"Marriage is anti-human."
"I have been a housewife for a year, and I am ashamed to ask my lover every time I run out of money."
"Growing up means becoming the person you don't want to be."
Zhou Yijun, China The only war correspondent based in Gaza has witnessed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with gunfire.
stayed far away from the battlefield, and she became a critic of the times, enthusiastic about writing in international affairs. Occasionally I appeared on "Qiang Qiang Threesome" and "Round Table Group". On the show, I kept arguing with Dou Wentao and Liang Wendao from short stories to international affairs.
And last month, she officially changed career!
made a set of documentary series, she is now called, directed by Zhou Yijun. The transfer of
was quite successful. The Douban score started at 9.3, and after a week, it dropped to 9.2.
Six-episode documentary, 50 minutes in one episode, traveling to six countries, it is a big battle. The name of the
documentary series is very prose and soft, and it sounds a bit different from her usual style.
"Childhood in a Foreign Country".
but you can guess its bright red theme-
early childhood education.
Regarding "preschool education", the stories of "Mother Haidian" and "Mother Shunyi" in the popular articles have long been told, and even the popular TV series "Xiaohuanxi" is also being discussed. What else can be filmed in the documentary?
chased four episodes in one go. The first feeling of
is that the whole person relaxes first.
follows the camera. It is a Japanese child running barefoot on the sand, without any scruples.
Finnish children walked into the nursing home, copied portraits with their grandparents, and stared quietly.
There is a brand new room in the run-down countryside. The children in Kolkata take off their shoes and sit around the computer.
The clouds are light and windy, not utilitarian, but ideal.
is so leisurely, is it deliberate to put aside hostility, and ignore the anxiety of Chinese parents?
Zhou Yijun, Director Zhou, not in Beijing recently, our first director of , , made an appointment for a voice interview, and we talked for two hours. She was like directing a scene in episode one on the spot, not controversial, not radical. Flat and straightforward.
so that our topic, in the end, left children's education at all, but directly attacked the whole national concept-
walked out of the kindergarten and stood in the center of the country. During the interview with
, on the other side of the mobile phone, the noise of traffic and people in the downtown area, and even the sound of the back kitchen, has never been cut off.
so that, when organizing the interview, you must listen carefully.
is like we have been ignoring one thing, the first thing-
life is after survival.
01, Douban 9.2, I am also surprised that
"Childhood in A Foreign Country" has been online now, there are so many comments, I am really surprised.
Some teachers and educators will come to talk to me about this topic, and they will say things that I have never thought of. I also saw a person commenting on the Indian episode the day before yesterday. He said that he felt that everyone’s efforts in the story were an island, and that connecting them together was the ocean.
I had prepared it before. This may be a program that was broadcast quietly and no one watched it. now has a Douban score of 9.1. I didn't expect it at all. I am not doing education and have no theoretical basis. I am also learning through some comments.
shoot this film, we use the way of millet and rifle. The team members are all very young, the youngest is probably 95 years old, and the largest, except me, is the post-80s. From shooting to post-production, we all rely on ourselves to complete.
I did the "So Ran Studio". Basically, the team works part-time, and I only came here for filming. During the filming, every country I visited was a local camera team. At least two or three people were in Israel, but when I was in India, a team of seven was hired.
uses different teams in different places. It is important for them to maintain a unified standard. How to communicate with photographers is also a problem.
This is my first time as a documentary director, and I was really exhausted after filming. We filmed in Kolkata for three days. On the day before we left, an Indian sound engineer hired there suddenly told me that the audio track recorded on site was not synchronized with the video. The editor had no choice but to correct one by one later. During the filming of
, I also encountered police officers from India who came to blackmail me, and an appointed subject suddenly couldn't come. There were such things.
I have very little experience in making documentaries, but I will learn some from the programs I participated in. For example, I went to film "Qiang Qiang Xing Xian Xia" with Dou Wentao the year before, and Gan Chao of Youku Documentary Channel. He was doing documentaries in Shanghai very early. , I have watched his film and will communicate with him. I also contributed half of the documentary film, and Youku contributed half. It can be said that a lot of resources have been mobilized. Before shooting "A Childhood in a Foreign Country", I would also learn about some different types of films, Korean, European and American, and I would see if there is any way to learn from it. The reason why
adopts the present form of hosting is that this form can put the characteristics of the host in it. Therefore, all the questions raised in the program are based on my personal point of view and can resonate with everyone.
