2022年，我开始在中国一所民办大学教授数字媒体艺术专业的本科课程。许多学生在高考选拔中处于较后的位置。进入课堂后，他们仍然沿用应试训练中的标准化方法：面对新的创作任务，首先想到的是素描、水粉以及可以模仿的固定方案。在课堂讨论中，他们常常保持沉默，很少表达自己的判断，也尚未形成能够共同讨论作品的专业语言。
In 2022, I began teaching undergraduate courses in Digital Media Art at a private university in China. Many of my students had been placed toward the lower end of the hierarchy produced by the national college entrance examination. When confronted with new creative assignments, they continued to rely on the standardized methods of their previous training: academic drawing, gouache painting, imitation, and familiar procedures with predictable outcomes. Classroom discussions were often met with silence. Students rarely expressed their own judgments and had not yet developed a shared professional language for discussing one another’s work.
我逐渐意识到，这不仅是知识和技术基础的问题。长期围绕标准答案展开的教育，使学生更习惯执行规定路线，而不是提出问题。当创作没有明确步骤时，他们最先感受到的往往不是自由，而是麻烦、不确定和失败的风险。
I gradually came to understand that this condition was not only a matter of technical knowledge. An education organized around standard answers had trained students to follow prescribed routes rather than formulate questions. When a creative assignment offered no predetermined path, many students experienced not freedom, but difficulty, uncertainty, and the risk of failure.
艺术并不天然比其他领域更自由。学院、市场、展览体系与教师的审美同样制造标准和权威。艺术教学的意义，不是把艺术宣布为标准之外的例外，而是让那些习以为常的判断标准变得可见、可以被质疑，也可以被改变。
Art is not inherently freer than other fields. Academies, markets, exhibition systems, and teachers’ aesthetic judgments all produce their own standards and forms of authority. The purpose of art education is not to declare art an exception to standards, but to make the criteria we take for granted visible, open to question, and capable of change.
自由并不意味着教师退出
Freedom Does Not Mean the Teacher’s Withdrawal
我最初采用接近完全放养的教学方式：不设置统一路线，先了解学生对什么感兴趣，再让他们根据兴趣决定作品方向。这种方法让一部分学生迅速建立了自己的创作路径，却也让另一些学生完全无法开始。学生原有的理解能力、知识基础、文化经验与自我规划能力，在开放任务中被进一步放大。
My initial response was to adopt an almost completely open teaching method. I avoided prescribing a common route, began by discussing the students’ interests, and allowed them to determine the direction of their work. Some students developed quickly under these conditions. Others were unable to begin at all. Differences in prior knowledge, comprehension, cultural experience, confidence, and the ability to organize a project became even more visible.
这段经历让我重新思考教学中的自由。我仍然不相信标准答案能够培养创作者，但也不再把自由简单理解为规则的消失。
This experience forced me to reconsider what freedom means in education. I still do not believe that standard answers can cultivate artists, but I no longer understand freedom simply as the disappearance of rules.
我不替学生规定作品最终应该成为什么，也不承诺把每个人带到相同的结果。但自由并不意味着教师退出。课堂仍然需要最低限度的共同结构：学生必须提出一个真正的问题，接触具体的现实，留下尝试与失败的证据，并向他人解释自己的选择。在这些边界之内，作品可以成功，也可以失败。评价的对象不是作品接近标准答案的程度，而是学生是否形成了自己的判断，并愿意承担创作决定带来的结果。
I do not prescribe what a student’s work must ultimately become, nor do I promise to lead every student toward the same result. But freedom does not mean that the teacher withdraws. A classroom still requires a minimum shared structure: students must formulate a genuine question, encounter a concrete reality, preserve evidence of experimentation and failure, and explain their decisions to others. Within these boundaries, a work may succeed or fail. What matters is not how closely it approaches a standard answer, but whether the student has developed a judgment of their own and is willing to take responsibility for their creative decisions.
拒绝把学生变成绩效项目
Refusing to Turn Students into Performance Projects
我长期反感所处教育环境中不断排名、比较和延迟生活的机制。高风险考试、学历等级、就业压力与家庭焦虑共同构成了一场难以退出的竞争。对单个学生而言，不断补习、增加证书和提高分数可能是理性的选择；但当所有人同时追加投入时，教育便成为一场没有终点的位置竞争。
I have long resisted the educational mechanisms that continually rank, compare, and postpone students’ lives. High-stakes examinations, credential hierarchies, employment pressure, and family anxiety combine to produce a competition that is difficult to leave. For an individual student, accumulating qualifications and improving scores may appear rational. When everyone is compelled to do the same, however, education becomes an endless competition for position.
韩炳哲在《倦怠社会》中将当代人描述为不断管理、优化和消耗自己的“功绩主体”。这种分析也帮助我理解学生的处境：教育压力已经不只来自学校和家庭，还会进入学生的自我认识。学生逐渐相信，失败说明自己还不够努力，停下来就意味着被别人超过。结构性的竞争因此被转换成个人的羞耻、自责与疲惫。
In The Burnout Society, Byung-Chul Han describes the contemporary individual as an achievement-subject who continually manages, optimizes, and exhausts the self. This idea helps me understand how educational pressure no longer comes only from schools and families. It becomes part of a student’s relationship with the self. Failure is interpreted as insufficient effort, while stopping is experienced as falling behind. Structural competition is transformed into personal shame, self-blame, and exhaustion.
