Is the present education system devoid of moral values? An academic believes that it lacks such values, but a journalist differs.

Zhou Yun: Education has lost its true worth

A Shanghai student, who returned from Japan on April 1, stabbed his mother repeatedly with a fruit knife within minutes of landing at Pudong International Airport following an argument, raising grave social concerns.

Though police have detained the man and are investigating the incident, especially trying to appraise his mental state, his 52-year-old mother is desperate to protect her son.

The woman's desperation to save her son from harm, even though she slipped in a coma after the attack, reflects the love and self-sacrifice of most mothers for their children. For years, sons and daughters have been the apples of their parents' eyes. Many Chinese parents, despite their relative poverty, sacrifice everything they have to educate their children and give them a better life. But what most of the children earn is just college diplomas, not proper, rational and mature values.

A person's character is formed on family values. In the past, Chinese people used to pay great attention to family values. In fact, people followed many scholarly works on family and morality as guidelines for centuries.

Unfortunately, moral education and family values have become pass today. Cultivation of moral character is not considered part of modern education, which focuses more on making money and achieving success.

Society today tends to weigh success in terms of money, power and social status rather than factors such as social contribution and faithfulness to one's family and cause.

But parents are still committed to helping their children in every possible way and every field of life. And in these times of single-child families parents tend to pamper and over-protect them - turning them into self-centered individuals. The stabbing incident at Shanghai's Pudong airport is one example of such self-centricity.

An equally shocking but fatal stabbing incident was reported from Xi'an, Shaanxi province, on Oct 20 last year. Yao Jiaxin, a 21-year-old student knocked down cyclist Zhang Miao with his car while rushing to meet his girlfriend. When Yao saw Zhang, a young mother, staring at his number plate, he pulled out a knife and stabbed her to death. The callous reason Yao gave for killing Zhang is that he thought he had "knocked down a farmer who would keep badgering him endlessly for compensation".

Yao's parents, it seems, did not inculcate in him even the basic human values. Had his parents taken the trouble of doing that, Zhang's child would not have been motherless today. Of what use is education if it does not value life?

More shocking news came from Dong Fan, a professor at Beijing Normal University, who said higher education degrees must be matched with high incomes, and that he would not meet his students who could not earn 40 million yuan ($6.12 million) before reaching the age of 40. If even teachers consider money to be the all and end all of life, how can students learn and follow family and social values?

School education should act as insurance for children's moral cultivation even if parents educate their wards in matters of humanity and morality. But the pressures of parents to see their children secure high scores and school authorities' eagerness to see more of their students get high and fancy degrees have pushed moral values and social responsibility into the archives of modern society.

Schools and colleges can no longer be considered places where individuals' characters can be built in the true sense of the term. With schools and colleges focusing on economic development and teachers preferring to take private classes to make an extra buck how can students be immune to the worship of money?

If we take our society to be a big college, we will see that moral values are vanishing from our midst at a fast pace, with young children being the most misled with distorted and vulgar ideas. The worship of money is evident everywhere, from TV programs to Internet postings, from glitzy shopping malls and supermarkets to swanky cars and designer clothes.

Hence, there is an urgent need for educators, education authorities, schools, colleges, teachers, parents and students - in other words the entire society - to rethink their priorities and accord education its rightful place in our lives.

The author is a professor at the School of Politics and Public Management, South China University of Technology.