Behind Jiang Ping's ability being questioned, should rural children not be able to go to a good university? Should girls be bad at science?

Said the retrospective

2024-06-18 20:35Published in Hubei

Recently, the story of the "genius girl" Jiang Ping has sparked heated discussions on the whole network. It has even driven Jiangsu Lianshui Technical College, Lianshui Cultural Tourism and Huai'an Cultural Tourism to become the focus of social attention. But perhaps, like the fate of any public figure, Jiang Ping has also ushered in a lot of doubts in recent days. Some people turned out the results of the suspected Jiang Ping's test scores, and questioned why Jiang Ping's previous results were not outstanding, but she suddenly achieved amazing results in this competition; Some people questioned that in some promotional photos, Jiang Ping's board book seemed to be wrong; Some people also say that the competition is open-book, and the results are the result of Jiang Ping's cheating.

Of course, there are also many people who stand up for Jiang Ping, "I am not as good as others, and I still pour dirty water on people", "I can't see others well", etc., every sentence is full of resentment, they are afraid that a little girl who works hard and earns life capital will be blocked by gossip, so they want to try their best to sweep away the shadow accumulated on her head.

But let's take a look at it, those who question Jiang Ping's ability, are they really just picking on Jiang Ping's mistakes in the board book? Or, instead of questioning Jiang Ping's ability, it is better to say that what they are questioning is that the three symbols of "rural, technical secondary school, and girls" are stacked together, and will really burst out with so much energy, which is enough to defeat the "top students" of Qingbei and MIT and the "smartest brains" they represent?

Rural children, should their academic performance be bad?

After Jiang Ping became popular, some bloggers went to Jiang Ping's hometown to find out what the growth environment of this 17-year-old "genius girl" was like.

Jiang's family has two rows of small gatehouses and raises a few chickens. The bricks and tiles of the earthen house, and even because of the age, the outer skin of the earthen house has obvious cracks. In the video, Jiang Ping's father looks older, his skin is tanned, and he smiles very restrained in front of the camera, and he looks like a typical honest farmer.

Jiang Ping's hometown

is such a family, the mathematics student who won the twelfth place in the global mathematics competition, and it is precisely because of such a family that Jiang Ping has also attracted criticism - born in the countryside, and the family has no resources and capital, why can Jiang Ping learn mathematics so well?

The subtext of this questioning is: rural children, grades should not be so good.

Some will throw out a series of figures as an example: in 2021, Peking University admitted a total of 442 students with rural household registration, accounting for only 15.1% of mainland students. And they may also add that many of them rely on special college programs for rural children, and if they rely purely on naked scores, there may be fewer rural children who can enter Peking University.

Objectively speaking, it is a fact that in terms of academic performance, rural children are generally inferior to urban children. However, this is not because children in rural areas are born stupider than children in cities, but because of the disparity in educational resources.

For a child's growth, the biggest impact on him is family education and school education. Looking at the family first, the families that can establish themselves in the city are generally middle-class, with stable and decent jobs and high cultural capital. Parents in rural areas generally have low cultural capital and educational qualifications, and the family's material accumulation is also relatively fragile, and their jobs are unstable, so they generally either farm at home, or work as craftsmen, engage in carpenter decoration, etc., or go to the city to work and leave their children at home.

Therefore, for urban parents, they know how to raise children scientifically, and they also have enough economic and social capital to purchase extracurricular services for their children, including remedial classes and interest classes. They are well-versed in education policies and competition systems, know what to do for their children at what point in time, and they can ensure that their every step is precisely on the child's key nodes.

On the other hand, parents in rural areas need to be busy with the family's livelihood all day long, and they are reluctant to eat or wear. It's not that they don't attach importance to family education, but the reality does not allow them to stay at home for a long time, and in order for the family to have material accumulation, they can only give up family education and are forced to go out to work. Make-up classes are a lot of money for them, and it is impossible to enroll their children in interest classes, and they can only say one sentence in the face of their children's education: "You have to study hard, so that you can go out of the countryside and live a good life."

