The most important thing in education is first and foremost vision and critical thinking, and then knowledge
Wang Jian (Ph.D. in Physics, Germany, Postdoctoral Fellow in Nanoscience at Princeton University, Senior Education Expert in China and the United States)
Source: US-China Science and Education (ID: ACSEF111)
Our Chinese family attaches great importance to education, and we discuss the education and growth of our children every day. From elementary school, to junior high school, to high school, to high school, to university, after entering college, I am worried about my children's future jobs, and after entering the workplace, I am concerned about their next career development......
What does our generation mean about success?
First and foremost, there is monetary success: we want our children to go to prestigious schools, get a good job, and be able to get ahead. In fact, the fundamental idea is that we want them to live a better life than we do, and we are defining success in terms of money.
A year ago, a parent contacted me and said that his daughter was very good and was holding a personal exhibition in a public library, and he wanted me to check it out.
This kid did a very good job of drawing, especially the figures. She was about to apply to college, and her parents wanted me to talk to her, so I drove to her house again.
The girl is what we call abc, and we don't speak Chinese well, so we talk in English. She asked me how I would choose the major I would apply to in the future, and I asked her what she liked to study and what schools she wanted to apply to. She said she didn't know herself, but her mother wanted her to go to medicine.
I was a little surprised that she drew so well and spent so much time on art, and I asked her if she really liked painting and loved art. She replied that she could spend a day in the studio painting without feeling bored.
So I talked to her about Xi and extracurricular activities, and I told her that I could get into the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), the Harvard equivalent of the American art world.
She said that she also knew that she should be able to get into RISD, but her parents strongly opposed her taking the RISD because they thought that they would not be able to earn money in the future after going to RISD, and they felt that it would be difficult to find a well-paid job studying art.
She said her mother wanted her to study medicine, but she wasn't sure if she liked it or if she would be able to spend a day in the hospital with a scalpel because she said she didn't like doing biological experiments in the lab.
Later, I told her that she could also find a high-paying job by studying art, such as graphic design or product design, and that RISD had many students who got offers from high-tech companies such as Apple and Google without graduating, so she could not only do what she liked, but also earn an annual salary of more than 100K while studying art.
Her eyes lit up when she heard this.
Author: Wang Jian
01
We neglect expression and communication
Since 1930, China has experienced various man-made and natural disasters, and various turbulent years, and it has never been interrupted until 1976.
Therefore, in the genes of our parents and even our generation, there is a deep, deep fear and insecurity of poverty, turmoil, and turmoil at the genetic level!
The educational philosophy of today's parents and my generation, our understanding of success, both of ourselves and even of the next generation, I think is directly related to the fear of poverty and insecurity that is in our genes.
By comparison, our American colleagues, people in their 40s and 60s, who are about the same age as us, had parents who lived through World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Gulf Iraq War, but these wars did not take place on American soil.
So, Americans were freed from the fear of poverty, hunger, unrest two or three generations ago. This sense of insecurity has subtly affected our generation's understanding of life, of success, and of education.
So, what is the understanding of education in our generation that we see today?
We are very concerned about the test results, because we have the "sequelae" of the college entrance examination and the imperial examination, and we believe that only when we enter a prestigious school can we be considered a success in education, and at the same time, we think that education is completed after being admitted to a good university.
We believe that majors that are directly linked to high incomes are practical. Therefore, mathematics, physics and chemistry, computer science, engineering, finance, and doctors are our favorite majors.
We pay a lot of attention to knowledge, we pay attention to rankings, we pay attention to exams, we pay attention to awards, we pay attention to competition, but what do we ignore?
What we ignore is expression and communication, ignore deep speculation, and ignore a lot of humanistic things.
Because of my work, I have come into contact with many excellent children, and I will take them to volunteer and give presentations during the summer vacation. I found that although the characteristics of each child are different, there is a trend and tendency in statistics, Chinese children include particularly excellent children, they have a very high GPA, they are the first and second among hundreds of people, they have a perfect score on the SAT, they have won awards in various competitions, and they have more than 10 AP courses.
However, I found that they have a very basic and common problem, which is that when I first walk into their home, or walk into the library or Starbucks to meet them, most of these wonderful children can't look me directly at me, and many of them avoid my eyes.
This made me feel that although it was in the United States, our Chinese education still lacked some very important elements, and we ignored some very important things.
We parents who immigrated to the U.S. from China are more concerned about something I think is called hardware.
When most parents discuss their children's college applications with me, they unconsciously say what their child's GPA is and what the SAT is, which is a subtle influence of the college entrance examination system.
We pay more attention to the high test scores, and ignore the communication between people, ignore the humanities education, ignore the expression, communication, speculation, and ignore the attention to social issues.
02
The first is vision, speculation, and then knowledge
In fact, the most important thing in education is vision.
I think American education has done a very good job in this regard, they focus on how to cultivate a person, and how to give children a higher and broader perspective.
Secondly, education is concerned with how to think and think critically.
The education of thinking methods is the core of American education. Their cultivation of critical thinking is not mathematical and physical logical thinking, but through the study of Xi humanities, through reading history, through writing essays, and through debates, to teach children how to read and how to look at history, so as to cultivate children's thinking methods, the perspective of problems, and the vision of the world.
再次，才是注重知识（knowledge）。
As an interesting example, I sometimes go to parent-teacher conferences for children from China who come to American high schools. What is the worst course for a child who comes to the U.S. in his first year?
