Not long ago, Yang Taoming, the master of "Success Studies", was arrested on suspicion of fraud, which made "Education Success Studies" once again arouse the attention of public opinion. In the involuted contemporary society, parents are "rushing" in the toxic circle of education, but children often fail to fight monsters and upgrade all the way as their parents expected, but they are ignored. There are thousands of parents of chicken babies, and three or two children of dragons and phoenixes. How should we view the "crazy" educational success? What does it mean behind the radicalization of parents to hope for their children? How should they face the ordinary, ordinary and mediocre life of their children?
Tencent News' Knowledge Roundtable invited Liu Zhiyu, champion of the International Olympic Games and promoter of traditional culture and psychology; An Chao, a young teacher at Beijing Normal University and author of "Pulling Big Children", and Fang Ling, a lecturer in psychology popularization of Chinese psychological society, jointly discussed how parents should let go of their high expectations for their children under the current parenting anxiety.
Core Ideas:
- 1 Educational success refers to the rapid qualitative change in quantitative achievements through rapid means in order to achieve class leaps, and its essence is to narrow education into a utilitarian material symbol and shortcut.
- 2 Only by treating the child as an independent living individual, and at the same time establishing a modern concept of children with both public and private nature, can we adapt to the needs of modern social development.
- 3 The deep-seated reason for the prevalence of young people lying flat may be that they do not want to live a life of personality alienation and continuous oppression of surplus value throughout their lives, but in the face of this alienation and exploitation, they as individuals are powerless to resist, so they can only lie flat.
- 4. The reason why successful parents are chickens and babies is essentially a problem of lack of security.
- 5 The way for the rich class is to compete in the field of culture and art, and to achieve class division. They are using money to accumulate children's artistic aesthetic and cultural heritage, which is a chicken doll way that ordinary families cannot afford, but they do not have to be mystified and noble.
- 6 For the young people born from vocational education, it is very important for them to live a dignified spiritual life.
The "gambler" mentality behind educational success
Q: What is educational success? How did it come about?
An Chao: "Educational success" is not a professional word in the academic field, it is more of a folk concept, which means that in order to achieve a leap in class, through the rapid way to obtain rapid qualitative change, the essence is to narrow education into a utilitarian material symbol and shortcut. There are some popular words on the market, such as "betting on the question" and "hit", and many parents want to burn incense to worship Buddha during the college entrance examination, especially like "gambling", there is a gambler mentality behind it. From my observations, children are able to achieve the highest educational achievements, and while experiences are worth sharing, experiences cannot be replicated. Because everyone has to experience unique "hurdles", pass unique "passes", and eat unique "hardships".
As far as the soil of the era of educational success and reproduction is concerned, in addition to the low birthrate, especially the high expectations and high pressure mentality that parents cannot afford to lose under the previous one-child policy, it is also related to the lack of establishment of modern children's concepts. Although the mainland is in the process of transforming from a large family to a nuclear family, the traditional concept that children are the private property and property of their parents is still deeply rooted. The traditional family concept of "raising children and preventing old age" is essentially objectifying children, viewing children as tools that parents can support and use at will. Even though the family form has changed, many people's emotional structure has not changed with the change in family form, and most parents still see their children as their tools. If a person was once an objectified child, after he started a family, he may also be an objectified parent, that is, all members of the family may always be in a state of cultural distress and emotional weakness that cannot be asked for from each other, unable to fulfill the expectations of the outside world. The traditional concept of treating children as the private property of the original family will lead society into a negative cycle, which will eventually lead to national and social anxiety.
Q: What does the extreme ideology of parents hoping for their children to become a dragon mean?
An Chao: What are the essential attributes of children, this is an unavoidable question in the discussion of educational success. The modern concept of children holds that children are public, not only family and individuals, not only private. "Your child is not your child," is a well-known modern poem that vividly embodies this idea. The idea is that the child does not belong to either his parents or to the family, and that he should be a child of society, a "child" of the child's own.
