School principal defends lecture, saying parents noticed positive change in their children.
By Cai Yiwen
A viral video showing supposedly thousands of primary school students crying during a lecture teaching them to be grateful to their mothers has brought accusations of brainwashing on social media.
The event took place on May 10 at Shuozhou Experimental Primary School in Shanxi province, northern China, but the video was only recently circulated online. The lecturer, Ouyang Weijian, can be heard speaking eloquently and emotionally, teaching the young pupils that they should accept their mother’s nagging. During the video, which has been viewed millions of times, many of the children sitting in the schoolyard are seen wiping away tears.
Students cry during a speech about being grateful to your mother.
According to the school principal Zhao Zhijie, it was an educational event for Mother’s Day. “Nowadays, many students don’t feel grateful and can’t endure hardship,” Zhao told Sixth Tone. “That’s why we decided to hold this event to teach them to learn gratitude.”
“You should all open your hearts to your mothers and accept their nagging,” lecturer Ouyang says in the video. “Only when you accept their nagging can you prove your gratitude and love to your mothers.” In his theory, mothers suffer from lots of pain, which they cannot express in front of their husbands, their parents, or their supervisors at work. Therefore, children who enjoy years of their mothers’ love should be the ones to tolerate their mothers’ expression of pain in the form of nagging and criticism of their behavior, Ouyang argues in his three-and-a-half hour lecture. “If your mothers don’t release their pain, they will get mental illnesses. If they don’t release their pain, they can’t give us more love as a normal person,” he said.
According to Zhao, more than 3,900 students and 180 teachers attended the lecture. Parents were not invited, but Zhao said that they later expressed told him that their children had been positively affected by the speech.
In reaction to the video, many netizens said they had attended similar “gratitude education” events at school, and some had even heard the same person’s speech. “Our middle school invited him for a speech, and I listened to him another time at high school,” one user of microblog platform Weibo wrote. “I cried my eyes out every time I participated, but always felt something was wrong after the event.”
Many net users criticized the lecture as a brainwashing event intended to promote the company’s theories and sell books. But the school’s principal denied the accusations. “I can personally guarantee that there was no commercial purpose to it,” Zhao said. “Even I was in tears during the lecture.”
In a previous interview with newspaper The Beijing News, Ouyang responded to similar allegations. “If what is inside your brain is nothing but garbage, why not wash it?” he said.
Ouyang is the founder of Daoguolai Dongneng Education Group, which offers educational programs for children, teens, parents, and teachers. On its website, the company claims to help parents to form a correct understanding of family education and enhance their abilities as educators. For example, the company holds a 3-day training course in Beijing every month, which teaches parents how to better love and educate their offspring. The course costs about 4,000 yuan ($585) per person.
Such training is problematic in the eyes of some other educators. “Suffering everything does not equal gratitude,” said Xiong Bingqi, the vice president of the education policy non-profit organization 21st Century Education Research Institute, in conversation with Sixth Tone. “Asking children to bear their parents’ bad mood rather than to communicate with them equally will only cause more mental problems.”
Xiong said that Ouyang’s theory is attractive to some parents because the parent-child relationship in China is often one of alienation. The parents only care about their children’s studies and forget to teach them about responsibility and independence. As a result, Xiong argued, students do not think of their parents as the ones who care about and sacrifice for them, but as the ones who oppress them.
“Though this kind of gratitude education has been criticized for years, many schools and education departments still advocate it,” Xiong said. “They fail to offer real lessons to cultivate students’ personalities, but expect that these formalized events will do the job. Students’ tears and a touching scenes are all they need.”
Additional reporting: Yin Yijun; editor: Kevin Schoenmakers.
(Header image: Ouyang Weijian gives a speech at a primary school in Sanya, Hainan province, Nov. 28, 2010. Sun Qing/VCG)
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