Over the past two days, two heartwarming currents have flown through Taiwan’s streets — like sunlight in the winter, shining into people’s hearts.
The first took place in Kaohsiung’s Fongshan County (鳳山), where a junior-high school student walked a person with disabilities across a busy intersection, pushing his bicycle alongside them at a slow, steady pace.
The second occurred at Yilan Riverside Park, where three students from Yilan Junior High School who had gone to the park to play ball discovered an elderly man who had been attacked, his head covered in blood. Faced with shock and potential danger, the boys did not walk away. Instead, they chose to keep the man company, call the police and wait with him until the ambulance arrived.
These actions speak louder than 1,000 words of preaching or moral instruction, proving that kindness is the most invaluable core of education.
In all honesty, adults today have learned to be weary of the world. When they encounter a difficult situation, their first thoughts might be: “Could this get me into trouble?” or “It’s best to avoid any unnecessary involvement.”
However, these students did not stop to weigh the pros and cons. What they showed was the most pure and direct form of goodwill — they saw someone injured, someone in need, and acted immediately. Such simplicity is precisely the force people need most to repair trust in the society.
This should also invite us to rethink the meaning of education. In an era that places excessive emphasis on grades and class rankings, the best education does not actually take place in classrooms, but in the empathy shown when facing the weak and vulnerable. This kind of selfless kindness deserves to be widely shared and affirmed. When schools and the rest of society place greater value on these qualities that extend beyond exam papers, we can plant seeds of hope for the next generation — allowing kindness to become a form of courage that can be passed on.
The students’ good deeds have narrowed the gap between people and allowed us to rediscover trust in its true form. However, this feeling of being emotionally moved should not be confined to online “likes,” but translated into practice in people’s daily lives. Members of the public should be thankful to these children for providing society with a profound lesson in character through gestures that were, to them, entirely ordinary. They serve as a reminder that each of us has the capacity to become that gentle light capable of warming others’ hearts.
Dino Wei is an engineer.
Translated by Kyra Gustavsen
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