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Should College Students Hire Cleaners?

College Students, Please Mind Your Own Business!

--Should College Students Hire Cleaners?

Several years ago, a middle school in Shanghai announced that students would be required to pull up and remove the weeds growing on the school’s playground. The next day, what did happen was that, instead of doing the work themselves, the students stood in the shade of the buildings and the trees, watching their parents doing the work on their behalf in the midday heat. What a “spectacular” scene of doting parents and spoiled children!

The idea and the practice that college students in China should hire cleaners to keep their dorms clean are just an extension of such notorious dotage and spoiling and, as such, constitute an unmistakable indication of our education being truly sick and decadent. Those who advocate and support the contention maintain that, as Chinese families get materially better-off in recent years, college students have the implicit freedom to spend their money on whatever they desire and hiring cleaners to keep their dorms clean can help students save time, which they presumably can spend on their studies. However, such a chain of reasoning is seriously flawed.

Admittedly, people could spend their legitimately-earned money on whatever they like; however, they should do so only to the extent that they spend the money on those commodities and services they themselves are incapable of. For each college student sharing a dorm with 4 or 5 roommates, there are at most 3 or 5 square meters of space for him or her to tend to, including the space in the corridor. Keeping such a small space tidy and clean is a piece of cake for any college student as an adult; the labor involved in the process is minimal, so is the time required. When frugality is still a universally acknowledged virtue in the present-day world, spending money on hiring cleaners for a trivial responsibility students are wholly capable of performing themselves is simply an act of money squandering.

Managing a dorm one lives in is really assuming responsibilities for one’s own actions. When the dorm gets disorderly and unclean, it is its inhabitants who should get it tidy and clean. In performing the cleaning him/herself, a college student learns to share the responsibility for managing a public space of which one is a part. The student also shows respect for the common welfare of the entire dorm. Cleaning one’s own dorm is a necessary process whereby one becomes a responsible person.

What actually lies behind such a contention is a deep-entrenched contempt for manual labor and the argument that hiring cleaners could help students save time and devote to their studies is a mere pretext. Typically, college education is not dominated by heavy loads of coursework and a college student has ample time to manage his/her own affairs apart from his or her studies. Usually, those students who claim they are too busy to clean their own dorms are most often found otherwise preoccupied with playing computer games or shopping. They refuse to do manual labor because they tend to regard themselves as elites or the “chosen ones” once they succeed in entering a college. As self-styled elites, they believe they are bound for white-collar careers and thus have the privilege to stay aloof from menial work of a blue-collar worker.

This naturally leads to a serious question regarding the ultimate aim of our education. No one denies the importance of learning but acquiring learning is only part of the college education. Essentially, college education is about the development of a whole person, who can apply the knowledge and the skills in diverse intellectual spheres to cope with the challenges ahead and turn one into a person instrumental to our society. Barack Obama is a living example of how a responsible person can grow into a global leader. What are most impressive about this first Afro-American president of the United States are not those impassioned speeches he has made about “Yes, Change We Can” but his readiness to serve the society through practical social work. On January 19, 2009, just one day before his inauguration, the president-elect worked as a volunteer at the Sasha Bruce Youthwork Shelter, painting the walls of the dormitories for homeless teens. This illustrates that the avoidance of physical labor is never the mark of a true elite
 
In the Chinese labor market, recent years have already witnessed an alarming surplus of college graduates, among whom a considerable proportion has found it hard to be employed. One of the reasons for their unemployment is their failure to acquire effective skills to solve practical problems. This constitutes a sharp contrast with the Japanese corporate culture in which newly-recruited college graduates start their professional careers not with the fundamentals of office work, but with the cleaning jobs in the company toilets. By forming their character and shaping their willpower, toilet cleaning enables Japanese college graduates to become CEOs of many influential multinational companies. This culture is echoed in South Korea where the Minister of the National Treasury worked part-time as toilet cleaner in the wake of the Asian financial crisis about a decade ago. How could we expect Chinese college students to be future leaders, on national and global scales,when they even refuse to mind their own business of cleaning their dorms?

It is well articulated that “those who are ordained for a lofty mission should first be subjected to the most rigorous intellectual and physical hardships.” If learning and knowledge can “civilize one’s mind”, doing physical labor can serve to “brutalize one’s physique.” Instead of being reciprocally repulsive, those two impulses are what a college student ought to cultivate in the equal measure. Whether or not college students should hire cleaners to take care of their dorms is not a matter of money or of time, but a matter of whether we expect to develop ourselves into men of integrity, responsibility, and maturity. To the extent that Chinese college students should cultivate healthy and productive value orientations, they should take every precaution against becoming spoiled by the materialistic well-being that the country as a whole is currently experiencing. After all, there are provinces of human behavior where money cannot and should not exert its impact because such behavior is measured not in terms of money but in terms of moral values.


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