What does this mean – 'Mountaineers are always free



What does this mean – "Mountaineers are always free?"

Day four – Taiyuan

Scott Finn, West Virginia Public Broadcasting

 

I've just bonded with this student journalist, 16, sent to cover the West Virginia delegation’s visit to his school – Shanxi Experimental.

 

He's reedy and tall for being 16 and Chinese – I'm 6 foot and we see eye-to-eye. He has an easy smile and a pathetic attempt at a moustache (I did the same thing at his age. Is adolescent self-delusion universal, or do the Chinese girls find wispy, patchy moustaches sexy?).

 

He's gregarious and curious, good qualities for a journalist. In fact, he turns the questions I am asking him back on me – a trick I've used myself.

 

Me: What do you like about Shanxi Experimental?

Him: No, please, what do YOU like about our school?

 

Then he throws a real curveball at me. He said he'd been researching West Virginia on the web. Coal, beautiful rivers and mountains, etc. Then he asks, "What does this mean, 'Mountaineers are always free?’"

 

I try to deconstruct it. "Mountaineers, you know, people who live in the mountains," I say.

 

"Yeah, yeah," he says. He knows that part.

 

"Are always free. Free, freedom. You know that word?" I ask.

 

He looks a little puzzled.

 

"It means you can't tell us what to do. Stubborn. We are stubborn."

 

He says: "This is good? People not obeying?"

 

I think about it. Have I just translated this into, "Mountaineers are always disobedient?" (Although there's a little truth to that).

 

I think I read somewhere that for many Chinese, "obedient" has an entirely positive connotation.

 

But that idea that obedience equals perfection is being challenged at Shanxi Experimental, and at a growing number of Chinese schools. It's part of a larger movement to encourage students to think for themselves and be creative – and believe it or not, it's being encouraged at the highest levels of the Chinese government.

 

The reason: An English teacher called Mr. Wen summed it up. He said China is a great civilization with a booming economy. Why, then, hasn't China won a Nobel Prize?

 

To be honest, I haven't been able to confirm that Nobel Prize thing, but I think he makes a good point. The Chinese have proven adept at copying Western technology and business practices. But at some point, if they want to catch up with the West, they need to encourage the sort of innovation that led to the Internet.

 

To do this, they have to encourage students to think critically. It's something we stress in American schools, too. But here, they've been working against some cultural constraints and a Communist history that discouraged and punished original thought. Remember the Cultural Revolution? Only about 30 years ago, everyone was wearing the same Maoist uniforms and the main text in school was written by Chairman Mao.

 

So seeing the principal of this school talk openly about doing away with the old ways and encouraging kids to think for themselves was refreshing. And so was his emphasis on hands-on learning. When I was training to be a teacher, such "experiential learning" was the hot craze, and rightfully so. What's the best way to learn how to tie a shoe – read a description of it or take hold of your laces and have someone show you what to do?

 

Shanxi Experimental is a tall complex near the center of the city. It was more like a small college campus, with several buildings and more than 4,000 students.

 

We'd call it a magnet school in the U.S. Some of the kids were from the neighborhood, but many were the best and brightest in the city and competed to get there.

 

First Lady Gayle Manchin led our little group, and you'd think she was Laura Bush from the reception we received. Banners, flowers, etc. Here's the best metaphor. At one point, we were taken to the open-air atrium of the main school building. We were encircled on all sides by balconies going up eight floors, and hanging off those balconies looking down on us were all 4,000 students of the school. Meanwhile, students performed in front of us -- traditional dancers in yellow dresses and cowboy hats (I still haven't figured out the hats) and a student symphony orchestra. All for us!

 

All the learning I saw was hands-on. We toured five or six classrooms. Students were learning English by performing real-life plays. Some 14-year-olds made up a skit about finding that their apartment was robbed. The 16-year-olds did an impromptu skit about First Aid. They weren't just reciting their lines, either. They were answering questions being posed by their classmates and teachers, too.

 

Then, the science labs. Row after row of students were mixing foul-smelling chemicals over bunson burners, or running plastic cars down tracks with different weights to measure differences in speed. The equipment was basic, but it still reminded me of an elite prep school. Every student was engaged.