Actually, I really want to just do it behind the scenes. I thought about finding an executive director at the time. I looked for a round, but there was no suitable one. In addition to saving costs, I ended up doing it myself. It must be a pity that
has to host and direct as well. Many things cannot be taken into account. Sometimes I explain the camera position of the photographer, and then I go to the camera to shoot, and interview the person on the other side, I will use my peripheral vision to look at the camera, thinking in my heart, why the camera still remains the same. I'm already in a hurry, why doesn't he take this? But I can't tell.
02. Finland never takes exams. It makes people feel lonely when they are old.
We first researched and determined the subject, and we would find a point for each country. Like Finland, it has no examinations and no competition, which is a very distinctive feature.
The Nordic countries Norway, Sweden, and Finland look very similar, but they are actually quite different. Norway and Sweden are rich in resources and very wealthy.
Finland is the one with the most scarce resources. They only have forests and have suffered many invasions in history. Sweden and Russia often bully Finland, so people are the most precious to them.
The whole society will devote energy and financial resources to the cultivation of people.
Finnish education is very leading in international student testing and evaluation, so I think Finland is a typical example. The filming of
Finland touched me a lot. I saw scenes of old people drawing in the classroom. I suddenly remembered a lot of things and couldn't help crying.
I didn't know how to paint since I was a kid. Before I went to Finland, my daughter and I went to a studio in Hong Kong. There was a canvas in it, and there were many kinds of paint beside it, so I could paint casually there. My daughter is very talented in painting. That day, she didn't hesitate to paint something. She drew an ice cream on the cloth and walked through the park.
I accompany her next to me, and I paint too, but I don't know what I want to paint at all. I paint a little bit, then paint off, paint a little, then paint off. The staff in the studio came over and told me that the difference between you and your daughter is that she is not afraid of painting, but you are afraid of painting.
I thought about it all of a sudden. Look at the old woman in Finland. She just doesn't think her paintings should be compared with anyone, so she will keep this interest. Maybe her paintings may not be so good, , but she has this hobby, and she will not be alone when she is old.
Teachers including Finnish teachers will take children to the forest to smell the smell and let the children describe the smell. There is no standard answer. This is their definition of success, which is completely different from the definition of success in Chinese culture.
Our success is to surpass others, and even for many times, we don’t know what I do to surpass others. What others have, I have, or even better, is this kind of thinking.dimension.
In fact, when I made this film, the most important thing I want to say is that there is no education method in the world that is necessarily the best, and we can use it. Like Finland, their system is designed to put resources at the bottom. The more disabled you are and the worse your background, the more resources it will allocate to you.
But I am not talking about it. This is because Finland is a small country and its independence is very late. People are their most precious resource. Their way of thinking will affect their education.
03, India is in chaos, but education is not bad at all
Some people will say that the Finnish government can provide these free education thanks to their very good social welfare. What about countries without money?
So, I took pictures of India to see how Indians save themselves when public education is underdeveloped. I want to tell everyone that personal effort is very important. There are many Indians and the reality is terrible, but there are still many people working hard.
The school in the cloud that I photographed is a place where the poor can no longer be poor. But in many such places in India, the government will pay for children to go to school and provide them with free lunches just to attract parents and let their children go to school.
There are really many Indians who will send their children to school for this cheap meal.
I was very impressed. There was a little girl in the show who came over and said to me, you know, every three seconds an Indian child will die of hunger. I was particularly shocked by what she said. Children in India are exposed to these things in society very early. The school will take the children to different communities on weekends to make crafts with waste products. This is very different from China.
India took 20 days, which is the longest shooting period. On the one hand, they are inefficient. On the other hand, when we were doing homework and looking for stories, we did not expect that Indian stories were so scattered. Like Finland, its main story is in the capital Helsinki, and Japan is basically in Osaka and Fukuoka.
But in India, we were shocked when we searched. Almost every story has to be changed to a city. This is also determined by the diversity of India, which is a decentralized country. This is also the case in the
team, it is difficult for us to eat a meal. Because everyone has different religious beliefs and habits, some don’t eat pork, and some don’t eat beef, which is too difficult. So in the end, basically all of us are vegetarians, or different people order different dishes.
