He posted a notice on his blog explaining why he shut it down:
I'm not a Chinese citizen. I care for something a foreigner probably shouldn't have cared about, which makes the local Chinese feel uncomfortable. I shouldn't have let myself take care of those kids left in village by their parents, so that your pride wouldn't have been hurt. But if I quit, my students would feel sad. There is only one way to solve this problem-- do not let the others know, so nobody would feel uncomfortable for what I am doing.
The society has paid more attention to me than I could bear. I can't take the responsibility, consequences or pressure from the social response. For that reason, I dare not let more people know about me. Therefore, I decided to close my blog. I hope you can understand.* This is what I read from other people's articles about Eckart:
According to the authorities' requirement, I must declare hereby that I'm not authorized to teach as a volunteer, and I don't have a teaching certificate granted by the government.
For ten years in China, he taught without being paid. He translated books on education and donated the money to charitable groups. He never asked for high payment but asked the publishing house to sell his books cheap so that more people could afford to buy. His monthly expense is no more than 15 dollars.
He was fined because he didn't have a teaching certificate. He tried to apply for Chinese nationality but was rejected.What would Ai Weiwei say if he knew this?
which is also what I want to say.
Many people speculated that Eckart did so under the pressure from the local government, who didn't want the issue of the "parentless village kids" to be exposed. Especially after the national TV station CCTV made a programme about him, Eckart has gained much more attention from the society than before. The CCTV journalist Chai Jing (柴静) interviewed Eckart in that programme. She later wrote an article on her blog about what she has experienced with Eckart and his students.
Impossible to improve
by Chai Jing, translated by me
One
I sat with Eckart Loewe on the grass. Seven or eight kids were rolling in his chest, beating about with each other.
Instinctively I grabbed one kid's hands and said, Don't do that.
Why not?
Because I don't like it. I nearly said it, but I held it back. I tried to make them understand that Eckart would feel uncomfortable and pain.
No, he won't. They giggled. The kid who was beaten by the others laughed, too.
Eckart sat among them. He said nothing but smiled at me who knew not how to handle them.
Later I asked Eckart, I wanted to stop them. I just couldn't help it. I even wanted to correct them, which was my first reaction. But you didn't do that, why?
I know what has happened to them. I know they are different individuals. I can understand their behaviour.
Is understanding enough?
If you talk to them when you understand, it makes a difference. If you talk to them with dislike, you feel the other way.
I was speechless.
Two
I interviewed the brother and sister.
The younger brother was chopping the firewood with all his strength. The crew team thought it was a touching scene for camera. After a while, the fire faded, not enough light for the camera. We stopped filming, and asked the boy to add more wood. After another while, I asked him to take me to his vegetable pitch. He refused.
Why not? I was surprised.
You go youself. He said without looking at me.
I was full of perplexity for all night.
The next day, Eckart said to me, When you said you were cold while the fire was burning, he took it seriously. He was determined to chop that piece of wood to warm you up. Later he found out that you said so with an intention-- you wanted a good shot for the interview, a shot with him doing something, a shot with fire light-- an intention full of that kind of things. When he found that out, he felt that you didn't entrust yourself 100 percent to him. So he was reluctant to accept you. And when you asked him to take you to the vegetable field, he refused.
Hearing this, I even didn't have time to feel ashamed. I just felt something hard in my head was bombed into pieces.
You had a good intention, but it was empty. Eckart said.
Empty?
Empty, impossible to do. If you do something with an intention, or on purpose, it is of no use. You can't achieve anything, because it is fake.
Do you mean in that way I can't influence people? I murmured unconsciously.
It is strange because I had never looked at it this way. You want to influence people, but end up in vain. Because people will feel that you do it in order to influence them, they will not take it.
Three
By the fire, the kid whispered something to Eckart.
You must be discussing how to test me. I thought to myself.
Eckart smiled and said to the boy, No, the urban people won't like it.
I indistinctly heard "ask her to play mud with us".
The boy turned to me and asked, Do you like mud?
"Of course." I thought I liked it. In my own impression, I even liked to roll in the muddy field when it was raining.
It was around 6 o'clock when the interview was over. The sky was completely dark, and it was cold in the mountain.
