My wife and I have too kids, 2 and 4, so naturally child education is one of our primary concerns. Here are a few of my points:
1) Private vs public school. Saw some debates on private vs public school the other day. Imho both are good choices in themselves as long as the parents don't take the school as the vehicle to outsource their child education. Another important thing is that parents have to agree with that school's education philosophy.
in any case, school is more a nursury, an outside environment than an internal, determining factors for children's growth.
School is NOT a status symbol,
2) Looking back our own growing experience, we are grateful to our parents for 2 things of great importance,
a, they raised us with a few simple principles, and chief among them was striving. The most important part of education is about character,
b, they gave us a lot of attentions. It's somehow ironic that success in life often means less time for the next generation.
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"Children are the messengers we send the the unknown world."
this is a line that I once saw on the walls around a children playground in east side of NYC,
If you think about, there is always one day coming that our eyes will be forever closed, and the world will keep evolving beyond that eternal darkness that we'd sleep in. But our lives will continue... in the forms of our children, and so on.
when we started to have children, my wife and I discuss what kind of children we want them to grow up to become. After a good deal of thinking and debating, we came up with the following:
1) Be brave. If he/she can have only one thing, we want it to be brave. Brave to face the world, brave to face his/her own shortcomings.
2) Be wise. We hope he/she will read, travel, observe, experience, question, and seek the long lasting intelligence of life. We hope he/she will be mature, calm, fair and rational.
3) Be agent of change. When the children succeed in taking care of their own well being, we want them to go beyond.
4) Be ambassador of good will. There should be no more rewarding experience for the children to help others to change and improve their own being and existence.
these will be the messages that we want our children to send,
and, equally importantly, whatever we want them to do, we need to practice it ourselves.
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here I'd kind of be the devil's advocate for once, say a few words from the public school side.
1) a good student from a ok school can do fine
both my wife and myself come from very humble background, my grandma still lives in the poor countryside... none of us attended the schools of super privileges when we grow up, of course it's fortunate that we were the top students in the so-so school in our little hometowns,
We are in no way to say ourselves to be above and beyond successful, and in fact we are not such, but we feel comfortable to think that, as a person, none of us will feel ashamed when compared to the most achieved peers that we had... we'd have nothing to complain should the kids grow up to become just like us,
2) a little horse race,
the neighborhood that we are in now is a private school zone, however our eyes were opened by the expereince of our next next door neighbor, who has a daughter in first grade at a very good private school, and one of our close friends, who had a son going to first grade in a good public school system,
the girl was far beyond the boy before that, partially due to that the pre-school she attented is a quite a bit more sophisticated than the one the boy went to,
however now 6 months later, the gap reversed. The boy became much matured and more articulate, and is now a little gentlemen, and the girl didn't show noticeable improvement. We then learned that the boy has quite some homework everyday, and mommy spent heavy time doing along with him.
3) one of my wife's collegues is a top smart kid from his college, and he later married one of those "trust-fund bebes". She is a very fine and sometimes even commanding person, and self-sufficient, working as a teacher before marriage.
