Building This Website Made Me Realise: I Almost Abandoned a Path I Have Walked for Eight Years

My original intention in building this website was to create an Archive for myself, so that I could trace back my footprints of studying education. This trail is more an intellectual one. More importantly, I wanted to start taking writing seriously. I know that in the age of AI and video, words seem increasingly cheap, yet I stubbornly believe that good writing is the most sincere and most complete form of expression. Just as Vygotsky cherished the relationship between language and children's cognitive development, I too often reflect on a trajectory: how language, as a tool of thought, influences our actions and ultimately turns our ideas into reality. Just like right now, it is hard for me to say that I began writing this article by bypassing language and acting directly. So I will always stand in awe of the human faculty to use language, and I believe this act should carry a dignity that human beings are born with.

Why did I choose to study education? The question has nagged at me more and more as I've come to realize that other people were studying majors with better job prospects and higher barriers to entry. I can't help feeling powerless about a decision I made at eighteen. Education always seems to be undervalued in modern society: almost everywhere, people in the field earn wages that hover close to the minimum. Good education does exist, but in most cases it is a scarce resource that only the privileged can access. I even wonder whether choosing this major was a kind of short-sightedness, an information gap caused by the lack of cultural capital. It reminds me of something I read long ago in Tokyo Poverty Women: “The more a woman has grown up in a poor family or suffered misfortune, the more she tends to give up the option of legitimately accumulating wealth for herself, and instead, hoping to be useful to others, to choose low-paying welfare-type occupations."

But that was the most sincere decision I could make at that time. I had seen people discussing, from the perspectives of psychology and neuroscience, what kind of childhood is worth pursuing and how childhood profoundly shapes a person's whole life. I believed that the reason I had always been enduring a kind of mental struggle in the mire of life was that I had not had a healthy environment to grow up in; I had not had a “right” childhood. Now there was a discipline that could answer my most intense inner curiosity, so of course I threw myself headlong into facing it. Besides, in high school we had to study many different subjects, and whether you liked them or not, you had to study them well to rank higher in the final GaoKao and earn the chance to attend a good university. Although I was very good at history back then, I didn't know what studying history could lead to. I think my making this choice suggests that, at heart, I am an optimistic person. I did not give up my longing for a beautiful life because of my lonely and incomplete childhood; I still yearned to see a kind of beauty I had never felt.

That was the beginning of the story. To be honest, my undergraduate studies greatly enriched my horizons. We studied child psychology, children's literature, the history of educational thought (which touches on the history of philosophy), the development of children across various cognitive domains, and even the arts, with practical skills such as drawing, playing the piano and choreographing dance. This made me feel that this is exactly what becoming an educator should be like: becoming a generalist, like Piaget and Vygotsky, who had deep academic foundations in different fields and were therefore able, from the perspectives of different disciplines, to influence educational practice in a subtle, gradual way. Teaching is not merely the transmission of knowledge in a particular subject. A teacher is a person with the faculty for independent thought and a distinct character, who uses that character to influence and inspire students, like the philosopher Socrates, someone who inspires students through dialogue rather than telling them “this is what it is” or “here is how we should get this type of question right to pass the exam”. A teacher should have a systematic understanding of what kind of person they hope to nurture, with their own judgement and aesthetic sense, rather than merely being stubbornly opinionated about trivial details.

I am grateful to have received training in such a diverse curriculum during my undergraduate years. In the process, however, I discovered that everything I was learning came from western academic research, which had been translated and introduced into China in large quantities, especially highly practical books on pedagogy, such as how to systematically cultivate children’s key mathematical competencies. So I became curious about what early childhood education looks like within the western education system. I initially planned to do my master’s in Finland, because I admired the Finnish education system. But later I found that UCL is the top-ranked university for education research, and studying abroad is no small sum of money for me. So if I was going to spend that money, I would go to the best university in this field, and if my application was rejected, I would give up the idea of studying abroad. In the end I only applied one programme, and I was fortunate enough to receive this opportunity.

