school violence environment like the previous youth in schools no longer exists. For students, they don't have to use their brains to avoid being bullied, deal with mischievous classmates, and think about learning itself.

Safe schools also restrain teachers' behavior, and banning corporal punishment is an improvement, but it is accompanied by a decline in teachers' right to discipline. On the other hand, teachers need to take on increasingly heavy administrative tasks and more messy inspections, as well as various "going to school" activities, and the main line of teacher-student relationship in schools is diluted. After listing the tasks, my high school teacher told me a little angrily: "This also enters the campus, that also enters the campus, it has always been education leading society, and now society suppresses education." "Discipline is not the transmission of knowledge, but the revision of adolescent children's behavioral habits, world view, outlook on life and values, which is especially important for junior high school students who are undecided. In the face of junior students, teachers are even more helpless. Relatives told me: Junior students want to drop out of school if they can't study, and the state requires that they be controlled and guaranteed school, so teachers can only go to their homes and beg them to come back to study, and after they come back, they are still naughty, which has a worse impact on other students. Many teachers told me that more and more teachers choose to leave after class, and the teacher-student relationship is reduced to a simple classroom teaching relationship, and an important link is missing in the growth of junior high school students.

It is difficult to say that junior high school students have rejected sociality, but rather that they have entered a new sociality, which is reflected in the introduction of mobile phones into schools. Small mobile phones can replace game consoles, Internet cafes, MP4 and all other products, what makes teachers headache is that ten years ago, as long as you guard the low wall on campus or enter the nearby Internet café, you can catch classmates who secretly surf the Internet and severely punish, and now you can only judge that the child is hiding in the bed and playing with the mobile phone by looking at the student's bloodshot and embarrassed eyes in class the next day. From the relationship between campus and society, mobile phones are of revolutionary significance.

The phone is highly integrated and has a very low cost. After entering high school after 00, the iteration of mobile phone hardware basically reaches the bottleneck period, and the thousand-yuan machine can have 128G memory to meet all daily needs, and will basically not lag behind in the next few years. When the post-90s began to use mobile phones for college, mobile phones were rapidly updated, and the mobile phones bought this year may not be able to open the new version of WeChat the next year. Even if parents do not buy mobile phones, some businesses near junior high schools have begun to buy some second-hand mobile phones to rent to junior high school students. The last time I came home, I was surprised to find that my cousin shared a mobile phone with other classmates to play games. There is no need to climb over the wall, not afraid of being beaten fat, and it is difficult to be caught by the teacher, almost no cost.

More importantly, in the physical space, the distinction between school and society is becoming more obvious. But with mobile phones as a carrier, the whole society poured directly into the campus. After getting rid of the nearby gangsters and naughty students, the students went straight to King's Canyon, the chicken-eating battlefield, and various short videos and live broadcast rooms. Mobile phones also offer a new sense of engagement. Taking games as an example, for post-90s rural children, it is basically impossible to buy a computer at home. Even if you have a computer at home, it is impossible to install various types of single-player games and online games like Internet cafes. More importantly, Internet cafes can sit with brothers who skip school together, keyboards sound one after another, with various tactical arrangements before and after, on mobile phones, whether it is King Glory or Douyin, these popular traffic products can basically run smoothly on various models of smart phones. Mobile phones greatly reduce the cost of opening black, and online and offline linkage can be realized at any time. The junior high school teacher I interviewed before talked about his confusion, although he has more and more experience in teaching, but he really does not know what is going on in the heads of these junior high school students in these classrooms. In a sense, mobile phones allow students to stay on the run, which in turn breaks the already thin sense of neighborhood.

▍ Nameless

In 2018, "The Nameless One" was released, and a line from Hu Guangsheng, played by Zhang Yu, was once widely circulated - "Laozi whole AK, get you Laifu, become bigger and stronger, and create brilliance again." At the end of the film, he is detained by the police and falls to the ground, trying to look up at the fireworks in the sky, repeatedly chanting bitterly and confusedly: "Play Laozi", as if everything is a joke of fate.

For the post-80s and 90s, Hu Guangsheng, who has a chicken comb hairstyle, is no stranger. Among junior high school students, there are always some children with long hair, and even very "kill Matt". This group of young people is childishly expressing their uniqueness and hopeful for the future. They have witnessed the rapid development of the country, and the family from one to two floors, from black-and-white TV to Internet TV, is also eager to join this rapid change. At that time, teachers would still repeatedly tell students in class that children in the city had good conditions, so if they did not work hard, rural children could study hard, so that they could go from wearing straw shoes to leather shoes. Students who do not study seriously do not feel that their future is lower than good grades, they have heard from their parents that many rich bosses in the south who did not go to elementary school and someone in the village became a big boss because of what opportunity, and the "theory that reading is useless" was even very popular for a while. As Hu Guangsheng said, "Why do we want to go to the city, that is, we can't stay in the countryside, people go to high places, water flows to low places, to put it bluntly, to enter the city is to change the way of life, that is, to run for life!" "Almost all of my classmates are convinced that their future will change their lives. Some chanted "fuck the world" and others meditated "dreaming about lions."

The post-00s generation has witnessed the gradual transformation of our country's development model from heavy speed to heavy quality. Just like mobile phone hardware, the surrounding world of the 00s has also entered a bottleneck period. The wave of building houses in villages has passed, and every household has a mobile TV. The post-00s, who have slightly worse grades, are not willing to enter the factory like their parents to earn a fixed salary day after day, and they also know that the opportunity to become a boss is becoming less and less. The effect of the accumulation of weaknesses has made the gap between urban and rural education levels widening, and it has also been widely found in surveys in other regions that in the past ten years, the competition in rural education has become more and more fierce, children with better grades will be sent to the county by their parents to study, young teachers and high-level teachers will also try to enter the city, and the sense of loss of rural school students is getting stronger and stronger. In my county, the house price in the new city has risen from more than 2,000 to more than 5,000, and the main motivation for buying a house in the city is to send children to primary and secondary schools in the new district. Except for the students, the wide roads of the new district remained empty, and most of the neighborhood was dark at night.

Returning to the feeling of the principal at the beginning of this article, for him, the current junior high school students have become well-behaved, but it is difficult to say that they are better managed. In any sense, the disappearance of gray spaces on campus is a step forward of the times. This year I occasionally passed by one of the most chaotic townships in our county, and a younger brother who had just entered high school told me that he had never heard the word "fattening." The great difficulty facing rural education is that the places where education is provided have become nearby without a sense of proximity, and the objects of education have become teenagers without a sense of youth. If the "nameless people" no longer believe in "becoming bigger and stronger, and creating brilliance again", the real nameless people will be born. Confronting and resolving this problem tests the conscience of our nation.

After the end of the movie is the ending song of the same name, and part of the lyrics are like this:

Humble pride of my kind

The unquenchable brilliance of life in the eyes

Vows not to be the chicken ribs of our world

What a bone crush is fearful

This article is transferred from "New Countryside", the original title is "No More "Crazy" Rural Teenagers". Welcome to share personally, media reprint, please contact the copyright owner.