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 | Tuesday, April 18, 2000, updated at 15:47(GMT+8) | ||||||||||||
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Sci-Edu | ||||||||||||
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Chinese Parents Told to Avoid Traditional Errors in Family EducationThe China Comment, a leading periodical on current political affairs in the country, published recently an essay entitled "Four Major Errors in Family Education", urging Chinese parents to give up traditional and wrong practices in family education.The article, by Wang Xiaochun, a researcher from the Beijing Basic Education Institute, describes the practices as "Greenhouse", "censor", "sequencing" and "great expectation". In the first category, the parents, forgetting the fact that the family is only the starting-point for the education of a child, turn the family into a "greenhouse" where the child is coddled and becomes weak physically and psychologically and could not stand the winds and rains outside of the "greenhouse". The article warns that the "family greenhouse" should not keep too much higher a temperature than school and society. If it does, the child may feel too much colder, psychologically, when leaving home. The "family greenhouse" should gradually lower its " temperature" as the child grows up, otherwise, the child could never grow up, the article says. In a family where the parents are very censorious and critical toward the child, the child generally lacks self-confidence. The parents base their practice on a wrong theory which says that a good child could only be made through criticism, the parents are authorized to correct the child, and a good child means a child without any fault. But as education experts have put it, children need to be praised for their merits, a good child is made by praise, and to develop a child's strong points is the best way to overcome his weak points. For parents who like to "sequence" their child among his classmates or schoolmates in academic level, they would turn the child into someone who only cares about his academic scores but not creativity, and lacks team spirit and real competitiveness, the article says. Moreover, it says, sequencing the examination scores is not a scientific way to find out the overall capabilities of a child. Good parents should dilute their sense of "sequencing" and, instead, they should help their child increase the sense of competitiveness and creativity, the article notes. The development of a nation does not rely on academic titles but creativity and competitiveness, it says. According to Chinese tradition, all parents pin high hopes on their child. Parents have the rights to hope that their child become a "dragon" in future but they can not force their child to become a "dragon", the article says. It advises that the parents should not try to plan for the child's whole life in accordance with their "great strategy". The child is independent and should choose his own way of life, the article says. What the parents should do is to create various conditions for the child to develop his or her talents.
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