When we interviewed, the efficiency was also very low, but during the shooting process, I found that although they were slow, in the end all the things to be done were done. In the process, we might have to argue and compromise with them, but the shooting can continue. of.
they let them understand that sentence, standing in the middle of a swarm of bees, you will feel that each individual is flying blindly, taking a step back, and seeing them as a whole, slowly moving forward in one direction.
04. Japanese people think that online media is not a serious platform. Chinese parents think that the British aristocratic kindergarten living in a castle
is the most difficult filming in Japan and the UK. It is very difficult to obtain the consent of their kindergarten, and it took a long time to contact Japan. . It took a long time for us to figure out that it turned out that we had to find the local education committee before we could shoot. It was very interesting when
was filmed in Japan. They asked me which platform I was broadcasting on? I said that when I play on Youku, I have to explain to them that this is a multimedia platform with a lot of traffic. But for the Japanese, they will think that you are not broadcasting on TV, it is a serious show. When filming
in the UK, the theme of "aristocratic education" was determined. I used to have a colleague who told me that after you broadcast this episode, many people will definitely hate the rich. I said it’s okay.
Actually, I think there is really not much to say about public education in the UK. British public schools also sent people to Shanghai to study mathematics education. They came to investigate not because of how good mathematics education in China is, but because they want to see how we teach mathematics on a large scale and how to improve efficiency.
Then why should I educate the nobles? Because I know that many Chinese middle-class families now send their children to study in the UK. When I researched , I found that there is a gap between their expectations of British education and the reality.
I heard a story at the time, but it was a thing of the past, and I couldn't shoot it. There are a few wealthy families, all of whom are middle-class and above, sending their children to a kindergarten in the UK. They imagined that the kindergarten was in the castle and the children were all in uniforms. The British people who received them from
said that there are such kindergartens, but that kind of kindergarten, you can't come in at any time, but the child has to sign up to go to such kindergarten. The kindergartens that
the parents go to are already very good, but they still complain that the children of the noble kindergarten wear little prada, little Louis Vuitton, why the furniture in your kindergarten is IKEA. Even children will feel that the chocolate eaten at school is not the kind eaten at home, so I don’t want to eat it.
I can say that from the material aspect, compared with some domestic international schools, British aristocratic schools are not expensive. There is something wrong with
. What is real aristocratic education? What the British think it is to cultivate an elite? This is what I want to talk about in this episode.
05, Israeli entrepreneurial failures are more trustworthy. A 19-year-old boy can be an East Asian press spokesperson
I used to be a reporter in the Middle East, mainly in Palestine, and I often go to Israel. I also went to Israel for this shooting. I want to know why they have so many teenage CEOs and how this entrepreneurial culture came about.
In the past ten years, Israel has indeed achieved great development. Their military will even set up an innovation department to encourage people in the military to start businesses.
Israel’s culture is tolerant of failure.
If you fail to start a business and you fail to do a good job, you will feel very ashamed, and maybe no one will give you a chance to try again. But in Israel, if you fail to start a company and start a company at , the second time you look for investment, investors will give you more money , because they will think that failure does not mean that you are finished, but that you have experience. .
I met an Israeli media leader during this shooting. He told me that he was only 19 years old, but only because of his language background and because his family was an immigrant, he was selected for military service. The person in charge of Russia and East Asia has to deal with reporters from the world's top media.
In any country, it is unthinkable that a 19-year-old person is responsible for so many things, right? But in Israel, they have this culture of encouraging failure, and they will let you try. It doesn't matter if you make a mistake.
06. I changed. I started to let my children watch TV when I came back from Finland, and I started to buy things less when I came back from India. child. I have been on a lot of business trips recently. This past summer vacation, I did not spend time with my children. As a result, when I came back, I found that they had learned to take care of themselves. I take pictures, they will also look at it. Because they were still young, they didn't know so much theoretical knowledge and couldn't understand what the narration was saying. But some intuitive things will be fun for them.
For example, they think it's fun not to wear shoes in Finnish classrooms. Children of the same age in Japan can brush their teeth, wash their faces, and fold clothes when they wake up in the morning, so they will also learn to do it themselves. In the episode
in India, they liked the old man who made toys the most. After seeing him cut the straw, he cut and blew the pipe, so that he could blow out the notes. They followed the lesson and made it immediately. I was very surprised, I still couldn't do it well.
