Wait till the kids get older, and you'll feel it when that sense of control will slowly slip away from your fingertips. It might not be a bad thing, in some ways. Kids get more independent. Kids can get to choose more, and parents will acquiesce. Parents might still push, but kids will push back. Increasingly, the society will push back too. Case in point, the school debate in Princeton, New Jersey.
No doubt there's a cultural aspect to it, in which Asian-American parents (particularly first-generations parents) expect the world from their kids, pitched against the largely liberal-minded (if you can call it that), mainly white American parents who want everything to be fun and game to their kids, with the slightest hint of stress as a bad thing. Anything short of a hurt feeling or bruised ego must be banned.
I am the first to admit, I'm partial to the debate. I'm asian, I'm a first generation parent to my kids born in this country, I was raised in Asia even though I've lived in US for decades now. Having lived and studied and worked in US and four different countries over three continents does lend me a certain perspective on things.
Believe me when I say to you, you don't want to be brought up under that Asian system. True to God. I was brought up under that "stuffed duck" education system (as the Hong Kongers call it), ie. you just stuff the duck to fill it up, never mind how the duck feels, never mind if the duck needs the food, never mind if the duck can actually absorb anything. It's more about the process (the stuffing, the grades, the exams) than anything else. It's almost sad to admit to this, but I have always thought the system works perfectly, even though I hate most of the teachers, I do love my school. I hate the learning part (because that's what the teachers stuff us), but I love my friends in school. It's like, you can be patriotic and love your country, but you hate the government.
That kind of dis-associative thoughts never really crystallize in my head until much later in life when I have experiences in other forms of systems.
As it turns out, I was pretty good in that old Asian system. I excelled in tests/exams because I like the adrenaline rush. I have a pretty good memory, and I learnt to beat that system. I never bothered to study because there's no point, the teachers didn't want or expect you to. You get "A" or 100% full mark when you can regurgitate texts from books. You don't need to understand the text as long as you can do brain-dump well. It makes the teachers' job easy in grading because if you quote the full text from textbooks, it would be full mark. To game that system, I would always do last-minute all-nighters on the night before the tests or exams, crammed as much from the textbooks into my head (the short term memory of my brain), then dumped everything on the paper, and voila, you're gold.
I'm sure for anyone who reads the above way of "learning," you'll see the problem in it rightaway. There's no learning involved, there's no understanding in the materials, there's no initiative (because everything was driven by what the tests/exams demanded of me, nothing else). I got good grades fairly easily even though my mother would get upset at me. She would see me loitering around most of the time, then all-nighters the nights before exams, and she oftentimes couldn't understand how I got the good grades.
It wasn't until I graduated from high school and moved away from that system, when I started college overseas, that I realized the huge pitfalls of the "education" that I've received. Good grades notwithstanding, I felt so inadequate because I never developed deeper understanding of anything that I should have mastered. I didn't have sufficient initiative to push myself forward since the western system expect me to push, and I didn't know how.
Catching up with the 12+ years of prior schooling in the few short years in college is hard. I cannot tell you how stressful it was. But no, I never once considered quitting or suicide, because they were not an option (I have told myself that much, without anyone telling me so). I've decided that the college degree is what I've wanted, and I'll make it happen, no matter what.
All the while, I have to work multiple part time jobs during college in order to pay my own way. (No, I never asked my parents to fund my college.)
So, you see, I know a thing or two about stress, and about dysfunctional educational systems too. I've had first-hand experience of education systems in four different countries, all of which are different. If there's something to say about adaption, I can add a few footnotes to it too.
Back to to the NJ parents' debate about the schooling change/reforms, I can totally see the fault line.
On the one hand, there are the Asian-American parents who feel that even though it's an excellent public school district, the superintendent is introducing the changes to make school/learning almost too easy. They are always pushing their kids to go for AP classes, extra-curricular activities like music and math, without which, the thinking goes, their kids would have less chance of success in this foreign land (even if their kids might be born here, and are as much an American as the next white kid). Every chance to gin up the kids' chance must be seized on. Expectations and the bar must be set high, because anything otherwise is not an option. It is the constantly under siege mentality that I don't think any white American parents who themselves grew up comfortably and didn't have to compete too hard (against 1.3 billion people of your own kind, perhaps) would never appreciate or understand.
On the other hand, there are the largely white liberal American parents who worry their kids are under too much stress, that there's too much work, that schools are no longer fun, that johnny and jane are not eating well, so much so that things must be too difficult for them. These are the parents who are equally adamant as the Asian-American parents, and who would not hesitate to jump right in to lower the bar, just so that their kids, all kids, can get through the hurdle. Afterall, isn't that saying goes, that no child should be left behind, that every kid is a success. If that is indeed true, and if any kid feels like they can't make it, the altruist impulse must be to stop the game, and wait for the kid to catch up. Well, won't we all feel good in the end (!!).
Dramatization aside, I'm sure everyone sees the problem here. On the one hand, one group wants to raise the bar higher so that only the most discerned kids (their kids, hopefully) will get through, while another group wants to lower the bar so that every kid will make it to the finishing line. Can there be any middle ground?