At present, many people's modern children's concepts have not yet been formed, and the modernization of materials is easy, and the modernization of concepts is difficult. Only by viewing children as independent subjects of life, and recognizing that children are both public and private, can we adapt to the needs of modern social development.
Liu Zhiyu: During the long period of culture, parents often seek their whole lives and never understand what they want in their hearts, so they can only continue the common understanding of social history, and raise their children into a generation of celebrities with the faith and enthusiasm of the glorious ancestors.
When I first became a monk, I told my parents that I would pursue my own life and explore more possibilities for the future, and my parents were very unhappy and had a lot of struggles. But slowly, I found that they all found their own lives.
After I returned to the world, I returned to a life in the worldly sense, and I worked and lived normally. At this time, I found that I had a good relationship with my parents, and we could share things that interested each other, which was a kind of positive interaction between children and parents.
The prevalence of young people is a "weapon of the weak" that needs to be identified and understood
Q: Is the prevalence of lying flat among young people the product of pluralistic values? How should parents deal with this behavior?
An Chao: This is not a question of pluralistic values, but a problem of the opposite of the extreme. When society and individuals reach a certain extreme, they will naturally reverse the regression. Literally, the lying flat of each youth is because the physical and mental load of the individual far exceeds the maximum of his or her own capacity; If we want to trace the deep-seated reason for the prevalence of youth lying flat, it may be that as a "person", he does not want to live a life of personality alienation and continuous exploitation of surplus value throughout his life, but in the face of this alienation and exploitation, they as individuals are powerless to resist, so they can only lie flat. A recent book by Korean-German philosopher Han Byung-chul has become popular, referring to the concept of a "burnout society," a kind of resistance that breeds in a repressive modern society, gradual, weak, rather than violent and strong.
Lying flat can be simply divided into two types:
1. Take a short break. This is a kind of rest after exertion, people always have to take a breath, and it is innocuous in nature.
2. Complete abandonment, or understood as permanent lying flat. This is a kind of abandonment of life, the parties give up hard work, strive to improve, give up the yearning for life, and give up creating value, materially do not rely on their own labor income, to be maintained through parasitic parents or others.
As a mother, if my child is in various setbacks and confused situations, I can understand his short lying flat and can give support, but I definitely don't want him to lose all his self-worth, I still hope that my child can live out his self-worth, which does not mean that he wants to become a good person, but to experience the various tastes of life, joy and sorrow, and do not want him to give up life and life. Choosing to lie down completely in order to escape pain actually loses the ability to feel joy and happiness. If we don't experience pain, we won't know what happiness feels like.
If the child is lying flat, we need to understand the root cause behind lying flat and the real appeal. The most important thing is to be involved in the needs of the child. If the purpose of the child lying flat is to rest, then we parents can give the child time blank and material and spiritual support. If you want to lie flat permanently, want to steal and slip, and get something for nothing, then I as a mother will definitely not support it, and I don't want my children to gnaw at the old. Dealing with children's lying emotions varies from person to person, and parents should explore the degree, severity and specific stage of their child's lying down state, and then make rational judgments.
Q: Who are lying flat now?
An Chao: There are mainly the following types of people who lie flat:
First, people with the qualifications to lie flat (families with solid family bases), their native family gives him the confidence to lie flat anytime and anywhere;
The second is 996 people in the workplace, they work overtime all year round, physically and mentally exhausted, so they often nag to lie flat, but many times these people will not take practical action, they just use verbal lying flat to declare the right to rest they should have;
The most terrible lying flat is the third, that is, children from many middle-class and even low-class families, who are not qualified to lie flat, but continue to gnaw like children born into the elite or wealthy families. I often find that in this kind of family relationship, behind every ordinary family child lying flat, there is a pair of unrestrained parents, habitually cleaning up the mess for the child and wiping the child's butt. In the process of substitution, arrangement, connivance, and back-up, the child loses the ability to be independent and self-responsible. Even if they don't have the ability to get to the bottom, even if they have exhausted everything, they still have to burn the last light for their children in the time of their lives. But when their parents die, how should children who do not have the ability to survive independently deal with themselves?
