A couple of years ago, a friend decided to transfer his son to another high school because the general mood of the school the boy attended was “really terrible.” He gave a few examples. “A lot of kids smoke. Of course, they did it without letting their parents or teachers know. And the aggressiveness of boys and campus violence are not effectively under control.” What else? “Well, what made me make up my mind is that one day my son was even insulted by some nasty boys in the toilet. Unbelievable! Disgusting!”

　　“So you want to find a better school?” “Yeah.” “Good. You’ve got good reason to find a relatively ideal place for your child. But you have to understand that there is no absolutely pure paradise for children in Beijing, or in this country, or even around the world. We live in a multifarious world, which consists of both good and bad sides, and something in between. By staying, you’d adapt your son to the circumstances, which I would say is cruel. Escape may make you a little comfortable, but is not a fundamental solution.” “Your advice?” “Better stay there.”

　　He didn’t follow my suggestion and his son finally became a transfer student. Now, the father has new problems, one being young romance. He talked to me on the phone, “As you said, a dog bites in every country. There is no pure Shangri-La on earth.”

　　Playing the parental role is one of the toughest jobs in the world. Parents are always worrying about their children’s safety, physical and mental health as well as academic performance. Some are constantly skeptical—maybe the school morale is unsound, the teachers are not qualified, the classmates are guilty of indecent behavior and so on. Others can’t figure out why their children fail to become geniuses. As a result, seldom have they purred contentedly about their children’s performance and everything around them.

　　Since this spring, improving moral education for juveniles has been a hot topic in China. Now, with all the students nationwide enjoying their summer vacation, public and media are focusing on the issue of what we adults can do to keep our children far from violence, drugs, gambling, pornography and other evils. Actually, this is also an international discourse, a difficult situation that has world educators and psychologists racking their brains for a solution. So far no effective approach has been found.

　　Why haven’t we found an effective remedy? To answer that question, we must get rid of a long-standing mistaken idea. That is to blame the spread of evil on hi-tech. A dozen years ago, many educators and parents thought that television was teaching violence and other dirty things. Some Western studies have established correlations between prolonged childhood exposure to television and a proclivity for physical aggressiveness that extends from preadolescence into adulthood. Now, people add the Internet to that blacklist.

　　In later life, according to some studies, serious violence is most likely to erupt at moments of severe stress. At such moments, adolescents and adults are most likely revert to their earliest, most visceral sense of the role of violence in society and in personal behavior. Much of this sense will have come from television and the Internet.

　　So the solutions to the problem include manufacturing television sets and computers with locking devices, by which parents can control children’s access to a set or to particular channels or websites. Obviously, it is people who invent hi-tech tools and then find ways to curb their use. That fact implies that it is the human being that should be responsible for the spread of unhealthy, undesirable material. Machines have no thoughts and common sense, and should not become our scapegoats.

　　Children may ask: Why do adults need entertainment programs saturated with violence, pornography and other dirty contents? Is that because they are more immune or more naïve or more unsophisticated? A teenager told me that adults are hypocritical and irresponsible. “Adults are using double standards. They are happy to watch the bad stuff while they ban it for kids. It’s unfair.” He is to some extent right. It is the adults who pollute and mess up this world; it is the adults who bring those dirty things into human society. To educate the young, adults should first of all examine and educate themselves. Instead of cleaning up unhealthy TV programs at prime time, we should ban them. Rather than bragging of their ability to differentiate, adults should teach children how to obtain such ability by facing the wickedness together.

　　TV, the Internet and other media tools just reflect the true world in which we live. Diversity and impurity, basic elements of the universe, are the causes and results of everything in this planet. We should let the youngsters understand the real world, the natural and social spheres that exist and develop not in accordance with human will. We have to dance with the “demon”—ugliness.

　　Many children believe that the world they are about to face is just like the fairyland their parents tell them about at the dinner table or before they go to bed—full of peace, justice, kindness and brightness. It’s nothing wrong for parents and teachers to instill in the adolescents something good. But that’s not enough. As children grow, they have the right to know about society as a whole, including the tales of conspiracies and shadiness, stories of midnight attacks, of stealthy murder, of sudden death in dark caverns, of pitiless enemies, and of cruel torture.

　　Trying to keep children from those ugly things is understandable, but may not be conducive to their insight and immunity. Many classic literary works contain violence, but they’re forever nutritious. There is no need to soften down a story for the young. They like it rough. It’s unnecessary to worry about the apparent terror and bloodshed in real children’s books and plays. Both children and adults should not try to escape from the stern environment that makes up real life.n

　　E-mail: Hblii@263.net

　　By LII HAIBO