Author:Insight · Seven
When you are looking up at the mountains, others are already looking down on the whole world from the top of the mountain.
01
Some time ago, I watched an interview with young sociologist Jiang Yilin:
She spent seven years tracking 28 students from Beijing's top high schools, all of whom came from elite families with high incomes and high academic qualifications.
Most families own at least two houses in Beijing, and some have properties in other provinces.
Many of their parents are alumni of Tsinghua University and Peking University, and some have returned from studying abroad.
Nearly half of these 28 children were admitted to Tsinghua University, Peking University, and Fudan University, while the rest were admitted to the world's top universities such as the Ivy League, Oxford, and Cambridge.
After graduating, they work on Wall Street and Silicon Valley, earning more than 10 times the average salary of their peers.
Why are all of them able to get into top universities and become proper winners in life?
Through Jiang Yilin's investigation, it can be summarized into several reasons:
First of all, the parents of these children are particularly good at strategy.
Among the 28 students, 17 took the college entrance examination, and 11 of them received varying degrees of extra points through independent enrollment and other policies. There are some very hidden ways to add points, such as the Olympiad Winter Camp.
Among them, Shiying's mother graduated from Tsinghua University and is also a professor in the Chinese Department of the university.
She can not only analyze the questions for her daughter when she participates in independent enrollment and teach her to get a higher score, but also consult the admissions officer of Tsinghua University before the college entrance examination to guide her daughter to fill in the voluntary application.
Second, there is economic support that cannot be ignored.
If a child has to prepare for the SAT exam, he travels back and forth to Singapore 5 times in a year, and the cost of airfare, hotel, registration fees, etc., is not something that the average family can afford.
There is also a child cultivated by elite families, under the subtle influence of their parents, who know how to handle interpersonal relationships with ease. They are "at home" on campus and are more likely to succeed in the workplace.
After reading it, people can't help but sigh:
It's no wonder that most of the students at top universities come from wealthy families.
The financial support they have behind them, as well as the resources, vision and pattern brought by their families, are really not half a star worse than ordinary families.
02
Jiang Yilin's research reminds me of a video I watched before.
The video blogger is a Tsinghua scholar, and in the video, he is full of emotion:
"When I was admitted to Tsinghua University, I found that ordinary parents, no matter how hard they work, it is difficult to train their children to become that top talent. ”
He said that he was born in a small rural village and was admitted to Tsinghua University through his own hard work.
After coming to Tsinghua University, he found that most of his classmates, their parents were either university teachers, entrepreneurs, and senior officials.
At first, he didn't feel any difference when he contacted them, but the more he went on, the more he found that there was a big gap.
At the beginning of the school year, he was lucky enough to be admitted to the "Qian Xuesen Mechanics Class", which is known as Tsinghua University, and felt that he was very remarkable.
But after coming in, I found that there were 28 students in the class, 80% of whom were guaranteed through the competition and did not take the college entrance examination.
And what he learned in college, people have already learned in high school.
Many students participated in various scientific research activities in their freshman year and entered the strongest laboratory;
During the winter and summer vacations, with the help of their parents, many students entered top schools such as Harvard and Cambridge to communicate, do scientific research, or go to the top 500 domestic companies for internships.
And he is still repeating exams, revisions, and studying every day, like a machine that keeps running.
And many students, under the influence of their parents, have a more long-term vision.
For them, Tsinghua University and Peking University are just a stop for them, and going abroad for further study, or starting a business and starting a company, is the higher stage they are pursuing.
They themselves know why they want to learn, what they like to learn, and what they love from an early age, and their parents also have the ability and resources to support their passion, so they are naturally motivated to learn.
The gap between him and these classmates opened up as early as birth.
As another blogger put it: when you're looking up at the mountains, others are already looking down on the world from the top of the mountain.
This is the heart-piercing truth that children from ordinary families must face:
Even if you try your best, the ceiling you can touch is just the starting point of others.
03
In recent years, the involution of education has become more and more serious.
How many parents of ordinary families are desperately trying to give their children a good supplement and cultivate all kinds of talents from an early age; sending their children to expensive interest classes and summer camps, and smashing pots and selling iron also to "gild" their children.
