Chapter 17 8.Learning "Chinese" is not learning "Chinese textbooks"

A few years ago, a girl named Li Luke attracted people's attention.She skipped a grade twice, was admitted to Tsinghua University at the age of 15, and studied for a Ph.D. in architecture at Tsinghua University at the age of 20.When people looked at her with the eyes of a genius, her father said that her daughter was not superintelligent. When reading only texts (mainly Chinese textbooks), I let the children read classic works such as "Mencius" and "Mencius". Li Luke's father insisted that his daughter have a lot of extracurricular reading, thinking that the best time of adolescence should be to read classics.He is very dissatisfied with the current school Chinese education, and believes that "chattering and wasting too much time on insignificant words will only ruin a person's life."Because his idea was in conflict with school education, he suspended his child three times so that his daughter could read freely without restraint.A lot of extracurricular reading has brought Li Luke a leap in intelligence and learning, early wisdom in life and ease of growth.

Li Luke's father's approach can be described as deviant, which is in contrast to many teachers and parents who regard Chinese textbooks as the bible for Chinese learning.It is impossible not to appreciate his courage and insight. I have read a book called "How We Learn Chinese", in which more than 70 well-known contemporary scientists, cultural scholars, and writers wrote about their early Chinese learning experiences. The 10s to the 1960s and 1970s are divided into four parts.I found an interesting phenomenon from the book - All the academic leaders before the 1950s have fond memories of their Chinese learning in those years.The content of their Chinese learning is basically the classic chapters of Chinese culture handed down for thousands of years; they almost all met one or a few well-educated Chinese teachers, and acquired perfect language and skills from the initial Chinese learning. They all affirmed that the early language learning laid a good foundation for their lifelong career and life.For example, someone asked Mr. Yang Shuzi, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, why he became an academician and what personal factors were there.He replied: "One of the important factors is human culture. The excellent traditional culture of the Chinese nation and the Chinese language have played an important, direct or indirect role."

In contrast, these people who received Chinese education in primary and secondary schools in the 1970s and 1980s were full of criticisms of the Chinese education they experienced. "Success" lies in getting some extracurricular readings by chance, and it is these extracurricular readings that make them perfect. Bi Feiyu, a well-known contemporary writer, was born in the 1960s, and he should have attended primary and secondary schools in the 1970s and 1980s.He said in the article "The Chinese Education I Received", "If I were to rate the Chinese education received by our generation, I would not give a 'zero', because it is not a 'zero', but a negative number. The reason why I say this is not to pretend to be amazing at all. After we have received Chinese education in elementary and middle schools, we have to spend a lot of energy on self-education and self-enlightenment again."

What he criticized was the Chinese education at that time.But time has changed, after so many years, our Chinese education is still the same.This dire state of affairs has yet to show signs of ending. Judging from the arrangement of textbooks, Chinese in primary schools still adopts a logical framework of first learning pinyin and new characters, and then learning vocabulary and sentences. Does pinyin really need to be put at the forefront of language learning?Do new characters really need to be learned one by one independently? Here is a seemingly reasonable logical reasoning: you must first recognize characters if you can read articles, and you must learn pinyin if you want to recognize characters—in fact, this superficially reasonable logic does not conform to children's cognitive order, and it reverses the human learning of language and characters. The nature of language learning is reversed, and it is full of anti-cognitive essence.

Language itself is a kind of tool, and pinyin is just a "tool of tools" - it is equivalent to the piece of rosin used by erhu players occasionally, which can make the bow hair more lubricated, but it does not need to be used when every child learns erhu. Just go and spend a long time learning about rosin—but this "tool of a tool" has now become the tool itself and the purpose itself, so that someone actually proposed that "Pinyin" will completely replace "Chinese characters" in Chinese characters in the future .Such an absurd idea was not only put forward openly, but also aroused discussion, it is incredible!

