How to Excel in Seventh Grade - A Mandatory Course for Students and Parents Transitioning from Elementary to Junior High

Author: Ran Naiyan, Wang Baoqiu / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-07-01
Features:
Six. Entering the Stage of Exploring Life Values
1. "Can people live forever?" In a seventh-grade class one afternoon, the students suddenly engaged in a heated debate about whether people could live forever. Some said, "Science may develop a way to achieve immortality." Others argued, "How can people live forever? I've never heard of anyone who has." The two sides couldn't agree, so they finally decided to go to the bookstore to look for answers in books.
The widespread reflection on whether human life can be eternal reflects the fact that adolescents' abstract thinking has reached a certain level, and their self-awareness has also matured. As a result, they can understand the infinitude of time and the finitude of individual life. They become aware that life is limited, leading them to abandon the fantasy of immortality. This is a necessary prerequisite for beginning to contemplate the value of life.
Adolescents' conscious recognition of the finitude of life often brings them pain. However, only by going through this process can they truly begin to face life. An outstanding young person once recalled this experience: "In junior high school, when I entered the second grade, I started thinking about the meaning of life. Why do people live? I thought about it for a long time. At first, I believed I could live forever and remain in the world. Later, I recalled Mao Zedong's 'Serve the People,' which states, 'People inevitably die.' So, I realized I would die too. The thought of death terrified me. I remembered that 'some are heavy as Mount Tai, while others are light as feathers,' and I decided to die as weighty as Mount Tai, like Zhang Side. But as I grew older, I realized that how I died was unimportant. What mattered most was how I lived."
This recollection vividly describes how a teenager moved from blindly believing in immortality to fearing death, then to pursuing the value of death, and finally to pursuing the value of life as a whole. Imagine that if this teenager had not gone through this painful and profound reflection, his later life might have been aimless, without his consciously realizing that only by contributing to the people could he make life meaningful. P24