In the last two decades, the television has became a familiar mass device though in the beginning only a few family could possess one. The smartphone market has experienced a similar course in China. In fact, for most older people, the television appeared as a new thing just as the mobile phone did. The similarity is that either the TV or the mobile phone also brought a sense of fear in them, fear that such new things would exercise bad influence upon their children, namely, a distraction from the study. The fact was that the parents had the right and power to watch TV but require their children to do the homework. Watching TV might be the only thing they can do at home. As parents, they had long lost the interest of learning or relearning the necessary knowledge but strangely they all hoped and required that their children be good learners in school, spending no time watching TV and gaining high exam scores.
Now it is not strange any more. For the older people, most of them only think of learning as a requirement in a fixed and given period. If they missed it, they would not take action to pick it up again, though occasionally they would express regret to the surrounding people, including their children. Another thing is that they never has a sense of investing in knowledge. They all innocently thought that school education was all enough for their children, and begrudged money on books and other vehicles of necessary knowledge. If their children happened to be good at school learning, the only thing that they as parents would say is a boast that their children are seeds for studying. In the beginning, they may say books are expensive and in the end they intend to say buying books is useless. They often feel confused, maybe sincerely, that why keep learning when one is "old enough".
