In a quiz on Chinese reading, a first grader answered “No, I won’t” to the question “Would you give up your pear out of courtesy to your brothers if you were Kong Rong?” He got a huge “X” for his answer from his teacher.
The reading section of the exam is a passage, written in both Chinese characters and pinyin, about a classic moral story, commonly known as “Kong Rong giving up pears” (孔融让梨), that has been taught in elementary schools since the Song Dynasty in the same way the tale of George Washington felling a cherry tree lingers in the U.S. classes. According to the story, Kong Rong, later a politician in late Han Dynasty, picked the smallest of all pears and let his brothers choose the rest that were bigger, despite being only 4-year-old and the youngest in the family at the time.
A reporter from Dongfang Daily contacted the child’s father. The child is in Grade 1 at an elementary school in the city of Shanghai. When the father saw the exam paper, he questioned his son about the answer, but the son insisted that he was not being playful. “ I asked him, ‘Why did you write that you won’t give up your pear?’ He answered, ‘I don’t think Kong Rong, a 4-year-old, would have actually done that.’ I asked him why not. He answered, ‘Because he was only 4 years old,’” the father recalled. He said that his son was pretty confident in the answer and refused to correct it, at least not until he got an explanation from the teacher.
“Actually, my son is not selfish. He understands the significance of sharing. He passes food to me, his mother and his grandma at the table every day.”
THE POINT
Should educators enforced values onto students, and if honest expression of unorthodox opinion should be encouraged.
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發表於 2012-6-27 08:26 AM
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