Figure | Courtesy of parents
Text | Miki porridge
I once wrote about a Hong Kong mother who, just moved to Shunyi for a few days, complained that it was tiring to be a mother in Beijing.
Why tired? Because she wants to build a "core education circle" for children:
Define what kind of people children meet on the way to growing up, what kind of friends to make; learn what genre to choose to anchor which famous artist; but also consider the quality of the surrounding musicians, it is best to form a band improvisation, and easily get a dragon of playing, writing and singing...
For her, the first step for the chicken baby is not to find a school, but to study which villa to live in. Visit neighbors, comprehensive assessment, around the central villa area, open up the most promising educational map for children...
That's probably... It can be called "geo-education".
01 / Planning
However, recently I found that the "geo-education" carried out by shunyi's chicken baby mothers is no longer enough to look at, and Shanghai mothers have begun to develop a global strategy in order to find high-quality educational resources for their children.
For example, I recently met a Shanghai mother, and the child's school experience can be put together into a storybook:
When he was in kindergarten, dad was transferred to work in the Philippines, so the family moved out of the country.
The child attended the largest American international school in the local area for two years, and the Foundation of English was firmly established. Because you know, the international schools in Southeast Asia are different from those in China, and the rich and expensive students who can read are all foreign children, and the teachers are all taught in English, which is truly international.
Dad was then sent to the United States, where he and his family continued to migrate, and the children went to an American public school.
In the third grade, my mother suddenly felt that studying abroad was not perfect. Why?
Because it is too difficult to learn Chinese abroad! When my mother went to the United States, she did not forget to carry the Shanghai language teaching materials and tutorial books, and personally taught the chicken baby hand in hand, but in the end she could not escape the result of "writing 6 words in an hour" and finally collapsed.
It turns out that the mothers who accompany homework all over the world are doomed...
Image source: Courtesy of parents
Although this mother finally used the spiritual victory method to choose to let go of the child and sublimate herself, the Chinese anxiety she felt in living abroad still made her determined to take her baby back to China.
And for the sake of chicken baby Chinese and mathematics, The Shanghai Bilingual School was directly abandoned and entered the public primary school at the doorstep.
Do you think that from Shanghai to the Philippines to the United States and back to Shanghai, the story will end here? NoNoNo, for this mother, is just the beginning...
After three years of studying in Shanghai public school, she said that she was facing a choice at that time, whether to go inside the system or outside the system. - That is to say, to continue to study within the system, or to change the path and think differently?
Tangled for half a day, chose the latter.
Because if you want to go to a private primary school in Shanghai, you need to compete for excellence, which is very stressful. Children's mathematics, physics and chemistry is not TOP, even if you go to the top school, it looks like a bully from the competition, confident that it is easy to be abused into slag, and life is downwind.
The educational plan of middle-class families is to make chicken heads rather than phoenix tails.
This is the same as the previous Beijing Daddy Chicken Baby Six Foreign Languages. We don't have any other resources for piano, chess, calligraphy and painting, and we don't know more foreigners, so we can only chicken foreign languages, English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese...
Behind the children who hide their merits and names, they are all the resource precipitation of middle-class families.
Shanghai mother took advantage of her own children, English from childhood to travel around the world to do a good job, mathematics is not bad, choose the international route has obvious advantages, early chicken academic, the future to consider the balance of sound and body beauty, so the baby was sent to Changzhou Waiya.
02 / Resources
Many people feel that Haidian parents' chicken and baby vertical and horizontal planning is very high-end, but in fact, the mothers who take the international route are the real master of coordination:
Do forms, write book reviews, open public accounts, do resumes for children can design an APP; domestic guide to the Olympics, foreign familiar with the Big Olympics and Small Olympics; read grading to understand Lens, AR and GRL; CAT, Common Core as a number of family treasures; British and American education advantages and disadvantages are well known...
Go to Hopkins Summer School in the United States, go to the United Kingdom to participate in the genius camp, go to Switzerland to ski and exercise, go to the Baltic Sea to form a team archaeology... They can do almost anything.
Whether it is Europe, America and Southeast Asia, or from public to international, the struggle of elite families is to help children realize the freedom of education - the freedom to choose.
But these parents who open up time and money to cultivate all-round children have said that they have no desire for education and choose schools by themselves all the way to school.
The Shanghai mother said that after a few years of studying in Changzhou Waiya, the child decided to go to the Uk to study.
Originally, the application of British private schools was three years in advance, but they only had one and a half years to apply in a hurry, and they could only rely on parents to find ways to gather resources to help children strengthen and improve.
Two months of summer vacation, English, mathematics, science, history and geography, all disciplines to find learning resources; accompanied the children to Hong Kong to do interviews twice, before entering the school also went to the United Kingdom to visit the school + scholarship test...
Not only that, but in order to allow children to integrate into the British education system, they also used the holidays to raid the violin and French for two months.