At the same time, we also forget that what children need to learn is images, fun, and overall perception. As soon as they go to school, they are drawn to boring and abstract letters and new words. Happy, they spend a lot of time and learn very little. Once I saw Mr. Wang Donghua from the Mother Education Research Institute of East China Jiaotong University say such a sentence, and thought it was very good.He said: What is the biggest problem in our Chinese education is to teach Chinese pictographs in the same way as Western Pinyin.In the past, more than 2,000 characters were taught in private schools a year, but now our country’s 2,000 years of excellent literacy education has been abandoned, and children can’t understand anything until the third grade.

Judging from the text selection of Chinese textbooks, there are many mediocre works. Many works are not top-grade in terms of ideological, interesting, and exquisite writing, but they have entered the textbooks. Tao Xingzhi criticized more than 70 years ago: "Chinese textbooks not only do not include the best characters, but also use fragmented characters as the center, teach a few characters in each lesson, and impart a little piece of knowledge. When we read novels such as "Water Margin", "Water Margin", "After reading the first section, we want to read the second section, or even read it from morning to night, from night to dawn, and feel happy only after reading it in one sitting. Textbooks centered on bits and pieces of text don’t have this kind of weight.” He likened such textbooks to “vegetables without vitamins” and “high-quality white rice,” which “makes people suffer from beriberi and cannot walk a single step.”

Mr. Tao also said: "Some people say that Chinese literati are bookworms. But textbooks don't even have the power to cultivate bookworms. Why do bookworms eat books? Because there are delicious things in books, which make them eat and eat. Eat. Eating textbooks is like eating wax, once you eat it, you don’t want to eat it again.” The phenomenon that Mr. Tao criticized decades ago has not improved, and it is getting worse. Sun Yu, a well-known contemporary writer, once worked as a middle school teacher for a period of time. From the Chinese education he received in the 1970s and his later experience as a teacher, he was deeply disappointed in Chinese education.But when his daughter grew up and went to school, he once looked through her daughter's textbook and was shocked. The disappointing chapters he had taught were everywhere in her daughter's textbook.

Mr. Qian Liqun, a famous scholar and professor of the Chinese Department of Peking University, commented that the compilation of our Chinese textbooks basically stays at the level of the 1960s.This really hit the nail on the head. From the perspective of teaching, the classroom teaching of primary and secondary schools in our country still uses stereotyped dogma such as new characters, explaining words, analyzing meanings, appreciating thoughts, and reciting a large number of modern texts. Which characters are new characters and which words are new words are stipulated in the teaching materials. Students must read, write and memorize these "new characters" and "explained words" over and over again, even though these words and words have already been used by most children. familiar.

The "Chinese Teaching Reference Book" issued to teachers simultaneously with the Chinese teaching materials has already stipulated how to interpret each lesson.Dr. Li Zhenxi, a well-known contemporary educator and special-grade teacher, criticized the current Chinese class as a place for ideological dictatorship. The silent protest of the students...the students' minds are firmly put on spiritual shackles, how can there be any spiritual space for creativity?" I know that some children will find a way to get a textbook reference book in order to answer the teacher's questions accurately in class, so that they can "correctly" answer many questions in Chinese class.

