Sun Min | Breaking the Dilemma of Mobile Phones: The Dilemma of Rural Children's Spiritual Life and the Way Out

Sun Min | School of History and Culture, Hunan Normal University

In the Internet era, smartphones have become an important carrier for rural children to seek "playmates" from the outside world, satisfy emotional "resonance", and obtain value "recognition". Fundamentally speaking, behind the "rural children trapped by mobile phones" lies the objective reality that the spiritual needs of rural children cannot be met in reality, and the construction of virtual "life" through mobile phones has become an important way for most rural children to seek spiritual sustenance, vent their emotions and gain recognition. So, what kind of dilemma does the spiritual life of rural children face?

First, rural children lack a sense of security that comes from the presence of their parents. In the vast majority of rural areas in China, most families are forced to make ends meet, and it is the norm for young parents to go out to work, and their children stay in the countryside for a long time. Although the daily life is taken care of by the grandparents, the "emotional disorders", "social confusion" and "academic pressure" encountered by the children in the process of growing up cannot be relieved by the parents in time. At the same time, the stability of rural families is getting lower and lower, and the negative emotions brought by long-term quarrels and conflicts between parents or sudden divorce will envelop their lives for a long time and be buried deep in their hearts. As children get older, they are either not sure if their parents love them, they are not sure if they are really together, or they often worry about who their parents will lose if they "fall apart" one day. These rural children who have lived in an incomplete and unstable family structure for a long time lack the foundation of space-time and emotional ties in the construction of their attachment relationship with their parents, and are more likely to become children who lack a sense of family security.

Second, rural children lack a sense of belonging that comes from real social interactions. In the past 20 years, the rural population has migrated to the eastern industrial areas, accumulated in the county through marriage urbanization or education urbanization, and the hollowing out of rural communities has accelerated and expanded. The first is the defamiliarization of the relationship between adults and children in rural communities. When villagers who have been out to work all the year round return to the village, they see that the children in the village are no longer familiar, and the first question they ask after meeting them is "whose child is this?", instead of the witty scene of calling them by their nicknames in the society of acquaintances. The second is the desertification of relations between children in rural communities. With the economic differentiation of rural families, some families have already moved to the city, and some families are moving to the city, and the lack of peer groups of rural children has become a common phenomenon: "It's a holiday, and there are few peers in the village!" In rural communities linked by geography or kinship, with the migration of rural population and the migration of farmers to cities, the socialization of rural children is no longer embedded in the warm and affectionate rural society.

Third, rural children lack a sense of accomplishment that stems from academic competition. In the process of concentrating students and teachers in cities, it is difficult to ensure the quality of education in more and more rural schools. Rural schools are concentrated in the primary and junior high school stages, at the time of students' learning habits and adolescent rebellion, when more and more rural schools are unable to discipline students' behavior, unintentionally pay attention to children's psychological changes, with the increase in learning content capacity and difficulty, many rural children are difficult to adapt to more and more individualized academic competition: "Many rural children, to the 5th ~ 6th grade, can not keep up" "In junior high school, in the past, only need to focus on 3~4 grades, but when promoted to the first year of junior high school, the curriculum suddenly increased to 7~8 courses, the difficulty has also increased, and some students panicked." If these "panicked" rural children do not receive timely attention and guidance, and are in a state of "wanting to learn but not understanding", "trying to learn but not making progress", and "working hard but not improving", it will be difficult for them to gain a sense of accomplishment from classroom learning. When the subjective efforts of individual students fail again and again, the disgust and behavior of rural children from "not understanding in class and not being able to do it after class" to "not wanting to listen to it in class and not wanting to do it after class" are becoming more and more common.

At present, the living and learning state of rural children is that they cannot confide in their parents without the nagging of their parents at home, there is no joy of calling friends and companions in the village, and they cannot find the joy of learning at school but are hit again and again. In such a living and learning environment, the serious lack of sense of security, the difficulty in constructing a sense of belonging, and the lack of a sense of achievement have become the norm in the spiritual life of more and more rural children. It is in this process of mental collapse that mobile phones "invade" the world of rural children, and even become their "all". Objectively speaking, the left-behind, isolated, and school-poor children in rural areas are the products of the times of the development of contemporary peasant families, the changes of rural society, and the changes of educational competition.