Fang Ling: There is an impressive joke on the Internet: "There are three kinds of stupid birds in the world: the first one flies first; The second is tired and does not fly; The third is an egg in the nest that allows the next generation to fly. "It's a joke, but the image reflects the parents' style. As far as the first type of parents who fly first, this type of parents do not allow their children to lie flat, so crazy chicken dolls, such as Haidian tiger mothers and tiger fathers who are famous for their chicken dolls, this type of parents are usually high-level intellectuals, whether it is status or education is very glamorous, they are "other people's children" from childhood to adulthood, so these parents cannot tolerate their children are not excellent.
Successful parents choose chicken dolls because of a lack of security
Q: Can good parents accept that their children are inferior to themselves? For example, those parents who graduated from famous schools such as Qingbei Fujiao and successfully entered the head factory after graduation, their children may have mediocre grades, how do they face the fact that their children may not be as good as themselves when they grow up?
An Chao: The first point is that it is difficult to go from luxury to thrift, this is human nature. Many successful parents, their own lives have reached the end of success, their expectations of success and the threshold of experience are unconsciously raised, and achievers are often internal-attributed, thinking that results are often based on personal efforts, easy to ignore the luck behind success, the help of others, the dividends of the times and other factors. Conversely, losers tend to attribute the reasons for their failures to institutional or structural problems.
Second, successful parents often have path dependence and find it difficult to tolerate their children's uncertainty. We live in a time of great uncertainty, and successful parents who have experienced the heights of worldly meaning want their children to be able to replicate their own methods more quickly to reach that height. For parents from Qingbei, they often forget how they succeeded, and may involuntarily lose their original intention in the process of accompanying their children to grow up.
Liu Zhiyu: The reason why successful parents are chickens is essentially a problem of lack of security. They believe that they are achieving established success through a common strategy, and when that strategy fails, or when this strategy does not work for the child, the insecurity that parents can experience increases exponentially. In addition, the problem of social values also leads to the inability of successful parents to tolerate mediocrity in their children. Our current social values are inducing comparisons between each other and competing to achieve their own success, rather than a second way. Under these values, we do not encourage young people to pursue their own lives, nor to contribute to society. We only care about whether our children can make more money and find a stable and decent job. Although such values are based on the general needs of ordinary people at the grassroots level, they are actually distorted and inconsistent. Defeating others can only mean a higher rate of access to social resources and does not create any value.
Q: From an economic and cultural point of view, although the parents of the upper middle class, the lower middle class, and the parents of the bottom families are all "chicken dolls", what are the similarities and differences in the motivations and methods behind them?
Zhiyu Liu: What we want everyone to know is that competition is not the whole of people, but the real world outside of competition. From an economic and cultural point of view, considering the psychology of parents hoping for their children to become dragons and daughters to become phoenixes, it is said that although the parents of the middle and upper classes and the parents of the bottom are inclined to chicken dolls, the motives and methods behind them are completely different. I have contacted some parents at the bottom of the ladder, due to low cultural quality, ideological pattern restrictions and other reasons, their understanding of children's growth and life is more one-sided, and their concern for their children's academic performance is superficial. Then for middle- and upper-class parents, their children's education is actually not so involuted, because their hope for their children is to smoothly transfer their resources to their children. At this time, the motivation of parents of wealthy classes to guide their children is to avoid class slippage.
How to let parents of all walks of life slow down their anxiety and avoid continuous involvement? I have the following suggestions:
First, establish a sound underpinning mechanism. By improving social security and medical insurance, the middle class will not worry about the decline of the class; Give play to the social functions of public welfare charitable organizations, so that young people who have just entered the society have a platform that can ensure their basic survival ability.
