Young people in their twenties, the unluckiest generation

The girl with short hair in the third row said, "I'm 21. Why do I live like I'm 41? Every day is wrapped in a lot of pressure, papers, GRE, postgraduate entrance examination, job hunting..." With emotion, she spoke quickly, as if eager to release the knot in her chest, her thin body could not bear it.

It was a lecture class at Peking University. I was the speaker in front of the third-year students of the School of Journalism. Their performance was beyond my expectation. Most of them were born around 1987 and went through puberty in the late 1990s. The two decades of economic expansion, material prosperity, advanced information and China's growing involvement in globalization were also the two decades of ideological death.

We instinctively believed that this environment would produce a generation that was more independent, freer, and more knowledgeable about the world, and that would take Chinese society to a new stage. But that doesn't seem to be the case. The class feels like a microcosm of this generation's dilemma. In the course of my lectures, I found out how little they knew about the world, how little they knew about human history and important people whom I had been made to know when I was a student fifteen years ago.

However, in the communication link, they could not restrain their frustration. They felt the great pressure of society, did not believe in individual will and power, and felt that they had been following the requirements of others. Poetry, love, idealism, the essential elements of youth, are absent from the universality of their lives.

Contact time is short, perhaps my observation is inevitably biased. Two days later, I read a report in Southern Weekend about the "super graduates" of Yiwu Industrial and Commercial College. The school's deputy dean is an avid supporter of student entrepreneurship. The most popular way for students to start a business is to open their own shop on Taobao.com. One of the most successful of them is Yang Fugang, 24, a recent graduate who earns 40,000 yuan a month and employs six people, including one from the prestigious Wuhan University.

He is the miracle and hope of this obscure college at a time when the employment situation is grim. Today, the college is turning into a playground for Taobao entrepreneurs, with dormitories filled with cardboard boxes, endless phone calls and young people spending most of their time online -- a group of online peddlers. Vice President Jia Shaohua told reporters: "To perpetuate the old idea of cultivating elites is to misuse the children."

Peking University and Yiwu Industrial and Commercial College, the two extremes of China's higher education, are stuck in the same predicament -- the purpose and meaning of education, completely missing. Universities have lost their independence, yielding not only to academic pressure, but also to the pressure of social survival. Young people, who represent the new blood of the future of the country and society, on the one hand, lack of spiritual and intellectual guidance, lack of protection and encouragement, on the other hand, are pushed ahead into a naked social Darwinian competition, squeezed and tamed, to exchange their youthful enthusiasm and creativity for survival philosophy. They are not treated as individuals, but as mere cogs in a vast economic and social machine.

I understand that Peking University girl feeling. Even at China's most prestigious institutions, educational ideas are rarely mentioned. The university carries its reputation, but it has long since surrendered its principles and convictions. The increasingly serious industrialization of education is killing its vitality. It was supposed to be the most elite university in China, supplying the country with the most brilliant minds, the most critical ideas, the most idealistic young people. But it has turned a blind eye to this mission. Those who try hard to enter the university of young people, after the brief vanity was satisfied, found endless loss.

They yearn here to be inspired, guided, inspired by the brightest things in their lives, and to find the path they most want to follow. When none of this happens, he becomes a captive of popular opinion. He wants to be what others want him to be, he has to compete with many of his peers in the same social standards, so the competition becomes brutal, and he loses himself more and more.

I also understand Jia Shaohua's emotion and Yang Fugang's choice. Yes, such a college has neither traditional nor realistic competitiveness of faculty and students. Its only advantage lies in its back to the famous Yiwu, the global distribution center of small commodities. It is better for students to enter society early than to sit around on campus for four years or learn such rigid knowledge. But it is clear that Jia has misunderstood "elite education". Today's Chinese university education is rigid, rigid and outdated, not elite education. The solution he offered, perhaps no longer stereotypical or old, was just a new toxic antidote. He vulgarized education completely. In fact, his methods did not bring any new value to the students, who were simply turned into peddlers in advance. Their success is also fragile, as reporter Pan Xiaoling of Southern Weekly summed it up: "With the lowest operating costs, the most abundant time, and the boundless energy of youth, these super-students glued to their computers all day have a competitive edge that is hard to replicate." But Yiwu already has too many of these hardworking small traders, and perhaps many of their parents, so what is the value of this college, another wholesale market with a college name?

In some ways, the twentysomethings are perhaps the most unfortunate generation. They live in an age of excessive abundance of material and information, but lack of spirit and value. It is also an age of continuous innovation of technological means, but the purpose and meaning of the age has disappeared.