adolescence
...ial Christmas card to our best friend who lives far away instead of writing the senseless issues, solving boring math problems, preparing for endless presentations and dramas? It’s our right to savor each segment of our education as an experience in itself and not as a grim preparations for the next step. It is our right to experiment , to trip and fall, to learn that defeat is as instructive as victory and is not the end of the world. It is our right to schedule our time in a way we like it be and do what we love to, enjoying the sun-shining days yet knowing the significance of our life to ourselves and to others and never letting a minute slip from in front of us in vain. But we can’t! Who have killed our precious adolescence, our freedom and rights? It is easy to look around for the killers----to blame the professors for assigning too much work, the society for engendering so heavy job pressure, the parents for pushing their children to far, the classmates for endlessly competing for the scholarship and limited high marks too often, the students for driving themselves too hard? But there are no killers; only victims. No one wants to let his final score be affected by failing to hand in some senseless homework; no one would like to see unemployment coming with his graduation; no one would be unwilling to be a good boy of his parents’ everyday talk; Almost everyone wants to be judged better than others, to be charisma leaders, rich managers, or at least high-paid white collar workers, a promising future differing from the common life. Few would be content to always live in a life worrying whether he could pass the exam, whether he would be looked down for his poor performance in exams, whether his love story would come to an end if he does not go abroad for further studying with his partner, whether he would be able to hunt satisfactory jobs after graduation to support his parents and his own family. Then there is no wonder for the CowBoy---or superman in English and Niu Ren in Chinese----In tsinghua who has just received admission to MIT and a large offer, to say: “I am just driven to do this” yes, we are driven to be our parents’ good boys and good girls ,and compete for the highest marks, we are driven to take CET, TOEFL and GRE, final exams and Graduate Entrance Exams. We may mark higher than others,.we may receive more praise than our classmates. We may tell ourselves that we are on the way presuming our dreams. But that is only because we have no choice. We are driven to do that by forces both from inner and outer side, keeping on to study till late ni...