The Temple
Director：GUO Heng-qi
Inside Dorm 206 live a few boys who are due to graduate from high school. They spend their days eating, chatting, playing cards, and playing with mobile phones, just to kill their youthful time while waiting for their high school diploma. Finally, they graduate from high school, but what are their next steps? Should they get a part-time job or keep pursuing a bachelor degree unwillingly?
When facing such students, teachers could hardly show their passion in teaching. It is impossible for them to get the students perform well in exams, nor getting decent salaries. Most of them just muddle along from day to day and waiting for the school to move. Only Teacher HO still cleans up the bulletin board, taking her job seriously as usual. Teacher HO is not good at social contact. Most of the time, she just sits along silently.
The original site of Duancun High School in Pingyao County, China used to be a temple in the Ming dynasty. It was a gratuitous elementary school in the late Qing dynasty and a higher elementary school in the early years of Republic of China. After the People’s Republic of China was established, it was turned into a county-operated junior high school and became a senior high school in the 1980s. In 2001, Duancun High School enrolled more students. As the number of students exceeded 1400, a new academic building was built next to the sports field. In the summer of 2011, the school merged with another two schools and its 150 students were transferred to a new downtown campus. Thereafter, grass started growing on the sports field. Only MI, the doorman, and his family still live in the old academic building.
GUO Heng-qi was born in 1979, in Shanxi, China. In 2007, he joined the post-production team of AI Wei-wei’s documentary, Fairytale , as an assistant editor. In December 2007, he worked as the editor of WANG Bing’s Crude Oil and edited ZHANG Chi’s drama Ubu Roi in January 2008. Between February 2008 and August 2010, he shot his own documentary, New Castle , which was later awarded Best Documentary at Busan International Film Festival 2010 and selected by Cinéma du Réel, Hot Docs, Yunnan Multi Culture Visual Festival and Taipei Film Festival in 2011.
When I was a student, we used to show our respect to all the teachers. After becoming a teacher myself, I had to deal with a cigarette-smoking student who remarked, “A man who has exceptional ability won’t be a teacher nowadays. Don’t you agree?” Since China initiated economic development 30 years ago, what else have we changed?
In Chinese canonical texts, “the meaning of School, the origin of teaching”, can be “extended to the righteousness of filial piety and fraternal duty.” Schools can “cultivate oneself as well as others”. However, it’s impossible to find these in schools now. Instead, ideological and political education takes place. Passing exams becomes the only goal of education and learning. When facing low salaries and unruly students, teachers in rural high schools have no intentions to properly deliver their knowledge and fundamental life skills. They struggle to maintain their dignity. On the other hand, students are bored with school. They skip classes, idle away their time, and feel lost and restless. They squander their youth and yearn for the prosperous city, while dreaming to reap everything without sowing. Yet, can we blame these to the failure of education? What’s more important is the society’s influence on young people. They learn about this world from their surroundings, familiar territories, and the classes of the society. As mentioned in the textbooks they study, “Consciousness is how one’s brain receives the objective world”. These students’ manners, mental states and values reflect the current Chinese rural society truthfully. They are the future of rural society, but, realistically speaking, they might just become another group of vagabonds.
Behind this withered hundred-year-old school, the system of humanistic values in rural society has crumbled. Subsequently, “seeking courtesy in rural communities when traditional etiquette and moral values have been lost” becomes an unrealistic hope.