I suddenly want to ask our school’s dear leadership team: does drawing such a sharp line between our 10th grade Honors Program and the regular classes really do anyone any good?
Since we all got into No.1 High School, we’re all standout students from the same age group. When it comes to the Honors Program, you might say it exists for choosing the best of the best—and of course, there’s nothing wrong with that. But here’s the current problem: the leadership seems to treat “the 10th grade” and “the 10th grade Honors Program” as two parallel categories, rather than as one containing the other, or even overlapping. Sure, the Honors Program also has four 9th grade classes under it, but our 10th grade classes should naturally belong to “the 10th grade”—not be filed under some independent category of their own.
That kind of framing is bound to harbor hidden dangers. For one thing, students in the regular classes may come to believe that we in the Honors Program enjoy certain “privileges”—which in reality we don’t have at all, even if that’s precisely the impression people get of how this school operates—and some of them may end up nursing a sense of unfounded resentment. For another, for Honors students who’d rather not make a fuss over themselveslike me, it can very easily turn into psychological pressure: “Do I really deserve an honor like this?” No need to doubt it—that’s exactly what’s on my mind. Schooling, after all, is supposed to weigh fairness, yet no matter how you look at it, this kind of division is neither fair nor good for solidarity among classmates. So why does it exist at all?
Of course, I myself am quite prone to suspicion, and I do ask for your forgiveness…
By the school’s reasoning, I’m clearly one of the “beneficiaries” of this very system—and yet it’s me, of all people, questioning it… I wonder whether I’ll end up being branded as someone “who doesn’t know when he’s well off.”
Come to think of it, across all the high schools in China, which one is truly “well off”?
Still, even if we set that aside, this “mini society” of a school is plainly full of backstage maneuvering—during military training, for instance, at every competition or performance, big or small, it was always Class One of the 10th grade Honors Program that came out most “glorious.” Whether that was rigged in advance is beyond what I can manage.
Who knows why I suddenly, out of nowhere, wrote an article like this today.
Can this even be counted as criticism? I don’t know.