Second, accelerate the integration of urban and rural areas. The concentration of people to large cities will exacerbate the hollowing out of the countryside and eventually lead to social unrest. In this regard, our functional departments need to tilt social resources, educational resources, medical resources, etc. to fourth- and fifth-tier cities and urban and rural areas, so that young people can have a platform to develop themselves in rural areas.
Third, change social and cultural concepts. What is really important is to change the social concept of secular success as a model for life from the cultural level, and to truly respect the person himself, rather than seeing him as a tool to achieve the goal of success. From childhood to adulthood, our education is telling children that going to Tsinghua Peking University and going abroad for further study and settlement is a witness of success in life, and children immersed in this value, especially small-town teenagers, will regard going out of the mountains, out of their hometowns, and out of the county as a long-cherished wish in life. In their footsteps of leaving their hometowns, the blood-sucking function of large cities to small cities increased. The concentration of young people in small towns in the city, and the small town gradually floats away, which is the key to the involution of the big city.
An Chao: I have a slightly different view on the relationship between "competition" and "anxiety". I think it is not because competition leads to involution and anxiety, but in the case of unequal resources and scarcity of high-quality resources, the use of a single competitive method to encourage individuals to succeed, this is not healthy competition, not fair competition.
A healthier, healthier competition mechanism is one in which all roads lead to Rome, and everyone can go a different way, and now there are too few roads. Competition is not a natural evil, what we want to change is not competition itself, but the zero-sum game behind the concept of vicious competition. For example, if two peaches kill three soldiers, this is not "competition", this is a means to gain power. There are no multiple tracks, only one track, the starting line is not the same, there is no competition.
So why do different classes choose a common path - chicken dolls? As far as I have observed, different classes of chicken babies have different methods and methods, and their motivations are also different. The way for wealthy class chicken dolls is to compete in the field of culture and art, and to divide the class, they are using money to accumulate children's artistic aesthetic and cultural heritage, which is a chicken doll way that ordinary families cannot afford, but it does not have to be overly mystified and noble. Now there are not often aristocratic lessons - equestrian, golf, etiquette or something. Why do the wealthy let their children learn horsemanship, they value the adventurous spirit behind equestrianism. Why learn golf, to maintain circles, if to develop a ability to focus. Why learn etiquette, because the essence of etiquette is to understand the world, learn to compare hearts to hearts, respect others, and cultivate gentlemen and ladies. But just learning the form is useless, I have seen the children of rich people who are really productive, they will not be poor and love the rich, but can respect people who are "lower" than him, this is the real etiquette. The middle class and the bottom class should not fight for financial resources on these, because the spirit of adventure, reasonableness, etiquette and shame can be naturally acquired in the daily life of ordinary people, but what should be cultivated the most? It is self-confidence, the ability to dare to dream, a kind of goodwill and confidence in believing in others, believing in the world, and believing in the future. Because the middle and lower classes, especially the bottom, they have become accustomed to people's sinister hearts, impermanence in the world, fierce fighting, and are particularly prone to inferiority, but to learn that even if they are at the bottom and have setbacks, they have the greatest goodwill to the world and the confidence to start from scratch and make a comeback.
Back on the path of cultural diversity and social support
Q: Many parents are keen on seedling-promoting parenting, cram schools and interest classes one after another, children have multiple skills, and even many children have already completed the junior high school curriculum in advance at the primary school level. There are also many parents who do not hesitate to spend a lot of money on school district housing. What does this educational arms race mean for children?
Liu Zhiyu: The education arms race is a very worthy of reflection, parents apply their children for various interest classes and cram schools, he feels that each of their children's interests and hobbies should be defined and considered "useful" by society, so as to realize its value. But the thinking of flaunting everything as "value" is itself wrong, and this kind of thinking makes us lose a love of life from the bottom of our hearts - we must make ourselves feel comfortable with some kind of recognition from society. In order to change the thinking of measuring the value of everything, we need to study Zhuangzi's philosophy, not only to learn Zhuangzi's view of "uselessness", but also to think about the purpose and meaning of life from the perspective of the authenticity of life—life itself is an end, it does not need to be of any use.
