Bamboo Doesn’t Fall | A second-grader already knows who to “hate”

Let’s talk about a video posted online by a mother. The content is simple: she flips through her child’s textbooks while laughing happily because her second-grade child doesn’t like foreigners, so the child has colored the eyes of all the foreign characters in the textbook illustrations red.

Such a young child, only in second grade, why would they be so disgusted by foreigners? I think the biggest possibility is the ‘intergenerational projection’ of family education. In fact, you can also feel it from this mother’s words: ‘Uncle Lei Feng’, ‘Uncle with the hat’, and ‘foreigners with yellow hair’.

In other words, the difference between children is not that big, it’s the parents who project their own cognitive anxiety onto their children. She feels that she is very successful and great in educating her child in this way, and the child has taken the initiative to ‘color the eyes of the yellow-haired people in the textbook’. But in fact, what is truly covered is their own eyes, their own ability to see the world.

Putting aside other things, first of all, this situation is completely not worth being happy about. Even this mother has to admit that she directly abstracts ‘foreigners’ into a target, which is a ‘false opposition’. In reality, whether it’s Chinese people or foreigners, they are all complex, specific, and different.

There are good and bad people among foreigners. If you directly simplify them into a unified ‘enemy’ label and abstract them, the only function is to mobilize emotions, and there is no other meaning. So even if I stand on this mother’s side, I would never adopt this method to educate the next generation. This is too absurd. This is covering the child’s eyes and forcibly stuffing what you want to feed them into their brains.

It’s like you use a cover to cover up all the colorful things, and unify them under the label of ‘bad guys’. At this time, you tell the child that there are bad guys inside, and you should ‘hate’ them. But I ask, what exactly does the child hate, or even hate?

A little thought will lead to a very clear answer. When children cannot distinguish specific objects, they can only hate a concept.

The comment section is also very interesting. I feel that everyone seems to be laughing, and everyone sees it clearly, but everyone is unwilling to talk to her more. Some even simply help out, praising her for teaching well and encouraging her to continue.

Perhaps they also feel somewhat powerless and helpless. I’ve had similar feelings in the past few days when browsing Weibo. The content in many comment sections is really shocking, and I can’t help but feel the emotion, ‘How can there still be such people’.

I can completely accept that everyone has different standpoints, but I absolutely cannot accept that things that have nothing to do with the facts are regarded as the standard.

For example, many experts and professors, especially patriotic experts, of course, their stance is correct, but at the same time, many of them often live abroad. Chen Ping, Sima Nan, and the one who bought a house in Switzerland, there are many, I can’t remember them all.

This is normal. People who don’t have the ability to access the world will easily be taught to reject the world; and those who can truly enter the world never oppose the world. For example, the above-mentioned people.

But what I cannot understand and accept is that the supporters of these people can actually find reasons to convince themselves that ‘they are buying houses abroad, in fact, they hate foreigners’. Isn’t this too amazing?

They let you teach your children to be xenophobic, but they send their own children abroad. They also euphemistically call it studying abroad and going abroad for further studies. But the truth is, they spend 5 happy years at a diploma mill, and then come back to become the family heir. I think some news is still fresh in my memory, right? Every time the protagonist comes back, they can always catch up with the ‘special activities’ held every few years, and through special channels, they enter prestigious universities at standards far lower than your children’s, and after two years, they go to hospitals, schools, or other public institutions, and easily reach the position you have dreamed of all your life.

Some situations are so absurd, but some people can still find suitable reasons to convince themselves, which I cannot understand.

To put it more simply, others let their children learn English, take the IELTS, and apply to schools, trying to enter a bigger world, while on the other hand, they are telling you ‘that’s a foreign thing’, making you take the initiative to withdraw. As a result, you actually found a reason to convince yourself, and once again believed them.

Isn’t this strange? People who are competing for admission tickets are teaching others to actively tear up their tickets, and they actually succeeded.

Just like that, a random essay, with feelings. The real distinction is not whether you love your country or not, but whether you can see the world. From this point of view, I think that the mother above, no matter how much she loves her child, is quite a failure. She didn’t realize until she recorded the video and posted it that it wasn’t the eyes of the ‘little yellow-haired people’ in the textbook that were colored red, but her child’s eyes and cognition that were colored red by her.