 

Oh, and let me tell you the most shocking part. Guess how long their school day is? It starts at 7:30 a.m., and ends at 6:30 p.m. Eleven hours a day. They take a break for lunch, but still. And a lot of them stay after school to participate in music, sports, and other extracurricular activities.

 

I spoke with that English teacher, Mr. Wen, about why he teaches here. He's 50 years old and has been at Shanxi Experimental since he was 33.

 

What amazed me is that he described the joys and pains of teaching like any teacher I know, including my brother and two of my sisters. He works extremely long hours for what I assume is mediocre pay.

 

On the other hand, he says he receives phone calls, letters and e-mails from students who are finding success all across China and the world (many live in the U.S. now, he says wistfully.) After seeing the material excess and go-go-go hustling of Shanghai, it is good to find someone who's so obviously not in it for the money. I recognize this tribe, good teachers, even though they live on the other side of the globe.

 

Wen says he likes teaching in this more open way, but it has a downside. Unleashing the students' creativity makes them harder to control. If you ask them to think for themselves, won't they inevitably challenge the authority of the teachers and school itself?

 

I saw a little of this when students asked the First Lady questions. One bold young girl asked her about China's One Family, One Child policy. She set up the question by talking about her own experience. She is an only child and was sometimes lonely growing up. However, she was forced to be more independent. What does the First Lady think about the policy?

 

I know you people reading this are going to think I am sucking up to the First Lady, but this is the honest-to-God truth – Gayle Manchin handled that question in the best possible way I could imagine. She talked about how she is an only child, and how she felt the same loneliness. But it also led her to read more, and that love of books has gotten her far. Meanwhile, she says her husband was one of five children, and she sees how close he is to his brothers and sisters, closer than you can be to perhaps anyone else.

 

Question answered, potential international incident averted.

 

If school is a training ground for life, I wonder what this means for the future of China. Will a new generation, raised in relative prosperity and being asked to think for themselves, eventually rise up against their elders and demand more openness, more democracy? Think of America in the 1960s, with 10 times as many people involved.

Or, will these changes come slowly, gradually. Will these students help China not only succeed in trade, but also produce the next Albert Enstein, whose portrait hangs on a huge banner in the school atrium?

 

These kids are in at the beginning of something big. They're pioneers of a new China, something that's never been done before, like being a child in America, 1776.

 

As we left, my young journalist friend asked me if I liked being a reporter. You'll never get rich, I told him. But you'll have a lot of fun. And you'll be as free as you can possibly be in this world.

 

He smiled. Maybe he was just being polite, but I swear I saw him trying out that English word, "Free."

 

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Earlier in Taiyuan…

 

We left Shanghai early and drove out to another airport for the trip to Taiyuan, the capital of China's main coal region, Shanxi.

 

The drive took almost an hour, during which we passed row after row of high rise buildings as far as the eye can see. I heard that 70 percent of the world's construction cranes are in China, and I can believe it. I lost count on the way to the airport after 50. One area looked like a port facility with two-dozen cranes to lift cargo containers from ships – but there has no harbor in sight. There was just that much construction going on.

 

I am told by Bill McHale from Kanawha Scales that I have been spared the full banquet treatment so far. The Chinese like to toast you with fire water, shouting "Gambai!" and watching as you drink it down. Call it dueling toasts.

 

It's such a hazard, he's developed strategies to cope. One, check and make sure your hosts aren't drinking water while you're drinking alcohol. Two, try to toast them back with beer – they're not used to drinking it in large quantities and it slows them down. You can say you're alcoholic or diabetic, but this has a real effect on your ability to do business. The drinking ritual is designed to break down barriers between the cultures and the sometimes-reticent Chinese.

 

When we arrived here in Taiyuan, I found a place much more comfortable and familiar to me than Shanghai. It's still big – I think around 3 million people. And if you look through the haze, you can see smallish mountains in the distance. It's drier and there aren't many trees. The people are more spread out and there's just a little more room to breathe.

 

Also, country people are just country people, wherever you go. I've seen several guys, not in the army, sporting camouflage gear on the streets. And the stylish women sport big hair and tight jeans. I could be in Cheyenne or Charleston.

 

They're treating the Manchins like royalty. First, police cars escorted our motorcade through the city. Then, the huge banner welcoming us to the hotel. I wasn't there, but I hear the reception by the provincial governor was akin to the meeting of two heads of state.

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