Parents are using their own means to increase their children's leverage into the future. Recently I was pushing a course on Zhuangzi, and Zhuangzi talked about a concept called uselessness. To understand what is useless, we must first understand what is useful. When we talk about being useful, we are actually being used, that is, when a person feels useful, in a way he is hijacked by external values and does not really enjoy the pleasure of dealing with the thing itself. For the vast universe, human life is just an insignificant meson and does not have any grand meaning, so it is meaningless to pursue meaning itself, which is also the "useless use" advocated by Zhuangzi.
An Chao: I offer another idea from the perspective of mothers, we cannot simply understand parents' enthusiasm for enrolling their children as an arms race, and many parents regard it as a way of hosting in the absence of formal custody resources. Because many young parents do not have the elderly to help take care of their children, lack of human support for childcare, cram schools and interest classes sometimes replace the functions of childcare institutions and belong to market childcare. Why do many parents complain? Because they can't find a more suitable and cheaper place to take over the children. Second, children do not attend cram schools and interest classes to learn knowledge, but to meet peers, and they have too few playmates. So we have to consider, how can we give more parenting support to helpless mothers? How can we create more opportunities for children to play so that they are not lonely?
Q: After graduating from Tsinghua University's master's degree, Pan Chao did not choose to engage in scientific research or enter the so-called "end of the universe", but chose to become a singer, do you think that people like him who have not achieved success in the worldly sense can be measured by simple "success" or "failure"?
Liu Zhiyu: In the era of fierce material competition, what society needs is a kind of spiritual exploration to fill its heart. Most of us grow up passively moving forward on a set trajectory in life, neither fully developing our hobbies nor exploring our career plans. Why is our society involving? Because most people follow the path arranged by others, and ignore their own existence.
An Chao: Pan Chao is a very lucky person, he has the courage to choose again and the confidence of trial and error, he received a good education in Tsinghua, but he can still put down his previous identity and start again, and forge ahead for the love of his heart, which is worthy of recognition. If we return to the cultural level to discuss this matter, traditional culture - Confucianism and Taoism is a state of integration, attack, retreat and defense, if you can't help the world, then choose to be alone, this is what traditional culture teaches us, under the immersion of this culture, we have more space to enjoy our own state of existence. However, due to social, historical and other reasons, this cultural root line has not been well inherited.
Accept mediocre children and mediocre selves
Q: Liu Yu, a well-known scholar, once said in a speech that she doesn't mind her children opening a pancake shop when they grow up. Let's assume a scenario, when parents know from the beginning that their child is destined to be an ordinary person, will they still choose chicken dolls? Or will they still love their children as always?
An Chao: This question cannot be predetermined. Teacher Liu Yu said she doesn't mind her children opening a pancake shop in the future. I don't believe it. Because there is a huge difference between knowing and doing, I believe that when she speaks this paragraph, she does not mind at the conceptual level, but once the child returns to the side and educates and raises him in the real family system, there will be a huge gap between knowledge and action. Especially around me are experts in education and psychology, I find that many people are very good, because this is a "professional speech", but caring for oneself is chaotic, I honestly say that it is difficult to achieve the unity of knowledge and action, I myself have not reached such a complete state for the time being, I am still on the road of exploration.
Liu Zhiyu: If parents can truly accept and tolerate their children, then our educational environment will be much more normal. Without breaking the law and without violating morality, we can allow children not to do so well. We need to see the bright side of human nature and help the child to illuminate the inner flame so that he can become a better version of himself.
