From Expectations to Involvement

When friends give birth to a son or daughter, I always write the same words on the greetings card I send: "There is nothing more painful than bearing children, nothing more exhausting than raising children, and nothing more difficult than educating children." Friends who are parents already always nod and voice their agreement. And because educating children really is the most difficult task in our lives, over the years these friends have all developed their own strategies to tackle it--and so have I.

The biggest difficulty which Chinese parents living overseas face in trying to educate and guide their children is that of how to combine and give equal attention to Chinese and Western culture, and the conflicts between the two to which objective circumstances may give rise. To take studying the Chinese language as an example, I'm sure the vast majority of Chinese parents must have had painful experiences. My own approach is this: I do not specially emphasize Chinese culture or Chinese tradition, but first simply treat "Chinese" as a second or third language to be studied in addition to English, letting my child feel that studying this language is no different from studying other languages such as Spanish, French or German. But as Chinese is the parents' mother tongue, if parents can spend a little time helping their children study, the children will generally make better progress than with other foreign languages. Once the children have got a basic grounding in the language, and most importantly do not reject it, one can gradually build their "Chinese consciousness." Let them first identify with the language, and from there go on to accept their own Chinese ethnicity.

Strictly speaking, Chinese schools do not fully conform to the requirements of the local education system. The teachers' qualifications and skills differ widely, and many of them are parent volunteers without officially recognized teaching certificates, so that Chinese schools can only be run as not-for-profit educational support organizations. Thus the schools constantly face the problem of different teachers demanding different levels of effort from their students. A student may have an extremely strict teacher one semester but a very lax one the next, and this affects their attainment.

My own little girl met with just such circumstances as these. In my view our first response should be to ask ourselves: "What do you expect your children to achieve when they study Chinese?" If we cannot first set our own goals, how will we know what demands to make of our children? Some people say they will be satisfied if their children can speak, understand, read and write Chinese, but this seems to me to be too vague. My daughter is studying at a Chinese school in the western suburbs of Chicago. The school has been open 24 years, and states its goals thus: in their ten years there, pupils should first learn to recognize, pronounce and write 1000 Chinese characters, and then on this foundation further improve their speaking and aural comprehension skills. I see this as a thoroughly practical objective for my daughter's Chinese studies, and she too feels she knows just what is expected of her, so we are both happy with this.

Quite generally, I believe we must get involved in our children's education on a day-to-day basis. We should always keep in touch with our children's academic progress, help them with difficulties in their schoolwork, observe their psychological and physical development and be ready to communicate with them and discuss things whenever appropriate. But we should not overlook the need to get involved spiritually too, and to teach by example.

Many parents are constantly pestering their children to study diligently and improve their character, but they themselves have not opened a book since they left school, or at best only read publications related to their own work. They force their children to practice playing musical instruments every day, but they themselves do not listen to music. Or they forbid their children to read romantic novels, but they themselves never read classical or representative works of literature. Children are not blind, and they are unlikely to even accept such an approach, let alone be motivated by it.

Of course parents can't be interested in everything, but when teaching our children the most important thing is to set a good example. Making the effort to get involved in things together with one's children not only provides them with a role model, but also provides mutual encouragement and forges the bonds which come from working together towards a common goal. Even if one is not really interested in a particular activity, if only one tries and does one's best the children will understand, and this in itself is a way of teaching by example. This is true of education generally, and applies just as much to Chinese language education.

Educating our children really is the most difficult of tasks, for at the same time we are facing up to ourselves, educating ourselves, and overcoming our own weaknesses.