Eckart stopped all of a sudden. He asked me mildly, We are going now. Are you coming with us?
Now? I was stunned.
I had not expected that the first thing flashing through my mind was "I have only one pair of jeans with me".
This thought killed everything.
By no means did I have the gust to say, Yes I'm going with you. That would be pretentious. If I had forced myself to play in the mud and jumped happily like a sparrow... That would only have been an ugly scene.
Four
What happened at that time?
I can't recall.
What did you think at that moment?
I don't know how to put it.
He looked at me in peace. For many a time in our interview he replied with those two sentences.
In the beginning, I looked at him with a buzzing voice almost shrieking in my head "this interview is a total failure. It's going to fail very soon." Once before me, my colleague almost interviewed him with a death threat, still he couldn't cut it into a programme, because the normal media practice didn't work on him at all. It's not that he wanted to be at odds with us, he only answers those genuine questions-- questions derived from unknown and communication, not from what you have read in his book, the editing plan you have made, the expectation you have for his possible answers, for your leader's nodding or for audience's tears.
I gave up.
I sat there with no expectation. The question sheet had been rustled into a ball in my hand. The journalistic experience I had gained in the past years was crumbling.
Then I found myself talking to Eckart about my story at primary school. I memorized the eye-sight chart then because I was near-sighted at that time. It just happened. I told the story without knowing how it came about. How strange! I had never expected myself to say it. I had even forgotten that story. But now, I said it, and told a long story. I had set a rule for myself: never have personal feelings when conducting an interview-- it's a NO ZONE for me. But I don't know why, the NO ZONE that was drawn with a black exclamation mark collapsed to pieces in a shriek.
When I watched the programme, I noticed I was looking down into the ground while telling that story. I was so shy, just like when I was eight.
Five
Then I came to realize, when he said he couldn't recall, he COULD NOT recall.
"Thinking used to take place in my mind. I thought of it, but I couldn't do it. Now I don't think anymore. I feel, and I've achieved what I wanted to do but never did. This is because thoughts become part of my life, become action."
If you read his blog, you can see the process of this transformation clearly.
He has written a book called Work with Children's Nature, in which he recorded his researches and experience. It is of a few 100,000 words, but he can't recall what he has written. He doesn't think there is another method he can adopt. He says he thinks no more, and writes no more, but feel. When I was reading that book, I was worried that he would become nihilistic. That worry was like a nail deeply embedded in my mind. It wasn't removed until I finished the interview.
What do you expect the kids to be?
If you teach with imagination, you imagine the students to be like this or that, and you always compare them with you imagination. This is the biggest problem in education. I can't establish a connection with them that way, because that imagination stands like a wall between me and my students. I don't want that imagination.
I know a very good teacher, even he said, I want my students to be creative, imaginative, etc. He has a standard for his students. Don't you have?
Then if the students can't meet that standard, will you give up on them? Will you blame them?
Maybe I'll be disappointed.
I have thought of many approaches before, but I gave them up all finally. They simply didn't work. The only thing that works is a teacher's state of mind, which is affected by the imagination that student should be like this or that. If a teacher is obsessed with that imagination, he won't be able to adjust himself to the students' state of mind, or to look at them the way they are. If a teacher opens his mind without any imagination, his reaction will be natural to the students' reaction. Students like that reaction, and they easily take it.
That's why Eckart said he had nothing to write about. He used to write massively to criticize standardized education and squarely designed schools. He strongly opposed the concept in education that "kills people's hearts". He struggled against the problems in the real world. Now he says he has given up the idea that he wanted to change it. I was taken by surprise when hearing it.
He said, If I had an intention of changing the education in China, I couldn't do what I'm doing. Fortunately I have no such an intention. I don't want to change it. I have no pressure.
I was stunned for a while, then I continued to ask, If it's not for change, what are we working for?
Change will surely happen. Change happens by itself. But that's not my goal, not my duty. It's not a burden upon my shoulders.
Not your goal? To change?
It's too heavy a burden, and impossible to achieve. He said. However, when you don't expect of it, change will happen.