Because French is a compulsory subject at Radley College in the UK, mothers will consider that if a child is placed in the worst class after entering school, it may hit his confidence.
What a heartbreak! Busy with academic assistance, but also do not forget psychological counseling, not only the overall situation of education, but also the implementation of details.
When the mother knows that her child is not a social personality, but she is good at academic research, more suitable for British education, college education than the United States, more in-depth research is not fancy.
Education can always force parents to become old experts.
A pair of children sent to Harvard's teacher Yu Jian said that it is not enough to be a qualified mother of a piano child, and it is not enough to find a good teacher, but also to hold up a mobile phone to record the whole lesson, so that when sparring can help the child correct the posture;
Recently watched a documentary "Ice Moment", ice hockey club children practice, parents on the sidelines are experts - children do actions, dad teaches him how to compete, where to compete, like a coach wielding a stick to analyze and explain...
With a baby can bring herself into a coach and referee, such a powerful parent I have seen too much.
Image source: unsplash
03 / Cost
The resources of middle-class education are precipitated, and it is necessary to mention the cost of education. Although it takes less time and effort than parents put in, it is not so important.
Ranking of global international education expenditure, Beijing and Shanghai are second only to the most expensive in Europe, and they have already honed their affordability and received about 500,000 yuan a year of education consumption.
If you study in an international school in China, the tuition and accommodation fee is more than 300,000 yuan a year, as well as various make-up fees, the cost of coaching to learn languages, learn musical instruments, practice sports, and participate in various competitions and examination fees.
It is not practical to want to lie flat, after all, the middle-class second-generation children who are fighting in the international education circle, which is not trained by their parents to have special skills?
To develop comprehensively, the cost of studying abroad is not too bad.
Shanghai's mother calculated an account for me, sending my children to study in British private schools, tuition and accommodation costs of 40,000 pounds, converted into more than 300,000 yuan. Other insurance medical expenses are about 100 pounds, school uniforms, miscellaneous expenses are negligible...
In addition, there are more than 2,000 pounds of guardianship fees a year, as well as various holidays for homestay costs 45-70 pounds a day, because the United Kingdom has three semesters a year, there is a mid-term leave in the middle of each semester, and Exeat out of the week, which can not live in the school, so it is a large cost.
But if sports don't take the career route, school resources are enough...
Like Radley College in the United Kingdom, as one of the four full boarding schools in the United Kingdom with the same name as Harrow College, Eton College and Winchester College, there are four Forbidden City colleges on a campus alone, and even walking to class can take into account physical training...
Of course, there are serious physical education classes, rugby, golf, kayaking, tall sports facilities are all free, which has to be exchanged for the country, at least one hundred thousand dollars, not including road traffic, and the spiritual consumption of parents.
In this way, 500,000 a year at home and abroad is the average annual cost of middle-class families who choose international education.
It's just that Shanghai's mother said that the same cost, compared to studying in the country to study in the Deep State, which is known as the chicken blood school of the cattle sword harvester, is not as good as going to the British private school, and the chicken can be closer to the cow sword.
Like the Radley College where her children went, known as the "middle school version of Oxford", three kilometers away from the top universities, the admissions officer came to the school for a direct interview, and the probability of entering Oxford can be roughly analogous to the children attached to the Renmin University to enter Tsinghua Peking University.
04 / Cognition
Shanghai moms say they drain their energy and only hope that this generation of children know what they want and enjoy the learning process. If you have the opportunity to study at a prestigious school, you must not let it go, but it doesn't matter if you can't go to school, the most important thing is that -
The process must be passionate enough for the goal to be meaningful.
Years of hard work, the accumulation of knowledge wealth, and the global vision have made elite parents become education experts, they cultivate their children's ability to choose, but they will not make authoritative decisions for children:
For example, if a child reads Oxford "Attached Middle School", if he is not willing to copy the road and has to choose Cambridge, it is also his own decision, and he bears the result himself.
They will feel anxious about the safety of their children, but they are also soberly aware that anxiety does not help the child in any way, and sooner or later the child will have to face everything in life independently.
Whether it is the epidemic or the war, it is only a stage, and the future work may encounter greater difficulties, no parents can always shield them from the wind and rain, and ultimately they still need to be strong enough inside.
The Shanghai mother said that her child is 17 years old and can already bear the results of her choices independently.
Parents will also discuss real-world problems with their children, but they will not blindly take sides. Because the world is full of complexity, the truth is often covered up by rumors, scams are more disguised, and most importantly, the essence can be seen by looking aside.
The closer you get to the essence, the closer you get to the truth. For example, in the Russo-Ukrainian War, the political conflict was behind a deeper economic conflict.
For China's elite families, to raise a child, the material investment is always only a small part, the energy is a part, and the greater investment is-
Broad vision, rich cognition, positive values, and the ability to think critically.