After touring Shuanglian, Hushan, and Nangang, some might ask: "They've just dressed up the schools with a bit of green, but that's got nothing to do with education, and that's the most important thing! How do 'new schools' bring about 'new education'?"
Wislawa Szymborska, the Polish poet and winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote a poem called "Conversation with a Stone" in which the narrator seeks to enter inside a stone to understand it but is refused several times. The stone says, "You may get to know me, but you'll never know me through" because the narrator lacks "the sense of being part" and "No other sense can make up for your missing sense of being part."
"If you don't believe me," says the stone, / "just ask the leaf, it will tell you the same. / Ask a drop of water, it will say what the leaf has said. / And, finally, ask a hair from your own head."
The stone of the poem could be read as "nature," and it could be read as "knowledge."
"It's only me, let me come in." / The stone replies, "I don't have a door."
In other words, how could "I" get into a stone with no door? It's that "I" didn't know how to take part or how to sense, did not understand that it was always welcoming me with open arms all along.
The point of "new education" was never in the remodeling of schools into "new campuses" but in the experience that students and teachers kept talking about in interviews. By experiencing nature, they gained knowledge. This is what Rousseau stressed in his Emile, or On Education: Children do not learn through words, they learn through experience.
Otherwise, even if nature and knowledge were close by, we would only be able to peek at their form yet not be able to enter. This is the greatest realization one gets from the "new campuses" of Shuanglian, Nangang, and Hushan.