For children, the resources and capital that the family can invest from an early age are very important for the cultivation of children's own thinking ability and habits. For children in rural areas, homeschooling is almost a blank slate.

The school, as the main place for the transmission of knowledge and the main position of education, also plays a key role in the growth and success of children. In urban schools, the educational resources are much better than those of rural children. As far as teacher resources are concerned, it is now said that the level of education of teachers has been rolled up to a master's degree or even a doctorate, and this situation will only appear in cities. In rural areas, more teachers can only rely on the state's targeted normal students, and most of the targeted normal students will choose to leave the township school and enter the city or county school to teach once the teaching period expires.

For many rural schools, their playgrounds are still the most rudimentary dirt roads, and they become muddy when it rains. The library is vacant because there is not a sufficient number of book resources. Laboratories and computers are even more out of reach, and in our local township middle school, only three people can share a computer in the information technology class, and high-quality teaching resources are extremely scarce in township schools.

Students can walk around the playground with their robot dogs in the afternoon, remotely control drones on playgrounds paved with plastic tracks and turf, and use binoculars to observe celestial bodies and constellations when the stars fill the night sky...... For rural children, perhaps everything can only appear in dreams.

In the case of backward family education and school education, rural children can only fight brute force, that is, through crazy use of time and crazy brushing of questions, in exchange for the possibility of breaking through. Jiang Ping has achieved such dazzling results, I think, in addition to having a certain talent, the most important thing is that she has been working hard and has been studying mathematics desperately.

Therefore, "rural children must not have good grades", this kind of remarks are an obliteration of the hard work of rural students, a kind of discrimination against rural students, and an unfair view, which ignores the difficulties faced by rural children in family and school education.

Can academic qualifications really represent a person's full strength?

There is a very interesting place, many people who doubt Jiang Ping's ability and find Jiang Ping's mistakes in the board book are students from or graduated from famous schools such as Qingbei.

It is not so much that they are questioning Jiang Ping's ability, but rather that this is a kind of contempt for high education over low education.

Technical secondary school, in the minds of many people, is the destination of children who are screened out by educational competition, and students there are very weak at least in terms of learning ability and thinking ability. Jiang Ping's exit from the circle undoubtedly gave a resounding slap in the face to this concept, and also made many people reflect, are secondary school students really bad? Are we stigmatizing secondary schools too much?

And Qingbei, naturally, is the other extreme, representing absolute success in academic qualifications. The students there must be the brightest, the most capable, and the most thoughtful. When Qingbei Sheng loses to secondary school students, they will feel that this is impossible, after all, there is so much disparity in academic qualifications, and it is impossible for secondary school students to be so powerful, she must have used extraordinary means, and the person who provoked the thorn appeared.

Therefore, the questioners actually only want to maintain the decency of the so-called highly educated and pseudo-elite. However, in today's society, can academic qualifications really represent a person's full ability?

Of course, for many highly educated students, perhaps they are indeed more talented than ordinary people, and there are always people who say that going to Qingbei is not something that can be done by studying hard, but by hard work and talent. The author is not a Qing Beisheng, so I can't verify the authenticity of this statement. However, for students who have an advantage in academic qualifications, academic qualifications can only prove the quality of the person's academic performance, and it cannot even explain the level of learning ability.

The author studied at Wuhan University with a bachelor's degree and a master's degree, and I dare not say how high the education is, but at least it is okay, I know too well that today's so-called scholars are actually nothing more than too much knowledge, answer templates and skills in their heads. The so-called highly educated students, they also take the points earned by soaking in the sea of questions all day long, fighting time battles, and "ignoring things outside the window", if they are only talented and do not study hard, they can only be reduced to "hurt Zhongyong" in the end, and the kind of students who can play and learn are really too few and too few.

Therefore, many highly educated students are often "top-heavy", and their minds seem to be full of knowledge and ink, but their feet are suspended in life and the ground, and they lack life perception. Let me give you the simplest example, how many of those highly educated and high-IQ students have been to the vegetable market to buy vegetables, and how many of them can cook?

