Where is your confidence?

After reading Monica’s article” Where is your confidence from” I have been thinking about why, general speaking, relatively, Chinese tend to lack confidence, even when doing something that they know is their strength, even sometimes they know they are better than others. Early this morning when I opened my eyes, the answer seemed to be coming clear in my mind.

China has experienced a feudal period of more than 2000 years, in a feudal society traditional culture which emphasizes humility and modest takes charge of every aspect of the society. For women, ignorance is virtue. For a child, who acts humble is always a pearl in the eyes of his parents and teachers. It’s 2000 years, not 200, within such a long time the dropping of water can wear a stone, such a wrong thing when have been repeated millions of times, it’s the truth, or a rule, that anyone who acts against is a bighead, and would be despised or isolated. Everyone takes the truth for granted, and no one dares to break the rule. It goes on and on, even today, we don’t always feel free to say “I can”.

Then who is the second to blame? Our education, exam-oriented education! The only days as I remember when I was often praised was in my kindergarten. As I grow up, the compliments I receive are getting less and less. And the truth is I am not the only one suffering from this circumstance. Big boys don’t need praise anymore? It’s ridiculous! Why are you always picking on me? In exam-oriented education, teachers only praise those nerds who burry themselves in books, only praise you when you got a No1 in a test (we know No 1 is only one). You will never get too many marks, you are never satisfied!!

On the other hand, they don’t care if we have learned something real. Take learning English for example, they don’t care whether you say it right, write it right, all you should do is master grammars and recite paragraphs and glossary, and then get a high mark in exams. That’s enough!! So that most of us can’t “speak”, and what we have learned for years turned out to be mute English. “sorry, my English is poor”, ”sorry, I don’t understand very well…” why? Not that we are slow, not that we are lazy in learning English, but that we are not educated properly.

Today the government says they are sparing no effort in making-education. But as I see it, if they have really done something, the trend of making-education only can be seen in colleges or universities. There we are given lots of time at our mercy, granted freedom that we couldn’t imagine before. But, everything seems to be too late. Just like a tiger that has been living in a zoo for ages, one day he is told “you are free, please go back to the forest and make your own life”.

To see it from the perspective of population. Rumor has it that “rules” don’t apply to china, a country with a huge population of 1.3 billions (in fact, much more than that). I think it’s true. Sometimes we can’t work out the problem by analyzing in a simple way, a rational, logical way. In such a big but crowded country, that happens thousands of candidates compete for a post in civil service examination. It’s obvious that people are being divided into two parts in such fierce competitions, increasingly confident winners and increasingly self-contempt losers (and they are the majority).

    Now you see where is your confidence? If you see it somewhere else, tell me then.