But the question is, can you really get the child to climb to the sky in one step by doing everything in this way?
A couple from Hangzhou, in order to give their daughter a better future, decided to send their daughter to study abroad.
I also followed the trend and chose the more popular finance major.
In order to make up for their daughter's tuition and living expenses, the couple gritted their teeth and sold the only house in the family, spending a total of 2 million on tuition fees for 6 years.
Unexpectedly, after her daughter returned to China, she found that the background advantage of studying abroad was actually very small, and she was not studying in a famous foreign school, so she repeatedly hit a wall in interviews.
Later, I finally found a job, but the basic salary was only 2,000 yuan.
Chinese parents who have been squeezed dry are going through a deliberate chicken baby scam.
They only see the halo behind the famous schools, forcing their children to frantically brush up on questions, apply for various cram schools, participate in various competitions, and want to copy the path of elite families.
I can't see at all that behind myself and those elite families, there is actually a gap in family resources and cognition.
Teacher Zhang Xuefeng once said: Learning finance, in fact, is to fight for resources and contacts.
Either you have a good family background, have resources, and have Bole to take you in the industry, or you are from a prestigious school, have high emotional intelligence, and have connections.
If you are not from a prestigious school and your family has no help, then you can basically only do a sales position.
Ordinary families blindly chicken babies, not to mention wasting a lot of energy and financial resources, and may also produce a "three no children" with "no goals, no dreams, and no motivation".
04
The British BBC television station has filmed the documentary "Seven Years of Life", which tracks and studies 14 children from different social classes.
From the time they were 7 years old, they were filmed every seven years until they were 56 years old, a full 49 years of shooting.
The end result of the study is astounding:
The vast majority of children have not been able to get out of their original social class, and their wealth status is strikingly similar to that of their original families.
That said, most parents have to accept the fact that children will largely copy your class.
But there are also very few children who can break the fate of intergenerational transmission and achieve a class jump.
Among the 14 children, there is a lucky one named Nick, who is the only case of achieving a class leap from the bottom.
Born in the countryside and walking three miles a day to school, he was reserved and shy and not as noticeable as other children.
Until one day, an illustrated picture book about planets sparked Neck's interest in science, and he began to frequently look for books of this kind to read.
Later, in a class, the students enthusiastically discussed aerospace knowledge, and the teacher enthusiastically encouraged Neck, saying, "You usually love to read so much, you must know a lot about airplanes." ”
The teacher's casual words made Neck deeply encouraged, and since then he has become more and more obsessed with technology.
At the age of 21, Nick was admitted to Oxford University to study physics, then immigrated to the United States to do nuclear power research and taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The famous psychologist Gardner said:
"Every child is a potential genius, but the direction is different, only by understanding the child's intellectual strengths, can the child be cultivated into an excellent person who adapts to social development. ”
Every child has their own unique potential and talents. For ordinary families, the chicken baby fights not only the resources and financial resources of the parents, but also the vision and cognition.
Breaking the barriers of thinking and finding the right direction, ordinary children are not unable to turn the tables against the wind.
Lynn, the screenwriter of the famous musical Cats, has had a learning disability since she was a child, but with the help of her doctor and her mother, she eventually became a talented dancer.
The Wright brothers, who invented the airplane, opened up their lifelong hobbies from a pile of broken copper and iron because of the support of their parents;
Zeng Wenyi, a famous snowboarder in the mainland, was directly admitted to the ICU because of excessive study, and later his parents gave up the chicken baby, so they inadvertently discovered his skiing talent and sent him on this path.
Not confined to the "chicken baby" dilemma, helping children find their own advantages, and then cultivating them according to their aptitude, so that their talents can be infinitely amplified, is the way for ordinary families to break the game.
05
Every child has the potential to become an excellent person, and it is the different education of parents that gives children a different life.
Maybe we try our best, but the child is still an ordinary person after all.
But the mission of parents is to stand firmly by the child's side, to encourage him as much as possible, to lift him, to stimulate his potential, to tap his talents, and to send him to see the wider world.
No matter what the outcome is, you must work hard with your child in a down-to-earth manner.
Give it a thumbs up and encourage all parents.