Coming to London began a year of academic training at UCL. For the first three months, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I simply attended lectures and seminars according to the timetable. The teachers provided some reading materials hoping to spark our discussion, but we never entered any genuine discussion. Combined with my stilted English, this made me feel that I was merely coasting through. The turning point came when we began the academic writing required for course assessment: facing a nebulous topic, I had to write a 5,000-word essay in English, without any trace of using other people’s intellectual work. It was indeed a huge challenge, and I could only try to find ways to make sure I got through it, and through the series of similar challenges that followed.

All I knew was that the teachers emphasised “critical thinking” and academic ethics, but I was still unsure what kind of writing counted as critical, or what writing in the form of an essay really was. I vaguely knew that the purpose of such writing might be to argue for one’s own viewpoint, but where the viewpoint comes from and how to argue for it were still somewhat unfamiliar to a Chinese student without a western educational background. Then one day, an article on the reading list of one of my module completely awakened me, and I finally understood how to conduct academic writing. I printed that article out and read it word by word, and I eagerly wrote my understanding in the margins, wanting to use my handwriting to confirm the arrival of that moment of insight.

First, it told me what stance to take when engaging in academic writing. It pressed me with a question: when you do academic writing, do you clearly know what the purpose of this piece is? Bit by bit, I tried to understand what it meant: your fundamental purpose is to persuade, but you cannot present your ideas subjectively as you would in literary writing, and you lack artistic techniques to help an audience understand and accept them. So now you can only imagine that you have walked into a debating arena. You have many opponents, who have already had a great deal of discussion on this issue. Once you walk in, you must first spend time figuring out which viewpoints already exist, what other viewpoints are worth adding, and which existing viewpoints can indirectly support the one you are adding. In this way, you both acknowledge certain existing viewpoints and add a new one, and you consolidate that new viewpoint. Thus, together with others, you enrich humanity's exploration of this question, and so you have made a kind of intellectual contribution. Academia, as a practice, exists to explore the boundaries of our understanding of different questions, and therefore you are qualified to be a thinking academic worker. You are awarded a degree to ensure your qualification to continue this practice. Of course, you can also choose to apply this ability outside academia and use the skill more flexibly. In any case, this skill is scarce in this world; otherwise human civilisation would only stagnate, and we could only repeat existing ways of life, although such an outcome might well be a blessing.

Until today, I still keep that article in a folder, along with the notes I wrote in the main library while reading the literature and my understanding of those readings, because they are so precious and meaningful to me. This experience made me understand that the purpose of education is not to have people absorb as much existing knowledge as possible; education is meant to cultivate people who are capable of forming their own understanding of issues and solving them.

It is embarrassing to admit that, in my work after graduation, I almost forgot, and almost gave up, this precious understanding. Only now have I begun to consciously train myself to use this ability. Otherwise, how could I convince myself that I am an educator? If I don’t expect this of myself, what outcome of education should I expect the children to see in me?

Although in the three years since graduating I have never stopped reading, and have never forgotten to enrich my touch on, and imagination of, different fields of knowledge, I have still lacked a systematic means of organising my reading practice. More importantly, as the quantity and variety of my reading increased, without the habit of organising these thoughts we always lose many hard-earned inspirations and insights. They lie scattered here and there like fragments, and when we look back we cannot see the path we have walked, a path that belongs only to us, a narrative we chose for ourselves. A diary is one form, but not the best one. In this intricate world, to diligently cultivate one’s own intellecture field, to train one’s intellectual integrity, to let one’s character stand upright and one's soul have place to nestle: is this not a beautiful practice of life?

Eight years of youth have slipped away just like that. At 27, standing at this end and looking at you at 19, I want to say to you: thank you for accompanying me through these years, so that I have not only a body and a mind, but also a heart. For the sake of this heart, I will live beautifully.