Linking Project 4 to my Box of Uncertainties (and applying what I learned in Unit 2), I aimed my focus on result-based education which is common in middle and high schools in China.
The two pages shown below are my initial notes on the definition and background of result-based education. I am aware that I lack secondary research in this area, so these pages consists of mostly assumptions(that is slowly morphing into understanding) of why this phenomenon exists in the majority of schools in China.
QUESTION: How can individuality within creative students be preserved in a result-based education environment(using fictional storytelling)?
Project 4 is a major self-directed research project, which involves investigating and identifying a meaningful area of inquiry which has not yet been explored. My project centers on mythology, religion, belief and result-based education in China.
My assumption is that students in result-based education are taught to form a belief of being perfect and taught a linear way of defining good and bad, much like the definition between heaven and hell in many mythological tales. After researching the Third Wave Experiment in 1967, I realized several things: 1. Fiction has functional uses in education, and 2. people lose their minds in a crowd and forget to think individually, and therefore it is easier to teach a crowd a biased definition of good and bad than to teach an individual.
I admit that I am biased towards this phenomenon because result-based education really built the way I think as a student and I found myself almost incapable of having a meter of my own about things I see and I am anxious that my work wouldn’t be “perfect” by academic terms.(Because we are taught to rank our success based on other people’s failures). I used to read ancient mythology(Norse, Greek, Roman, Egyptian) and fictional tales as a way to escape and form a safe haven for my individual idiosyncrasies when I was taught to believe that those things are not a part of true academic learning in middle school.
After all that being said, result-based education is actually the best possible solution that we as a country has come up with after a pretty rocky part of history, because we are aiming to transform from an agricultural country to an industrial country(or a developing country to developed country) in the shortest possible time, and in order to achieve that, China as a whole will need an abundant number of workers who believes wholeheartedly in a collective sense of honor and a fixed definition of success and failure(which is defined by the leaders, who changes those definitions according to the direction that we as a country are going after.
If I look at this phenomenon from a macroscopic view, I would think that this is a clever and efficient tactic. (I have compared this to the novel 1984 but personally I think it was too negative of a comparison, this particular phenomenon has achieved really positive outcomes, if it hasn’t, it wouldn’t have survived this long). I emphasize that this phenomenon is invisible to most young individuals in school who are going through their primary and secondary years of education. I maintain that we show this to them in some way that they would understand what they would be going through before actually going through it, for that might change their entire perspective to what they are learning. This has already been done by multiple artists and content creators in China where they post their work on platform(Bilibili, Red and Weibo,etc) which attacks that linear mode of thinking by projecting the macroscopic view in a magnified dystopian way, and it overjoys me that they are receiving answers from the audience online saying that they hear them and agree with them. People, especially youngsters(or the younger generation, are waking up).
There’s something emotionally uncomfortable in the process of this project. I think I’m trying to understand this phenomenon in Project 4 so I could use it as a basis and go a step further when I do my individual project, and focus more on telling fictional stories, mythology, religion, and belief, because I don’t plan on being caught by this narrative for too long (because if I do, I’ll simply be telling the same story over and over again). I understand that I can’t change this macroscopic phenomenon itself, but I could change the way people observe it, and therefore bring a change to the mindset of people inside this phenomenon, especially youngsters. (This is where fiction and belief comes in.)
The center of my Box of Uncertainties has always been fiction, mythology and belief, why people chose to create and believe in the definition of God. I think of it as a filter or a lens. People look through this filter/lens to see the world they want to see, and some have the ability to tinker on the lens of others, so their perspective of the world is changed, either for better or for worse.
I aim, in this project, and in my work as a whole, to be a tinkerer. I want to learn the craft of tinkering different lenses to either expose the more objective truth or to let people see a potentially better world.
(And definitely communicate with other tinkerers because defining a specific world as “potentially better” as an individual could be dangerous).