I myself have undergone some changes. When I just came back from Finland, I told them, if you want to eat sweets, then eat, II didn't want to give them these things before.
Our neighbor’s child, his family is absolutely forbidden to watch TV. When the child comes to my house, he will cover his eyes when he sees the TV turned on and say, "Our house is not allowed to watch TV ." I may not be so strict before, but I also control the TV time of our children. But after returning from Finland, I will discuss with them. I said, do it yourself, how long will it take?
After I came back from India, I bought a lot less. It is true that their Gandhi spirit, turning waste into treasure, doing it yourself, these touched me quite a lot. I told my children, if you want to buy a toy, first think about whether you can make one yourself.
07. China only rewards children who are sensitive to words, while those on the desk think that they have not studied well
I think I am a very typical Chinese parent, and my growth experience is also a very typical Chinese growth experience. But the way the next generation recognizes is different from ours, we must accept it.
I used to think that my child should understand all the Chinese books in the world, or he should be able to read ancient Chinese books, but I now feel that I will still look forward to it, but I will not force it.
In India, they told me that children are not the same as children. Some people are born with characters and are more sensitive to words, and some people are more sensitive to pictures. But our education system has always rewarded only those who are sensitive to words.
Those children who scribble on the desk during class are always regarded as not studying well. In fact, we ignore what they are doing, and we don't know enough about children's talents.
Don’t assume that all children are interested in words. There will still be great writers in the future. Don’t worry, but just know that every child is different.
When I was young, I grew up in an environment that was not encouraged. After a 100-point test, you will be asked, why not test two? After two 100 points, you will be told, don’t be proud, keep it next time. Then when we were young, we would often hear a sentence, look at how other people's children are doing.
But looking back, Chinese parents are willing to make a lot of sacrifices for their children. My parents have helped me with many things since I was young, and the financial conditions at home are not very good, but they will let me get in touch with the best things.
When I was a child, my father had a little hobby, he liked fishing and photography. When I was very young, I went to a photography class in the Children's Palace. They bought me a camera, so I had my own camera when I was 13 years old. At that time, it was a luxury for a working class.
Chinese parents always give a lot to their children, but they may not realize that independence is important. I don't think they can be blamed, but at that time, no one told them that there are other possibilities.
I have always felt that China’s education needs better. Including corporal punishment. When I was young, I was not good at math. Under such high pressure, I inevitably lied and signed my mother’s name. In fact, there is no way. It is not that the kid is willing to lie, but there is really no way.
I have never felt that I am a very good child. I have always been good at school, never good. But our perception of ourselves is defined by countless standardized test scores.
Therefore, in my long learning career, I never felt that I was very good. I felt that I was a little bit worse than others, and sometimes I would fall behind. I didn't recognize myself until I left school.
08, education shouldn’t just be mother’s anxiety, the whole world is the same
Recently, many reporters have come to visit me, most of them are female reporters, and fewer male reporters. Even female reporters would definitely ask me such a question, saying that education is the common anxiety of all mothers. They also said this unintentionally, so I asked why you only think it is mother's anxiety?
A British female journalist I met before. She is also a mother. Once she went to Syria on a business trip with a male colleague. At that time, the Syrian stand was just beginning and it was very dangerous. After they arrived in Syria, the TV station asked them to do a live broadcast to interact with domestic audiences, and audiences could call in and ask them questions. As a result, all the audience asked the female reporter, what would your child think if you went to such a dangerous place?
But that male reporter is also a father, no one will ask him, what would your child think? This is the case with
. When mom comes out, someone will always ask who will take care of your child, but dad will not.
I think this is a very unfair thing. I have some friends who are also fathers. So they told me, you made a movie about educating children, you made "Qiangqiang" and "Round Table Pie", we would all watch , But this movie about educating children is not necessarily watched. Because they acquiesced that it was mother's business. The definition of roles like
is still very traditional. I think we need some time to change them.
*This article was originally created by the first director, and reprinting requires permission.
*text / 孑孑
*This article was originally created by the first director, and reprinting requires permission.
*text / 孑孑
