Citing examples of teachers from various schools across the rural areas of China, Global Times on June 13 described the effects on children of a training program which assumes that they are born poets. The Shiquang Four Seasons Poetry Youth Service Center has instructed teachers from 3,332 primary and secondary schools across rural China.
Global Times quotes only a small handful of them, but they describe a process well known with poetry: It is one thing, and a good thing, merely to read poetry; it is quite another, to compose it with any increasing success; a third thing, to recite. One teacher says that he learned truly to understand, “that all children are born poets.” The children, in the teachers’ reports, become happier, and thus: more confident, better students who learn more readily. Many are shy—this is often connected to coming from poorer families—and they feel physically and emotionally safer.
Just one of a number of examples—as translated in Global Times: “In the wheat field, there is a group of me. At 12, I long to grow up; at 20, I miss my childhood.”
Is anyone thinking of the rural frontier youth who became the greatest of American Presidents, while constantly reciting poetry?
