【专栏】| Conlumists

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By Chen Ya, Jointing.Media, in Wuhan, 2024-10-07

Talking with friends everything under the sun, we talked about the involution of education in China.

Kids work so hard since junior high school, doing homework every day until 11 p.m. or even later, and rushing to all kinds of trainings on weekends. Everyone is under peer pressure to continue studying. Thousands of troops and horses crowd the one-wood bridge of the college entrance examination, while after graduation, undergraduates, postgraduates, and even Ph.D. students can’t find jobs.

Academic education has standardized the criteria for selecting talents and has wiped out the talents of children. Is this not a massive waste of talent? Of course, some people think that the law of the jungle is survival of the fittest. But does the law of the jungle really apply to human society? Is this not an ideological tool that some people seek to rationalize their own behavior?

In today’s rapidly changing society, what skills will children need to survive in the future, and where will they learn them? This brings us to innovation.

Unlike acquiring a skill later in life, I believe that creativity is born, but it takes the environment to make good ideas work. The environment can either inspire or stifle innovation. The essence of innovation is breakthrough, breaking out of the old way of thinking, the old rules and regulations. People can be innovative under pressure and think outside the box; the same is true when they are in a relaxed environment. Innovation is systemic.

I would argue that the mechanism and the system play a vital role in innovation. The same group of individuals, within a particular environment lacking an effective incentive mechanism and intellectual property protection, have no means to fully unleash their potential, to work for themselves and create wealth for themselves. This is not conducive to stimulating people’s maximum potential.

A favorable system will motivate people to achieve their utmost potential for creation, whereas an unfavorable system will only stifle people’s creativity.

If the architect aims at a more orderly society, he will make people compliant and turn them into tools. If the architect of the system aspires for this society to have more prospects and be more competitive in the future, he will design a system to serve creative individuals.

This is analogous to how we educate children. When we want children to be obedient, the aim is to save our own time and energy. After all, the time, patience, and energy, even the ability, required to manage an obedient child and a naughty child, are different. Nevertheless, if a parent considers that the child should be more competitive in society in the future, he or she will hope that the child is not overly obedient and can have his or her own independent thoughts. For any given viewpoint, the child can verify it for himself, has the ability for independent thinking, has the ability to question, and has the ability to solve problems independently, rather than merely being an obedient and well-behaved child.

Similarly, if what we want is a stable, manageable society that saves the cost of administering society, then system designers will tend to habituate individuals in society to obedience, and the public will favour such a design. In dealing with the public, government will play the role of manager rather than servant.

Edited by Wind、DeepL write

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