There are often many modern Chinese recitation requirements in Chinese textbooks.Because modern literature is a colloquial thing, it is open in terms of words, not as strict as classical literature.Most of the passages that children are required to recite are ordinary passages, which cannot reach the state of "adding one word will make more, and subtracting one word will make less".To recite an open thing rigorously, the children are afraid of making mistakes, for example, they cannot recite "hit him hard" as "hit him hard"-it's just an extra "dispensable" The word "land" will not work either.Every punctuation must be firmly memorized... The purpose of recitation is only for "correctness", not for understanding, not for remembering the classics into memory and thinking, but just for not losing points on the test paper.Means and ends are completely confused here. From the perspective of teachers' Chinese literacy, the rigid and single teaching method for many years has greatly degraded the professional quality of the language teacher group, and the subject quality implied by the role of "language teacher" is so pale. I personally heard a principal say when talking about a teacher's work arrangement: "Can't teach anything else, can't you teach Chinese!" When Yuanyuan was in elementary school, the teacher often emphasized that "learning Chinese means memorizing texts, and students who memorize texts well will get high test scores."After entering junior high school, I met an even more surprising Chinese teacher.The teacher is very "dedicated" and often leaves a lot of homework for the students, many of which are for no reason.For example, classify "spiritless" into the category of "new characters", and ask students to look up the dictionary and note the pronunciation of each word-for students who are in the first grade of junior high school, which of these four characters is a new word?For example, ask to explain what is "cough", "strength", "proud", etc. Most of these words cannot be found in the Chinese dictionary, so the students have to use more complicated words to "explain" these "new words". ", such a job can make people burst their stomachs. I remember that once Yuanyuan was very annoyed when doing this kind of homework, and said that it seemed that "eating" and "drinking water" had to be explained, so we simply played a game and gave the following annotations to "eating" together: "take a spoon Chopsticks and other special tools to send food into the mouth, grind it with teeth, and enter the stomach through the throat.” "-It is simply "knowledge is endless"!We laughed bitterly. From the perspective of reading volume.Taking the textbooks of the fourth and fifth grades of elementary schools in Beijing as an example, a textbook has about 20,000 to 30,000 words, and the normal reading volume of a fourth grader should reach 800,000 to 1 million words in one semester—it’s not that the 20,000 words in textbooks are “condensed” It can be worth 200,000 or 2 million words in general books. It is 20,000 words, no more and no less—that is to say, in terms of the amount of reading that students should achieve, the amount of reading provided by textbooks Far from enough! In recent years, the Chinese education field has begun to emphasize students' extracurricular reading, and has listed many famous works from ancient and modern times, both at home and abroad.However, most schools and teachers pay more attention to the current test scores than extracurricular reading. The Chinese learning of primary and middle school students is basically limited to Chinese textbooks.Especially in elementary schools, almost all teaching activities revolve around textbooks.The so-called "extracurricular reading" is just a ray of deaf ears. In the past two years, there was a discussion about Chinese education in primary and secondary schools in the society. Many people expressed their dissatisfaction with the current school Chinese education, and even had many fierce words.There seems to be a consensus that Chinese classes in primary and secondary schools are difficult to carry such an important task as "language learning".But after the debate, the situation remained the same, with minor adjustments and basically no change. This is a heart-wrenching fact. Thousands of years of ancient civilizations have created unparalleled language and cultural wealth in the world.Entering modern society, our technology has advanced, but we are becoming less and less able to learn our mother tongue. Our Chinese education is becoming more and more industrialized.Symbolic, technical, and standardized teaching and assessment eliminate the ever-changing charm and richness unique to the subject of Chinese.Learning mother tongue should be a relaxed and pleasant thing, but now it has been alienated and turned into a boring and distorted thing.Chinese class is becoming more and more perverted into an almost tortured activity. No wonder so many children don't like learning Chinese more and more. What should I learn to learn Chinese, and how can I learn Chinese well? The reform of Chinese teaching is a huge topic that requires in-depth research, and no individual can give an authoritative answer.But after all, we have some effective experience, which can be applied to the current study and life to achieve obvious results. From the experience of many people and various materials, it can be concluded that there are many elements in learning Chinese well, but the core and most fundamental way is reading. It is not feasible to learn Chinese without the accumulation of reading volume.Suhomlinski, an educator in the former Soviet Union, tried many methods to promote students' mental work, and finally came to a conclusion: the most effective method is to expand