In the face of the constraints of these structural variables, how to rebuild the spiritual life of rural children? We believe that the most critical force is still in the rural school, a "new type of rural school" that can truly adapt to the changes of the times and meet the educational needs of rural children.

The first is to reduce the expectation of cooperation from rural parents and actively promote companionship management. A survey in township schools in L County, Hunan Province found that relying on the two main bodies of class teachers and psychology teachers, the establishment of companionship class management in the campus can effectively meet the spiritual needs of left-behind children for attachment relationships, which is especially obvious in junior high school. The key to "companionship management" lies in the fact that the class teacher or psychological teacher can give students sufficient emotional comfort while establishing rules for students and cultivating their behavioral habits: for example, preparing some ritualistic activities on major festivals, giving different surprise evaluations to different students in the regular examination summary, discovering and giving psychological counseling to students when they are depressed, and so on. As a psychology teacher said, "Seeing is healing, listening is healing!" The humanization of the teacher-student relationship has become an important mechanism to make up for the sense of security of rural children. This kind of family-like teacher-student relationship puts forward higher requirements for the time and emotional investment of rural teachers, so it is necessary for the education administrative department and the government to introduce corresponding incentive measures.

Second, in view of the real social plight of rural children, we will focus on the construction of boarding schools. It is very necessary for rural children to establish a high-quality boarding school that conforms to the law of rural population movement in the township or central town. Our research in a number of boarding schools in Hunan Province found that for rural children, boarding in school plays an important role in at least two aspects: first, strict and regular work and rest time with institutionalized mobile phone management, can effectively reduce students' "screen time", except for a small number of mobile phone addicted students need special attention and guidance, the vast majority of children can adapt to the arrangement of not touching mobile phones at school, "in rural junior high school self-study ends at 9 o'clock in the evening, students return to the dormitory without mobile phones, at least to ensure their sleep time." Second, in boarding schools, the monthly leave system is based on the monthly leave system, with the arrangement of free activities in school for half a day or one day a week, which greatly reduces the time and space cost of rural children to carry out real social interactions. "I and my friends can chat in a random corner of the school", "ask a friend to play basketball", "sometimes organize a football game spontaneously", etc., similar social exchanges arranged by students have space and carriers, and it is of great significance to reconstruct the sense of belonging of rural children to build a social circle of peer groups at low cost.

The third is to increase non-learning activities in the school as much as possible, so as to educate people and regain self-confidence through activities. In the context of increasing competition in education, in general, most of the rural children are "learning weak" who are distinguished by the dual forces of "economic differentiation" and "educational differentiation", and the improvement of teaching quality is inseparable from rebuilding their learning self-confidence, but more importantly, teachers need to change their concepts and understand the power of "self-confidence transfer", that is, through non-learning group activities, students can discover their own strengths and advantages, and continue to accumulate non-learning ability self-confidence, which may become their "difficult to become a talent but an adult" necessary qualities. These collective activities include various club activities, interest groups, etc., as well as large-scale sports meetings, art festivals, campus evenings, etc., organized by the school, as well as cultivation and education activities with labor skills, housekeeping, behavior and etiquette as the main body. Some of these colorful non-learning activities have become a window for them to release various negative emotions, some have become opportunities for them to discover their own unique value, some have become the carrier for them to stimulate their own internal motivation, and some have become a path for them to develop good living habits. In these group activities, their emotions, bodies, and psychology can be effectively regulated, and they can regain their own value in the activities, and regain their self-confidence in life instead of "being useless under the theory of fractions".

It is undeniable that the lack of family education in rural areas is an important reason for the aggravation of the problem, but it is by no means the only and fundamental reason. Objectively speaking, this is the "disease of the times" caused by the changes of the Internet era and the modern transformation of the family. The times are changing, society is changing, and our basic education, especially the rural basic education that serves the largest group in China, farmers, needs to keep up with the pace of the times and adjust their thinking and roles in a timely manner, truly respond to the most urgent educational needs of rural families, and enrich and enrich the spiritual life of rural children by reconstructing the relationship between teachers and students, constructing collective life, and building campus culture.