Aside from English, the most difficult subject to learn well is history.
The American teacher said that when teaching history, he found that Chinese children were constantly drawing key points in their books. What are the paintings? Chronology and people. The teacher was very puzzled, and I could only explain that this is how we take the history test in China.
The questions in our history exams are all fill-in-the-blanks, and what happened in which era, and teachers in the United States say that most of these do not need to be memorized, because many things can be Googled.
However, what students should know is the impact of a historical event on us today, and why this historical event came about, what its social impact was at the time, and how various historical events are related.
And these are questions that our children from China don't know how to answer. Because there is no simple right or wrong for many questions, for example, what would China have been like if the Xinhai Revolution had not happened?
This is a question of "the benevolent see the benevolent, the wise see the wise", but it precisely cultivates a child's ability and method of analysis, critical thinking and thinking. Therefore, it is through these that American education guides children to learn how to think, how to analyze, and how to do research.
After I finished my postdoc at Princeton University, I started a high-tech start-up, and the company grew from one employee to dozens of employees.
At that time, our company hired a lot of young people who graduated from the University of Science and Technology or Tsinghua University and then went to the United States for further study and obtained a doctorate, and most of them chose to work in high-tech companies after graduation.
What is most lacking in our generation? The ability to speak.
When we meet at a table with MIT or Penn State engineers, I often find that when we can't say two or three words about a technical or market issue, we Chinese-born engineers start to raise their voices, blushing and arguing, turning what would have been a simple job problem into a red-faced dispute.
Many times, engineers from the United States would ask me later why they were so excited, why couldn't they just talk about things calmly? Actually, I can understand very well that it's because of our educational culture.
Similar problems are actually manifested many in our generation. I had a college classmate who was the top student in the college entrance examination in a southern region at the time, and came to the United States after graduating from college and going to graduate school. He was a very smart man, he could play blind chess in college and learn everything very quickly.
But after arriving in the United States, he changed a lot of jobs and couldn't get along with his boss, because he always felt that he was smarter than his boss, why was the boss so stupid, and he always looked down on his boss in his heart, so he always had conflicts and disputes with the boss in dealing with problems, so he was always fired.
Later, it didn't go well until I had psychological problems, and finally I couldn't figure it out, so I just left.
Our Chinese family education often neglects children's mental health because of the fear of poverty and instability in our genes, causing us to focus too much on security. It is natural for us to bring this fear into our educational mood, into our educational culture.
We want our children to be able to walk a stable path, that they can make a lot of money, that they can get ahead, and that they can get rid of this fear in our hearts. However, we often neglect our children's mental health and communication.
Once I took my son to get a haircut, and the barber talked to me and said that the average parent brings a teenager of this age, and she can know what the relationship between the parent and the child is like within a minute.
Because for most Chinese families, within a minute of coming in, she can feel a tension between parents and children.
Adolescent children are rebellious, but our family education neglects mental health.
Therefore, many of our outstanding Chinese children will have psychological problems, and if they are not handled well, they will be reflected through depression, and even more extreme ones will go to a dead end.
From 1979 to 1989, Nobel laureate Professor Tsung-Dao Lee helped China run a well-known science training program called CUSPEA, a 10-year joint Sino-American program to select and train physics talents.
In that decade, every year, 100 of the best university physics graduates or graduate students in China would be selected through examinations and sent to the United States for further study through this program. So in that decade, a large number of China's best physics students were sent to top universities in the United States.
However, decades have passed, and after such a group of top physics students in China arrived in the United States, there are only a handful of people who really stick to it and still work as professors or scientists in physics or physics-related majors in the United States.
Similarly, China is very strong in basic mathematics, and there are a large number of mathematics seedlings who won medals in the International Mathematics Olympiad in high school. However, after many years, very few of these people will eventually go on to do mathematical research or make achievements in mathematics.
All of this is a deep reflection of our educational problems. Many times our children's interests are forced out, and they are reluctant choices, rather than true love and passion.
The cultivation of our children's interests does not go through a natural filtering process.
As mentioned earlier, there is a fear of hunger, poverty, and instability in our blood, so we said that "we are not afraid to learn mathematics, physics and chemistry well and go all over the world", which led to many of us studying physics never comparing our choices back then, and we were blindfolded to a certain extent to this road.
What is the problem caused by this? At a certain stage, we will suddenly realize that we don't have to study such boring physics or mathematics, and when we have the power and opportunity to choose, we will change careers and go to business and other jobs.
It will be difficult for most people to make it to the end, and it will be difficult to produce real results.
In contrast, children in the United States have so many choices from an early age, and in fact they have been facing obstacles, being told not to study physics, not to study mathematics, that stuff is too difficult, too boring, not interesting, you can read this, you can do that.
After this filtering process, people who really still like mathematics, physics, and this kind of very logical and very boring subject, and who can not be tempted to go, must be the real love.
And only true love can persevere, last, and do one thing to the extreme. Only true passion can be truly excellent.
We found that while basic math education in the U.S. may be poor at mental arithmetic, the best of them can still do world-class work and win Nobel Prizes.
How to avoid passing on the fear of hunger, poverty, and instability in our genes (including our parents' generation) to our next generation, and how to shield this fear and lack of confidence in the education of the next generation is an important educational issue and responsibility we are facing!
Only in this way can our next generation dare to face risks, dare to take risks, be able to choose what they are truly passionate about, be able to persevere, and make world-class achievements and successes.