If I become a father, I will give the initiative of my life to my child and respect him as an independent person. I live in this world myself, I don't need a lot of external things, I can recognize myself, recognize my present moment, because I allow myself not to be excellent, so I also allow my children to be not excellent. I don't ask my child to be a person, my love for him is a natural flow of love, and I am willing to witness his growth and allow him to make mistakes. I want my child to be able to help me in any way I can when he needs it, but at the same time he is also an independent person and I will pull away when he no longer needs me. This idea stems from the Buddhist idea that everyone is independent, and this idea is very clear in my past practice, and when I was a monk, I was responsible for my own life. So I think that when my child comes into the world, he is also responsible for his life, because his life path will ultimately need to be completed by himself.
Q: How to avoid the fierce competition in education? How to really provide a benign growth environment for children?
Liu Zhiyu: Vigorously develop vocational education and carry forward the typical case of "high quality and low achievement". Our media should report more about the happy lives of ordinary people and not nostalgic for grand narratives. In fact, at the beginning of the founding of the country, our country was inclined to vocational education, at that time education was to serve production and life, and now there is no such way out, so everyone is rolled up. So how to develop vocational education? I think we need to first link the government, enterprises and academia, while encouraging social participation; Secondly, strengthen the publicity of vocational education, so that the whole society can form a good trend of advocating vocational education.
An Chao: Vocational education is indeed a very important channel to ease the competition in education, and there are many people around me who are studying vocational education, but there is a bigger problem behind vocational education that is graduation and employment, and the state has also made great efforts to develop vocational education, but the society does not have enough jobs to accommodate vocational school students. In the post-epidemic era, the world is in an economic downturn, resources and opportunities are becoming less and less, and the road to vocational education has been opened, but how can the subsequent society provide them with a more decent, dignified and secure life? Although many blue-collar workers, such as couriers and delivery workers, may earn more money than the bottom white-collar workers, why are young people reluctant to do it? Because in the society and culture, there is still a certain degree of discrimination against blue-collar occupations, social security for them is not enough, and their lives lack dignity. Moreover, the labor of many factory assembly lines is often repetitive and mechanical, young people are vigorous, there is not enough guarantee, vocational school students are still unwilling to enter the factory. For the young people born from vocational education, it is important for the state to let them live the dignified and more decent life they deserve. In terms of education channels, the state must break down the barriers between vocational education and creative jobs, so that students who graduate from vocational schools can smoothly enter these jobs.
In addition, parents should create more resources for their children within their limited abilities, such as getting closer to nature and cultivating their children's independent personality. Why do many cities now make young people feel depressed? Because in the process of rapid urbanization, the accelerated growth of high-rise buildings destroys the original material structure of nature, which is also a kind of destruction of the inner natural order.
Then parents should let their children learn basic self-care skills. I often hear cases where the child is an adult, and the mother washes the child's socks and underwear. How can children grow up? How can it be independent? In the family system, small conflicts can easily lead to parent-child wars, and in the counseling cases I have received, there are many problems caused by who cooks. 80 Growing up in the era of happiness and peace with abundant materials, being raised as a baby, turning a deaf ear to many things that should have taken care of themselves, but the epidemic tells us that "impermanence" will still come, disasters may still be encountered, and everyone must have a certain ability to take care of themselves in order to ensure their basic survival anytime and anywhere.
Another point is that it is important to rebuild the emotional community of the community. Why is it so difficult for many young parents to bring up their children now? In addition to the fact that the ancestors did not have the spare energy to take care of it, another important reason is that the community is atomized and is no longer a home. I see a lot of parents trying to form parenting communities as a community to help each other, and I'm doing the same.
Roundtable Guests:
- 1 Liu Zhiyu International Olympic Champion, promoter of traditional culture and psychology
- 2 An Chao, a young teacher at Beijing Normal University, author of "Pulling Big Children"
Roundtable Moderator:
- 1 Fang Ling is a lecturer in popular science at the Chinese Psychological Society
Finishing: Fu Yuchen
Reviewed: Cai Juan