Before we get to the middle ground discussions, one has to acknowledge a few facts and understanding:
- As noble and altruistic a goal as it is, not all kids will succeed, at least not by the same standards to everyone anyways. In a society, you need doctors and lawyers, but you also need car mechanics and coffee shop workers, and kids don't follow the same path, nor do they need the same cookie-cutter kind of education or training. Some people are never cut out for academics, much as some people are not cut out to be soldiers. Should we push everyone to the frontline in a battle because we believe everyone should be a soldier? Of course not. Some might want to drop out of regular school and learn a trade. Does that make them less of a success? Well, if you measure everyone by how much they earn, then yes they are less successful. But should we define success so narrowly? As most, if not all, liberal-minded folks would agree, one has to follow their heart and choose a path that makes them happy in life, and if these kids are happy to be a tradesman (albeit earning less), then they are as much a success as the next CEO who might be earning millions in compensation. Unfortunately our society these days have conditioned (brainwashed, even) everyone to thinking that EVERYONE has to get a college degree and go for white collar desk job to be successful, so much so that every other kid who does not want to follow this path is labeled a failure. This is just so wrong.
- How much stress is too much? Nobody can tell exactly, since everyone's threshold is different. While no one wants to see any suicide to happen, is it really true that every stressful situation would lead to that one conclusion when a kid will take his own life? I don't think so. I can't recall how many times I felt almost suffocated (literally gasping for air) with pulsating heartbeat when I thought of the hurdles ahead of me during college, the amount of work (and the self-learning that I had to do before I could do those work), and how little time I had. It could be said that the one driving force in me, was the fact that I really do want this (to finish the college degree), and I'm generally a stubborn person. And so, I kept going, and I slowly learnt to master my own system to deal with stress, to multi-task, and to prioritize the tasks. I have to learn it myself, in my own way, in my own time. My parents could not have done for me, however much they might want to help. No one can, and no one should.
- Parents need to understand that kids have to learn to deal with failures, as much as how they need to learn to deal with stress. Parents cannot do the learning for the kids. It is oftentimes the parents who cannot deal with the idea of failures that they push the kids forward (as the Asian-American parents do), or pull the kids back (as the liberal white American parents do), worrying that their kid cannot compete, that the kids will feel bad and hurt their pride/ego.
There's almost no point pushing your kids to be just as academically good, but be a "square" in everything else. Getting into a brand-name college might give your kids a leg-up in johnny's first job, perhaps, but three to five years after graduation, there won't be much discerning difference anymore.
The kids need to be doing the pushing, ie. that driving force (of what they want to pursue), need to come from the kid. It cannot and should not be coming from the parents. If the kids don't have that, they would languish later on in life.
At the same time, we can't be lowering the bar of expectation every time a kid says "work is hard." What kind of message do we, as adults, send to the kids by removing every chance of hard work so that they expect everything else in life to be easy and a piece of cake? I still recall the tremendous amount of satisfaction and pleasure when I finally made it through one of the most difficult classes in college, all on my own. I felt like I could take on the world, if I could get through that, and I did. I would not trade that feeling for anything else. Those liberal parents should take away that chance of push and hard work that johnny should be doing, so that he would learn to stumble, stand up again, and make it on his own terms. As a student, that kind of learning and discipline would benefit the kid for the rest of his life.
So, where's the middle ground?
One has to ask, with this very excellent public school system being around for so long, why is it that suddenly everyone thinks it's broken and needs to be fixed? Why do the kids need more work, or less work, today when kids from decades past didn't and those alums all did just fine?
Is it that the middle ground should have been more choices? Why does the school superintendent need to take away the work, effectively lower the expectation of the kids to make things easier? Why can't there be different track, where kids can choose their pace, the same way one can choose between taking (or not taking) AP classes? Surely if those white American parents want less stress for their kids, their kids can opt for the less intense classes, whereas if the Asian-American kids want to push, they can opt for the AP classes.
But of course we all secretively know the answer to that, even if no one wants to admit it outright, when we see the kind of passive-aggressiveness of so many liberal white Americans in general. While they want to make things easier for their own kids, they realize that their kids will be at a disadvantage if they don't take AP classes (for example). In order to maintain the status quo, they cannot allow any other kids to get ahead (the Asian-American kids, in particular) so that their own kids can catch up. And the only way for that to happen, is to change the rules of the system, alter the rules of the game in their favor.
You can see now, that I'm a fairly aggressive person, and I'm not a pushover. Hence, I have a particular distaste of passive-aggressiveness. I see all these being played out in my kids' current school system as well, although not as acutely as those in NJ.
Given my own experience, I do constantly remind myself that I need to step back, to let the kids learn independence, to allow them time to find their own internal driving force. As I told them many times before, as they get older, I'm not going to do the pushing anymore. I do have certain expectations of them, and I do know their ability (of how far they can go), but the rest (what they want to do, where to push it) will have to come from them. For parents, this is a constant learning process to letting go, and to have faith in the kids that they'll push through ok somehow. My parents had the wisdom to let me take the driving seat and decide what to do, I can only hope I learn to have enough trust in them to let them drive. It's not easy, and I'm still learning the rope.
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