I just finished my traveling to USA last week. During the last two days of the trip, I stayed at my friend Simone's house in San Francisco. Simone has two kids, a newborn baby aged 1 and a lovely girl in her first grade. It's quite joyful when I stayed with the family, not only because of the comfortable living environment, but also the way the family members interact with each other, which is interesting and equal rights based.
Nina, Simone's daughter, is such a lovely elfin. Every day, she finishes school at around 14:00, and after that she needs to take extra classes, including piano, paintings, language, and swimming. But when I tried to ask her if she felt reluctant or stressed for those classes, the answer I got is, “Not at all!”
She told me she's excited for each class she’s attending. Actually, she's a girl interested in everything and is always curious about this world. Guess what, her favorite major is science! During our chatting, she described to me her daily life in details, and talked about her classmates and teachers, how they decorated their houses for Halloween and Christmas… you can feel the joy from deep of her heart when she tried to express all of these clearly.
That reminds me of my sister's son, who's 4 years old now. As I know, he also needs to take quite a lot of “hobby-developing” pre-school classes like Chinese, Mathematics, Piano, English, chess, etc. on a daily basis. I remember when I asked the same question to him, if he just felt very stressed or reluctant. The answer is quite different from Nina's.
Both the kids in China and USA take extra classes, but what we have to agree is that there's too much pressure on Chinese children's shoulder when they're kids.
There are many online articles nowadays discussing about the strengths and weakness of the different education mode in China and US. Many Chinese families agree that it's better not to send their kids studying aboard before they reach the age of entering into colleges. The main concern is the pre-college lessons are comparatively a little too “easy” in US's education system, while the high-level education system there is much mature than in China.
Good education should be nothing but to raise kids' curiosity and develop their IQ and EQ. However, here in China, we have to say it's a score-oriented education mode, and everything our parents are trying to do for their kids is for a same final target only – their kids success in passing the university entrance exam of China.
It's really unfortunate that all thestudents study so hard for so many years, from as early as 4 until 18 years old,is just for an “EXAM”, that is regarded to determine their whole life. Andduring all this long period, their natural demand as a kid can not be fully fulfilled and the knowledge they learn may be eventually unpractical for their future career. Although we often say the society is becoming more and more diverse and there're lots of opportunities available for different career paths, and we allknow this competition among parents are a little crazy, Chinese families just dare not to leave their kids behind…
