I recently read about Wang Jibing, a food delivery rider in Jiangsu province who won one of China's highest literary honours, the Lu Xun Literary Prize, for his poetry collection Low Flight (低处飞行). Wang is 56. He left school at fourteen because his family could not afford otherwise, worked construction and street stalls, and now writes poems on scraps of paper between deliveries, drawing on conversations with more than two hundred fellow riders. The collection's governing idea is contained in a single couplet: who says that spreading your wings must mean flying high? Flying low is still flying.
It is a lovely thought, and it got me thinking about what we, as teachers, are actually doing when we talk to students about their futures.
The polite consensus
Teachers are generally encouraged — by schools, by governments, by the whole atmosphere of modern education — to push every student towards high ambition in its conventional forms: university, then law, medicine, finance, engineering. This ideology has been validated at the highest level of policy. Most notably, in 1999 Tony Blair's government set a target of getting 50 per cent of young people into higher education by 2010. The target was missed by seven years, but the instinct behind it never really went away. The assumption is that more ambition is always better, and that a teacher who suggests anything else is selling their students short.
There is something real in that defence, and I want to give it its due. For a bright child from a poor family, an ambitious teacher can be the one adult who tells them the world is larger than their street. The "soft bigotry of low expectations" is a genuine hazard. I have met students in Shanghai whose horizons visibly widened because a teacher refused to let them settle.
The quiet cost
And yet. I have often felt that this encouragement subtly devalues the work of the people who keep the city running — the delivery riders, the refuse collectors, the drivers. These jobs are critical, and in Shanghai they are done, on the whole, with impressive diligence. So why is it close to taboo for a teacher to discuss them with respect in the classroom as plausible futures? Why must everyone be a lawyer or a doctor, when society would collapse within a fortnight if that became true?
Wang Jibing is a useful rebuke here. By the standard metrics of the careers fair, his life looks like a story of constrained ambition. By any human measure — craft, dignity, contribution — it looks like a flourishing one. He did not need to fly high to fly.
Where this leaves me
The case for pushing ambition rests on social mobility and the moral risk of writing children off early. The case for realism rests on honesty: most people will not become surgeons, someone must do the essential work, and a society that treats that work as failure makes most of its members feel like failures. If all work were paid properly and respected properly, it would matter far less where a student ended up, so long as they worked hard, looked after their physical, psychological and financial wellbeing, and treated their fellow citizens with respect.
My tentative instinct is that the dichotomy is partly false. Perhaps the teacher's job is not to set the altitude but to teach students to take their own lives seriously — to be ambitious about character, effort and craft, whatever the occupation. But I am genuinely not sure where to lay my sword on this one. Push every student towards the lofty professions and we quietly degrade the ordinary ones. Counsel realism and we risk offending parents, or worse, capping a child's potential before it has had a chance to show itself.
I would invite anyone reading this — teachers, parents, policymakers — to share their thoughts. Should we keep encouraging lofty ambitions and accept the collateral snobbery, or should we be honest with students about the full range of honourable lives, and risk being accused of expecting too little? I am interested to hear what others think.