Similarly, the secondary school degree is indeed not so conspicuous, but if all secondary school students are beaten to death just because of one academic degree, it is very unfair. A person's ability cannot be "nailed" by an academic degree. Let me give you another example, Jiang Ping studied fashion design, and according to her teacher, Jiang Ping's professional ability is also very powerful. Jiang Ping herself said that fashion design is her own Plan A, and mathematics is only Plan B, even if she does not show such a high ability in mathematics, will anyone be able to guarantee that Jiang Ping will not go far on the road of fashion design?

So, don't measure everything by your academic qualifications. Don't use the set of criteria of the capitalists to select labor to bind every living person living in society. Academic qualifications may be able to become a "stepping stone", but it will never become a "gold medal for avoiding death".

My undergraduate thesis was to investigate the problem students who formed gangs in school, and after the research, I was actually very impressed. Although these students are deviants in school, they are also at a disadvantage in learning, and they may not have much breakthrough in academic qualifications in the future, but they have one thing that I envy, that is, they live in a concrete life, they have a strong perception of life, they dare to love and hate, and they are more like students who are alive and vigorous.

If those "winners" with the halo of famous schools continue to talk about secondary schools and try to negate Jiang Ping's efforts and achievements, then I have to quote a netizen's comment: "The pseudo-elite enjoys resources and tramples on the bottom."

Girls, must they not be able to learn mathematics, physics and chemistry?

Of course, the questioning of Jiang Ping also extends to the discussion of gender.

"Generally, girls are not good at math, Jiang Ping's soul should be a boy."

I don't know when it began, it became an inconsistency that boys were good at science and girls were good at liberal arts. It's as if reality is supporting this idea. There are more boys in the science class and more girls in the liberal arts class.

Boys do well in the exam, "boys are more active in thinking", and girls do well in the exam, "this girl must study very hard", as if the thinking ability of girls is weaker than that of boys. Someone found a reason for this concept: "Boys are more active and flexible than girls, so they are more suitable for science." Girls have delicate minds, so they are more suitable for liberal arts. ”

The prevalence of this idea of assigning gender to subjects has also led to the fact that boys who choose liberal arts may suffer from some strange eyes. Because the author is a liberal arts boy, I have a deep experience.

But why does the notion that "boys are good at science and girls good at liberal arts" exist? Girls, is it really hard to learn mathematics, physics and chemistry?

A paper published in Nature compared the differences in mathematical cognition of more than 500 children from multiple perspectives. The results showed that there was no significant difference in mathematical cognitive ability between men and women. Therefore, the so-called "boys are better at science than girls" is not supported by science.

Therefore, "boys are good at science, girls are good at liberal arts" is just a stereotype of many adults, a projection on children. In layman's terms, some boys choose science, not because they are good at it or because they like it, but because they are influenced by the idea that liberal arts are the choice of girls.

Those who graft the child's nature onto the discipline and give the subject a gender temperament, hurting and restricting can only be the children who have infinite possibilities.

Moreover, whoever said that girls should be delicate, gentle, introverted, and quiet, they can only make achievements in the field of liberal arts. These so-called women's gender temperament is created by society and traditional gender stereotypes in the process of women's growth.

As the philosopher Beauvoir pointed out, a person is not born a "woman", but gradually grows into a "woman".

"Every factor in women's upbringing, conspiring to limit them and make them mediocre, is not because they are inherently inferior, but because they slowly learn to become passive, self-doubting, and overzealous in pleasing others."

If children are not allowed to explore the possibilities of life freely because of their gender, they will suffer from it, regardless of gender.

Therefore, stop instilling in your child the concept that "girls can't learn mathematics, physics and chemistry", respect the child's interests and wishes, respect each completely different individual, and respect his and her talents, talents and efforts.

I hope that the voices questioning Jiang Ping can be fewer and less, which is not only to respect her efforts, but also to respect ourselves.

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