A student shows the leaf carving work "Rooster" of Liu Ping, an art teacher of Qingdao Experimental Primary School, east China's Shandong Province, Jan. 11, 2017. Liu loves this type of art and spends her spare time on creating various works inspired by traditional papercutting. (Xinhua/Wang Haibin)

 “All children should receive the kind of education that can guide them to be more graceful,” said a proposal made by Tang Jiangpeng, a member of the 13th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). The proposal has become a hot topic of discussion in China, receiving support from many Chinese netizens and also inspiring people to ponder: What is a “graceful education?”

Tang told media that he thinks there are four different ways for students to become “elegant.” First, they should be educated with a strong sense of beauty as well as the ability to perceive this quality in their everyday lives. Second, students in China need to be taught how to appreciate the beauty of others and how to appreciate excellence while being able to tolerate imperfections.

Third, students should be encouraged to develop an aesthetic taste in everyday life without assuming that a refined lifestyle requires excessive spending, wasting money and getting the best of everything. Last, he emphasized again the importance of teaching students to see beauty, adding that they should learn to bring beauty to others while being able to feel it themselves. 

Tang’s “obsession” with the importance of “beauty” in Chinese students’ education quickly attracted the support of many commenters on China’s Twitter-like Sina Weibo,  many of whom said that a “graceful education” simply means cultivating students to recognize the beauty that exists within their various life experiences. 

“I guess calling it a ‘graceful education’ is another way to describe ‘beauty education’. It has been mentioned before when updating our kids’ education. I don’t mind though, beauty education is exactly what we are missing,” said a netizen on Sina Weibo. 
 
Some others finding the term “graceful” too abstract, but said they still believe this recommendation may lead to positive changes to school curriculums. 

“But I do want his ‘educating kids to live an aesthetic life’ argument to be something that is implemented at my daughter’s school. Like they can arrange particular sessions such as scientific-oriented and arts appreciation groups… I’m bothered by her shallow hobbies of looking at lipstick swathes and being a follower of beauty gurus,” Zhang Chunxia, a woman who has a daughter in a Chongqing high school, told the Global Times on Thursday. 

If Zhang’s belief that liking ‘beauty’-tagged products reflects a lack of taste or elegance is true, then the fundamental question we are facing here is how “beauty” should be defined in an educational context. 

“I think it means to guide our children to have a beautiful heart inside, to teach them a way to judge what is right and wrong, sensible or not, and also to know how to love people as well as be confident that he or she will be loved,” Song, an educational expert who specializes in adolescents’ mental health development, told the Global Times on Thursday. 

“‘Grace’ is intrinsic in a child who has a beautiful heart. Good, kind, loving – these are qualities that make a person sane and elegant,” emphasized Song.    

While Song has a profound and somewhat philosophical explanation of “graceful education,” some others believe the seemly sophisticated idea is strikingly simple and essential.  

“It is just the ordinary ‘everyday education’ which we should have but missed out on giving to our children. We have been praising ‘knowledge education’ for too long, to the point we have forgotten that our children’s ‘life education’ has equal importance,” Xiong Bingqi, director of the 21st Century Education Research Institute in Beijing, told the Global Times on Thursday. 

“Do you consider a kid with good scores but who doesn’t know how to tie his own shoe laces graceful?” Xiong asked.