their reading range. People who are poor in reading must be poor in language and poor in thinking.If we want a child to learn Chinese well, but ignore his extracurricular reading, it is like giving a child who should have a cup of milk only a spoonful of milk, and letting a person who wants to learn to swim enter the tub to test the water. Many primary and secondary schools now offer "reading classes", but these classes are basically not for children to read with a book in their hands, but for teachers to teach "reading methods" and students to do "reading questions".It's like when a person needs to drink water, the person next to him will tell him a lot of knowledge about drinking water, and ask him to answer some questions about drinking water; but the glass full of clear water never refuses. Pass it to him. The country invests a lot of money in the construction of primary and secondary school libraries every year, but the library of many schools is nothing more than an old cardboard box covered with dust on the top of the attic. Teaching life is irrelevant.Children have always been in "reading poverty", and the topic of discussion in school Chinese teaching and research meetings is often "how to teach reading lessons well". If school education fails to provide children with sufficient reading conditions, extracurricular reading must be supplemented at home. Among the parents I have contacted, many of them have insufficient understanding of the relationship between reading and language learning, and some parents even obstruct their children's extracurricular reading.They are very concerned about their children's grades. They heard people say that reading extracurricular books is good for learning, so they let their children read them for a few days. But as soon as the children developed an interest in reading and began to appear obsessed with reading, the parents became worried, fearing that their studies would be delayed, and hurried to read them. Pull the child back into the textbook.These parents always think that reading extracurricular books is not learning, but learning from textbooks is learning. There is indeed such a phenomenon in elementary schools. Some children never read extracurricular books and often have high test scores, while some students who often read extracurricular books do not show an advantage in the exam. This is because the primary school Chinese test papers are generally closely related to the textbooks. Repeated training closely related to the textbooks before the exam will indeed make the children perform well on the papers.In fact, many people's achievements are just an illusion.It's not that the children cheated, but that this kind of test can't test the students' real "language level", it only tests the "level of learning textbooks". The false impression of Chinese achievement can only be maintained at the elementary school stage. Once entering middle school, especially high school, the connection between Chinese test papers and textbooks becomes weaker and weaker, and the correlation between grades and reading volume emerges. Except for some ancient poems and essays, most of the Chinese test papers for the college entrance examination have nothing to do with the teaching materials. What it examines is basically the students' real Chinese level. , I just want to explain that if you don’t pay attention to reading and stick to the textbooks to learn Chinese, then students will become more and more unable to do what they want after entering middle school. In the end, it may be difficult to get good grades in the most critical college entrance examination.And a student with a really good Chinese level can calmly deal with any form and level of examination papers, and he will not perform mediocrely in the college entrance examination. When Wei Shusheng, a famous special-grade teacher, taught Chinese in middle school, although he was under the pressure of students' entrance exams, he always led the students to finish all the textbooks in the first month of school, and read extensively in the rest of the time and related academic activities.He is also a person who despises teaching materials so much, but he can teach the "bad class" in ordinary schools to the "experimental class" whose test scores exceed those of key schools.He has grasped the core of Chinese learning, and it is a matter of course to get good grades. Most parents and teachers cannot be like Li Luke's father or Wei Shusheng, who have the courage and ability to let their children learn without learning Chinese textbooks, but at least we should not only follow the textbooks.First realize that learning Chinese is not learning Chinese textbooks, and then you can boldly introduce extracurricular reading into children's learning. ●There are many elements in learning Chinese well, but the core and fundamental way is reading. It is impossible to learn Chinese without the accumulation of reading volume. ●If school education fails to provide children with sufficient reading conditions, extracurricular reading must be supplemented at home. ●Repeated training closely following the teaching materials before the exam will indeed make the children perform well on the paper.In fact, many people's achievements are just an illusion.It's not that the children cheated, but that this kind of test can't test the students' real "language level", it only tests the "level of learning textbooks".The false impression of Chinese achievement can only be maintained in elementary school; once entering middle school, especially high school, the connection between language test papers and textbooks becomes weaker and weaker, and the correlation between achievement and reading volume emerges.

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