Compared with ten years ago, local households in Shanghai are putting their spendings more in the education fee for home members than in their clothes updating and purchases, Laodong Daily reported Tuesday.
In 1992 on average, each person of a household spends 276.85 yuan (US$22) a month on buying clothes and caring for own body and hair.
Today in 2002, the amount of money used for self-decoration more than doubles 276 yuan, rising to about 577 yuan.
If each persons' monthly earning is more than 2,000 yuan currently, then people will surely wonder, where does the 1,500 yuan left go? Totally for food and other expenditure on electricity, water and gas? Surely not.
About 1360 yuan a month is used as educational spendings for each home member on average in the year 2002. The number ten times that ten years ago. In 1992, spending on education for one person was only 113.74 yuan.
The data reveals the dramatic change in local households' criteria on individual's social values.
In the past, it was vogue in Shanghai that who dons well and behaves gentle will be regarded as having a good image in the public.
But now, nearly all people have made it a habit to behave oneself well and there's fewer problems in adequate clothing harrassing local people. Therefore, people start to care more about their words and inner value. The inner value includes how many things they know, how much experience they have and how versatile they are under different circumstances. Noticing these things, today's households, no matter made up of young couples, or elderly couple with children, all changes their spending styles. A local night language school offered English classes at the price of 20,000 yuan a year. But there are still many young people going there.
Some people said that they feel the more capable they are, the more eager they want to learn more, or feel obliged to learn study more.
It's just like what a saying goes. It says that the relationship between the abilities of an individual and all kinds of knowledge in the world is like a ball in the sea. The ball stands for human being, the sea stands for the wild sea.
When a person learns more and masters more abilities, the ball that represents him also grows bigger and has a larger surface area contacting the surrounding sea. The more knowledgable a person becomes, the wider vision he will have. Under this circumstance, a person generally will have a compressed feeling that if he wants to get a better knowledge of every thing he meets and sees, the only way out is that he spends more time studying wherever and whenever possible.
The general courses local people study at leisure time now include dancing, singing, computer skills, all kinds of languages (English, Japanese, German, French on the top), cooking skills, auditing, marketing and law courses.
(eastday.com June 4, 2002)