Someone has described for me the feeling of listening to Eckart's talk-- it's like Zen, mysterious and inexplicable. But underneath his words is a strict system built on logic, one thing deduced from another.
You used to be in a status of being anxious for a change. Why did you give it up? Why don't you want a change now?
Try slowly to understand the way it is. When I came to understand it, I accept things as they are.
Are you angry at the current situation?
No.
You know that there is a danger. When we totally understand how things are in reality, many people quit. This is the confusion I have.
Probably that's because you still want to change. When you are out of ways, bumping into a barrier, you give up. I can't change things, well, I don't need to. Things change themselves.
Then what should we do?
Do our own business and do it well.
Six
Do you want love? I asked Eckart.
He was 41 years old. The teaching in the village in Guangxi had turned him from a young chap to a grown-up. He had no family, no house, no children. He wore a pair of nickers with no socks because he couldn't find a pair of socks that fit his feet.
I don't know what love is. I have never experienced it.
My heart clinched. That was my first reaction.
Then he continued, But I saw it on television, and I felt it odd.
Odd?
Those love stories on television, I don't know what kind of emotions make them happen. How should I put it? To have that person belong to you? I can't imagine that kind of feeling.
He once said that one of the reasons he could stay in China was that his parents never thought he belonged to them.
I said, But even in these kids around you, I can see that they are instinctively fond of you and drawn to you. It's a human nature, isn't it?
They belong to me, but it's different from love, in which someone belongs to the other. In the former, you can let it go; in the latter, you can't let it go.
Let go of what? I didn't quite follow him.
When the students leave, they can easily let it go, nothing to be dependent upon. But the love I saw on television, you can't let it go. You feel painful when the other leaves.
You don't want that dependence and occupation?
No.
Seven
In the comments on the programme after it was broadcast, there is one thing shared by all-- what Eckart gives us is not some kind of touching that makes us want to cry. He stuns you and makes you sit in the middle of night, thinking "what kind of life do I have now?"
Today, when we were having lunch in Jingjiang, Jiangsu Province, we brought him up at th table. A guy sitting next to me was very moved, but he added, We can't let there be too many Eckarts.
Why not?
He seemed to be lost. Then he murmured, It will cause too much trouble... He subverts our way of thinking.
It's a strange expression, but I totally understand it. What he meant is, the more you get to know Eckart, the more disturbed you are by him. He makes you question many common senses and values that have been framed firmly in your head.
I asked Eckart, You make people ask questions. People have a set of rules, which they accept but probably have never thought about. Now you make them question whether these rules are right or wrong. But normally to question is a dangerous thing to do.
Danger is your fear of freedom. Freedom is a status in which you can't stand still.
How can I be strong enough not to fear?
I think if you only have material, then you fear. If you have something more important than material, then you fear no more.
He gave a definition in the programme, Freedom is when there is no obstacle in you mind.
Eight
Among the kids I interviewed, there was one the naughtiest.
Whenever I was talking to the other students, he would jump in and ask "What? What? What are you talking about?"
When I wanted to talk to him, he was gone already, or he was pressing someone underneath and beating him about. He was so anxious and swinging forth and back when I was about to interview him.
Only when resting in Eckart's arms, he was quiet, and he could stay that way for over 10 minutes, like a little bear. He could even stay calm and not strike back when someone else provoked him.
Civilization is to stop and think about what you are doing. Eckart said. But I never saw him reason with the kids in such a way.
Words, more often than not, are fake. He said. Only the things you have experienced are real. He filmed drama series with the kids. He let the students play a role. The role is about a kid who finally understands that "a strong man is not based on what he conquers, but on what he suffers".
He accompanied the kids when they grew up. Now they are about to leave the school. These little kids, everyone of them wrote a sentence to compose a song, "I stand lonely, outside this cold window...", "a tough man doesn't fear losing face..." They messily played the piano and came up with a rhythm. Then Eckart noted it down. Creation is from a mess. He said.
The naughtiest kid suddenly said, Do you want to listen to mine?
The lyric he uttered shocked me. I grabbed his arm, Say it again.
None of us is perfect. It's impossible to improve, But for you, I'm willing to do.
Whom did you write this for? I asked.
For him. He pointed at Eckart.
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