My View on Education

The mental health education I believe in

I have wanted to write about this for a long time. Three small moments left a deep impression on me.

The first came during a teaching competition in my second year, when a judge remarked, “The content that mental health education actually requires is quite simple.” The second was noticing that even the most basic psychology knowledge draws considerable traffic on the internet, while in the high school classrooms I knew from my own student days and teaching practicum, student engagement was honestly not high. The third was discovering that the APA website hosts a full psychology curriculum for high school students; its first-class typesetting and rigorous content stayed with me.

I later tried two experiments of my own. The first was bringing genuinely rigorous psychology into the classroom, such as the Rosenthal effect. Students responded noticeably better than they did to slogans like “be the master of your emotions” (which also says something about how poorly mental health courses analyze their audience: primary and high school students are taught almost the same material). Yet I came to see that such concepts can be too abstract, and the real difficulty lies in teaching them well. A teacher once told me that students come to psychology class to relax, not to hear complicated theory. I only half agree. Deep thinking is not the same as suffering, and chanting simple platitudes is worse than letting students sleep.

The second experiment happened during a summer of volunteer teaching. Our team prepared lessons together, and among us was a student from the Chinese literature department. We found that a career-planning class could be built around Su Shi’s tumultuous life and the tension between ideal and reality in The Moon and Sixpence. To our surprise, people genuinely love “hearing someone’s story”. When I later taught that lesson in a competition, it went well, and both students and teachers were pleasantly surprised: so a psychology class can be taught this way too.

I have always believed that, compared with one-on-one counseling, which demands long hours and extensive training, mental health education is the solution that fits our country’s reality at this stage. Why should sustained work that reaches a thousand students rank below brief one-on-one sessions? Mental health education should hold its head high.