In the 1950s and 1960s, when college students were still scarce, most of the poor children in the countryside who had studied for a few years had a vague but clear dream of going to college, expecting to “be a man in a field house and be a son of God” and one day be admitted to college and eat public food.
In the autumn of 1960, I was orphaned during the famine along the Huaihuai River, but I was lucky not to become a starving corpse, and I was admitted to the junior high school “big reform class” with excellent grades. For a time, I naively thought that college was very close to me! This also became a strong motivation for me to resist hunger and study hard in the following years!
Later, although the country’s economic difficulties, education adjustment contraction, “big change class” abolished, but can in “ten to six or seven” in the cruel elimination to junior high school graduation, I think the road to enter the university still is not far! At that time, my dream university was Wan Nan University, which later became Anhui Normal University.
The two teachers who taught us algebra and geometry in the second and third year of junior high school and were our class teachers graduated from Wan Nan University. They introduced us to the University of Wannan, which is located in Wuhu, the city of a thousand lakes, near the Yangtze River and the beautiful Ochre Mountain. And at this time my ideal major was mathematics. In addition to the influence of the two class teachers who were math teachers, I was also confident that I had won the first place in the two math competitions held at school.
In order to go to university in the future, I confidently filled in the application field for junior high school graduation with “Fuyang First High School”, which has the highest rate of entrance examinations in the region. However, “the ideal is rich, but the reality is skeletal”. A cousin who is an elementary school principal reminded my class teacher: “He goes to high school, who can pay for him? Let him apply for teacher training!” So I had no choice but to enroll in the Montgomery Normal School.
When I entered Mengcheng Teacher’s College, I thought I had no hope of going to university and could only be an elementary school teacher in the future, and I was slacking off in my studies, some students in my class encouraged me not to give up on my dream of going to university, as long as I did well in my studies, 5% of the graduates of Mengcheng Teacher’s College would be recommended for guaranteed admission to university. The fire of my dream of going to college was rekindled in my heart. If you have a dream in your heart, you will have a path under your feet.
Soon after the spring of 1966, the school announced the list of five graduates from the current two classes who were recommended to be sent to college, and my name was on the list! At that time, the ideal university in my mind was East China Normal University. Mr. Yang Jingyu, who taught our language for the last two years, graduated from the Chinese Department of East China Normal University in his early years. He had a deep knowledge of literature, and was very passionate about teaching. He especially admired Shakespeare’s plays, Heine’s poems, and Gorky’s novels, and he always chose the best pieces for us to listen to whenever he had the chance.
Mr. Yang also often introduced his alma mater to several students in his class who had excellent academic performance, saying that East China Normal University was a national key university with excellent teaching conditions and campus environment. A small river runs north and south, and two arched bridges connect the east and west campuses. I thought to myself, “Isn’t this an enlarged version of Meng Shi? Of course, at this moment, I have also chosen to study Chinese language and literature as my major in college. Just before everything was ready, just waiting to pick up the backpack to go to university, the Cultural Revolution broke out! My dream of going to university was shattered!
In 1977, when the college entrance examination was resumed, I went to the examination hall in the cold winter and took the exam with my own students, and finally in the early summer of 1978, I received a letter of acceptance from the university I had been waiting for for 12 years. In the early summer of 1978, I finally received a letter of acceptance to the university I had been waiting for 12 years.
If I look at the first half of the name of the university, “Shaanxi Normal University”, it is similar to the university I dreamed of 12 or even 15 years ago, but when I look at the second half, “Xianyang College”, I am not only disappointed but also puzzled: is this a “department” of Shaanxi Normal University? “Section”? And when I came to the school in Zhouzhi County dumb cypress town to report, the difference in my heart is indescribable! I thought, “It can’t be as beautiful as Wan Nan University on the Yangtze River and at the foot of Ochre Mountain, but at least it can’t be this far behind the smaller version of East China Normal University, which is the Meng Shi where I studied 12 years ago! Soon after I entered the school, I learned that there were at least dozens of “so-and-so teacher’s colleges and universities” in similar conditions within a month.
This begins with the peculiarity of the resumption of college entrance examinations in 1977, when the college admissions conference was held twice, and the final plan was not announced until October 21, when it was decided to “resume the unified college entrance examination system” and allow 66 and 67 high school graduates to apply for the examination. However, in the admissions process, the originally announced principle of “merit-based admissions” was distorted (limiting the percentage of older candidates). After the official admission of 230,000 freshmen in the spring of 1978, a large number of high-scoring older candidates failed to make the grade (later, when answering a reporter’s question about the 1978 admissions process, the Ministry of Education publicly admitted that the first problem with the 1977 admissions process was that “the implementation of the principle of meritocracy was not enough”).