我的教学不反对努力，而是反对把努力变成没有边界的自我消耗；不反对评价，而是反对用单一排名定义一个人的能力和价值。
My teaching does not reject effort. It rejects the transformation of effort into limitless self-exploitation. It does not reject evaluation, but refuses to define a person’s ability and value through a single ranking.
在自由中保留限度
Preserving Limits Within Freedom
加缪所讨论的荒诞，并不意味着放弃行动，而是清醒地承认世界不会提供一个永久可靠的答案。竞争教育却不断要求学生为了未来推迟现在的生活：进入更好的学校、取得更高的学历、获得更体面的工作，仿佛完成下一次筛选以后，真正的生活才会开始。
For Albert Camus, the absurd does not require us to abandon action. It asks us to act while lucidly recognizing that the world will never provide a permanent and final answer. Competitive education nevertheless asks students to postpone their present lives for an abstract future: the next school, the next degree, the next job, or the next position in a hierarchy.
加缪关于反抗与限度的思想，使我相信教育应该允许学生对这种无限推迟说“不”。这种拒绝不是消极退出，也不是拒绝承担责任，而是不让任何抽象目标占有人的全部生活。
Camus’s ideas of revolt and limits suggest that education should allow students to say no to this endless postponement. Such refusal is not a withdrawal from responsibility. It is a refusal to let an abstract goal occupy the entirety of one’s life.
学生可以努力，也可以承认自己的限度；可以追求完成作品，也可以公开一次失败；可以独立选择，也需要在与他人的关系中解释自己的选择。教师的责任不是消除所有困难，而是避免把困难再次转化为对学生人格的判决。
Students may work hard while acknowledging their limits. They may pursue a completed work while openly presenting a failure. They may make independent choices while remaining responsible for explaining those choices to others. The teacher’s task is not to remove every difficulty, but to prevent difficulty from becoming another judgment on the student’s worth.
让学生难倒 AI
Asking Questions AI Cannot Answer
AI能够快速提供答案、图像和看似完整的解决方案。面对这种技术，我关心的不是学生能否比AI更快，也不只是他们能否更熟练地使用提示词，而是他们能否提出使AI失去通用答案的问题。
AI can rapidly produce answers, images, and apparently complete solutions. In this environment, I am less interested in whether students can work faster than AI, or whether they can master increasingly sophisticated prompts, than in whether they can formulate questions for which AI has no universal answer.
这里的“难倒”不是设置谜题，而是把问题带回身体、地点、记忆、社会关系和创作责任。Donna Haraway提出的“情境化知识”提醒我们：知识总是产生于具体的位置和经验，并不存在完全脱离立场的全知视角。
To “stump AI” is not to construct a trick. It is to return a question to the body, a place, a memory, a social relationship, and the responsibility of making a creative decision. Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledge reminds us that knowledge always emerges from a particular position and embodied experience. There is no view from nowhere.
AI可以重新组合既有的语言与图像模式，却不能代替学生拥有一段生活经验，也不能替学生承担一次创作判断。因此，我希望学生追问：AI忽略了什么？谁的经验没有被看见？它的答案建立在怎样的数据和价值结构之上？当学生把现场观察、个人记忆和具体关系带入问题时，他们不再只是调用AI，而是在检验它的边界。
AI can recombine existing linguistic and visual patterns, but it cannot possess a student’s lived experience or take responsibility for a student’s creative judgment. I therefore ask students to examine what AI excludes, whose experiences remain unseen, and what data and value structures support its answers. When students introduce field observation, personal memory, and concrete relationships into a problem, they are no longer merely operating AI. They are testing its limits.
真正的学习，不是得到AI给出的最好答案，而是提出一个只有学生通过观察、实践和反思才能继续回答的问题。
Learning does not mean obtaining the best answer an AI can provide. It means formulating a question that the student can continue to answer only through observation, practice, and reflection.
教学作为共同实验
Teaching as a Shared Experiment
我目前主要教授摄影和交互类课程。人工智能生成影像则作为一种不断进入这些课堂的新方法与讨论对象。课程所涉及的媒介并不是教学的终点：技术会不断变化，软件和平台也会被替代。更持久的能力，是观察现实、提出问题、组织材料、判断图像，并理解自己的表达会进入怎样的社会与技术系统。
I primarily teach photography and interaction-based courses. AI-generated imagery enters these classrooms as an evolving creative method and object of critical inquiry. The media and technologies involved are not the final purpose of teaching: technologies will change, and software platforms will be replaced. More durable capacities include observing reality, formulating questions, organizing materials, judging images, and understanding the social and technological systems into which one’s work will enter.
我无法保证所有学生产生同样成熟的作品，也不希望用统一结果证明教学成功。我更关心课堂是否让学生经历了从沉默到表达、从执行路线到作出选择、从害怕失败到能够解释失败的过程。
I cannot guarantee that every student will produce equally accomplished work, nor do I want identical outcomes to serve as proof of successful teaching. I am more concerned with whether the classroom enables students to move from silence to expression, from following a route to making a decision, and from fearing failure to being able to examine and explain it.
教育不应该把已经在竞争中被排到后面的学生再次定义为失败者。它至少应当提供一个不同于排名体系的空间：在这里，学生可以面对不确定性，形成自己的判断，与他人建立讨论，并为自己的创作承担责任。
Education should not define students who have already been placed toward the bottom of a competitive hierarchy as failures once again. It should offer at least one space outside the logic of ranking: a space in which students can confront uncertainty, develop their own judgment, enter into discussion with others, and take responsibility for what they create.