The owner of these beautiful flowers must have
packed them into a pretty box to make it look even more splendid. Sadly, their
beauty is covered by a very plain box.
I felt
sorry for the flowers because they aren't allowed to grow, now that they're cut
off from their body. Furthermore, they're beauty cannot shine anymore. I was
staring at this picture thinking this stuff when suddenly my neighbor, Hyun-Hee
came into my head.
Hyun-Hee was an 11-year-old girl who was in my
class and lived next door. She was a girl not unlike everybody else, who loved
to play dolls with her friends, loved reading fairy tale stories and playing
outside on the weekends. The only difference she had from her peers was that
she was always on the top on every exam in my class. Nobody saw her studying in
our classroom, but she was exceptional in terms of grades. I was curious how
she had managed to be such a great student even though she didn't have any
special feature. And as I was living next door, I found out the secret eventually;
her mother was the strictist person I had ever encountered. I could hear her
mother yelling at her daughter everyday, possibly because she wanted her to
study more and get better grades. Hyun-Hee's schedule was like that of a
celebrity. She had a bunch of academies and tutors coming over helping her to
study more and more. Hyun-Hee seemed to be really stressed out from this, and
one day…
We were playing hide and seek and riding
bicycles in the backyard of our apartment, and when I suggested we go home now
that it’s getting darker, she came over to me and suddenly started crying. I
was utterly shocked at her sudden behavior, and I didn’t know what to say. All
I could do was to stare at her vaguely waiting for her to say something. Half crying, she told me these shocking stuff.
For a few days, she stayed up all night trying to figure out the answers of the
math problems she couldn’t figure out. She was dozing all night, but her mom
kept waking her up, making her get the correct answers before she sleeps. She
didn’t want to go home, because everyday, her mom yells at her for playing for
so long and not studying enough.
Now, she ended up in a normal high school,
being a normal student with normal grades. Now that I’m thinking about her, what
her mother was trying to do was to pack a bunch of beautiful flowers in a plain
box, labeled “beautiful flowers.” She should have let her go free and let her
be the one who decides on her things. She should have let her do things she
liked. She should have let the beautiful flowers blossom freely and express
their own beauty and talent they were born with. Instead, she wrapped up her
talent and her own characteristics with the “standardized features” by giving
her so much stress an 11-year-old couldn’t possibly bear.
What I’m trying to say here is that, the real
beauty can only be achieved, and a leader of a community can only be reared, by
letting the children’s natural talents shine, not by oppressing them with
unmanagable workloads.