As a remedy, in early April 1978, the Ministry of Education had to urgently notify all regions to find ways to expand the enrollment of more than 40,000 new students. In addition to the universities in the big cities, which tapped the potential to expand the number of “day students”, the provinces and cities decided to take the unconventional emergency measure of relying on the local teacher training universities to enroll students as regional special schools (it was too late to approve the establishment of new schools), mainly to train teachers for secondary schools. It was in this context that the “Xianyang Special Training Department of Shaanxi Normal University” and dozens of other special training departments across the country were born. The school building was borrowed from the old site of the Zhouzhi County Mumbai Branch of the Northwest Cotton Factory No. 1. As for the faculty, they were urgently deployed from the teachers of the secondary schools in the counties …… From the notification of the expansion, the deployment of teachers and staff, the admission of new students, the enrollment, to the opening ceremony held on May 25, it took just over a month.
This is a very peculiar college life. The school’s first four majors 10 classes of more than 500 students, almost all over 30 years of age, “the old three”, many of them were secondary school teachers before enrollment. This is a group of middle-aged people who have been in the society for more than ten years, heavy-hearted, dragging big, hardworking and pragmatic, but also love to be critical and serious, and the traditional sense of college students in the pure, vibrant, romantic untouched.
Originally, if we can strictly according to the results of the college entrance examination “merit”, the majority of our students should be admitted to undergraduate or even major universities to study, now “expanded” to such poor conditions of special training department, the heart of the injustice is very difficult to hide. However, a little later, we have a little balance: admitted to the physics department of Sichuan University, an older student from the original upper rural areas of Xianyang, because they feel that the four-year undergraduate program is too long, applied to transfer to Xianyang special training department of physics. This phenomenon of reverse transfer would only have occurred in that particular era.
I miss my classmates in Math 3, Class of ’77. When we first met on the first day of school, we all looked so different from each other, it was like a lifetime ago! The group of middle-aged people who should have entered the university campus 12 years ago, and wasted half of their lives, became university classmates only 12 years later. The class of 53 students, of which six six high school graduates 33 people (I am considered high six six), six seven high school graduates 16 people, six eight high school graduates 4 people; married 49 people, unmarried 4 people; a total of 123 children, 2.3 children per capita, the most 4; 45 men, 8 women. The vast majority of boys smoke, many people also use pipes to smoke dry cigarettes, in the evening study, dozens of pipes together to swallow the clouds, the classroom smoky, like a fantasy, a sight to behold!
Most of the students in the class came from the countryside, shouldering the whole family, farming and reading to take into account, carrying a heavy load, to graduate two years earlier, is not a blessing! I can’t help but think of a little philosophical story: the monk asked: “Do you think it is better to be a piece of gold or a pile of yellow earth?” The seeker replied, “Of course, gold is good!” The monk laughed and said, “What if you are a seed?” It is evident that “what suits you is the best!” For most of our classmates from the countryside, it seemed better to read two years of college to graduate and raise a family than to read a “long” four-year undergraduate degree! Shortly after graduation and job assignment, several students in this class died of strain and died young. It was sad to hear that!
In contrast, I was relatively lucky. At the beginning of the school year, because of the smaller family chores, I was able to complete my studies, and was encouraged by two of my classmates to develop the idea of studying for the entrance exam – this can also be seen as a continuation of the “university dream”! The first two years of the resumption of the college entrance examination, not only the old five undergraduate graduates prevailed in the examination fever, and even in the study of college students and even high school education in society, there are also some people vying for the examination. It is only necessary to self-study to a certain level, to get the “equivalent of this science” certificate, you can apply for the examination. The two students in the class are really determined to study, and I am half dreaming and half playing along.
The first time I became a father in the second semester, I was so tied up that it was hard to focus on preparing for the exam. But in order not to break faith with my classmates, I had to hold on and continue to prepare with them. The first thing you need to do is to take a look at the actual website. To be honest, my mathematical thinking ability is average, I can cope with the in-class study exams, but I feel quite difficult to go deeper into a certain direction.
Since I had set a goal, I spent almost all my time outside of class, eating and sleeping on weekdays to study. On weekends when I go home, I listen to English radio while riding my bike, and when I get on the train, I take out my professional books and read them without distractions. At home, while feeding my daughter with a bottle, I was also reading and writing on draft paper, so I could say that I was “using three things at once”. The good thing is that at that time there was no temptation other than reading the newspaper and listening to the radio, so people who wanted to study could devote themselves to their studies.
Although later, for various reasons, I was not able to register for graduate school, but the two-year study period was not a waste of time. The two students who were determined to study eventually had a master’s degree in engineering at Zhenjiang Agricultural and Mechanical College, which is also considered aspirational.
Looking back on more than two years of study in college, it seems that I have not yet finished. After graduation, I stayed in charge of teaching management, in order to listen to the lectures when not a layman, so I used the near water to read through the main textbooks of Chinese language and literature almost once. The history of Chinese and foreign literature was used to connect the classical works of Chinese and foreign literature that I had read before, and I suddenly felt enlightened. The seeds planted in my heart by my mentor, Mr. Yang Jingyu, finally sprouted!
This May is the 40th anniversary of the founding of my alma mater, Xianyang Normal College, and the enrollment of the first class of 77 students. My alma mater has fulfilled my college dream and provided me with a platform to study, work, think and write. That’s enough!
Recent Comments