My Philosophy of Education: Respect, Equality, Communication, Patience

The day before yesterday, a friend from my hometown came to visit, and we talked about a teacher from our middle-school days who had once held a school leadership position. She knew his present circumstances well and told me that he had lost his mind. The cause, she said, was that his two sons were exceptionally rebellious, so that parent-child relations were extremely tense. On top of that, because he had once been a school leader and was, in the countryside, a person of some social standing, when his family fortunes declined he fell into depression, eventually came to believe in superstition, took up spirit-medium practices ("Chuma Xian"), and ended up mentally deranged.

After hearing this, I could not calm down for a long time. When I was a student, he, like many other teachers, thought highly of me. He once told me that I would certainly become a leader one day—that even if I returned to a rural production brigade I would become its head, because he thought I had the temperament to charge fearlessly into action.

The strongest impression he left me was the totalitarianism flowing in his blood; his catchphrase was "I am the law, and the law is me." I remember that when we were at school he once enforced the rules almost tyrannically. Once some students set off firecrackers and broke discipline, and no one admitted it. He beat every student in the whole teaching building with the ruler, one by one, until someone confessed.

Our English teacher was highly skilled; his classes consistently ranked first in English scores in the whole town. But because he was free-spirited, he was deeply disliked by this school leader, who eventually simply transferred him to a very bad school. We students all felt deeply sorry about it, but power was in his hands and none of us could correct his mistake.

When I learned that he had lost his mind, I was at first greatly surprised, but on reflection it did not seem strange. His relationship with his own children was poor, and both children became problem children; I am not surprised by that either. Because his entrenched totalitarian mindset doomed him to a crude, heavy-handed approach to family education, such a parent can hardly raise children well.

It cannot be denied that this teacher of mine was a kind-hearted man with no ill will toward the school or the students. By his own standards he had no ill will toward his colleagues either. He wholeheartedly wanted the school to develop better, so a cynical teacher like our English teacher seemed to him a threat to school discipline; if such a liberal element were allowed to exist, it would be hard to manage the other teachers, so he transferred our English teacher away.

This totalitarian-minded teacher of mine taught me politics and cared deeply about his students. I remember that, conditions being poor in the countryside, when many of us caught colds once, he ordered the school cafeteria to cook radish soup with vinegar for us, because he had heard that vinegar-boiled radish soup prevents colds.

When I fell ill at school, he also looked after me. At that time I was class monitor and president of the school student union; before that I had even founded a literary society myself. Such conspicuous identities brought me quite a bit of trouble (which is a major reason I like a low-profile life now); some classmates were always trying to pick on me, and he stepped forward to protect me. I was very grateful to him, so hearing that he had lost his mind made me rather sad, and I very much want to go and help him next time I return to my hometown.

But setting personal feeling aside, I deeply regret the consequences of his style of governance and education. This politics teacher of mine had good intentions; everything he did was for the future of his students and his own children. Yet his parent-child relationship had become so bad that one deeply regrets his way of raising children.

Another of my elementary-school teachers had the same personality. When I was in primary school, his two sons also attended our school, and this teacher of mine would pick up a stool and beat his two sons at the slightest pretext, using such crude methods to educate them, never considering their dignity or feelings. As a result, both sons grew up to be very rebellious and still cannot forgive their father to this day.

Now that I am a father myself, I often think about family education. In relating to my son, I hope to be as open-minded a father as possible; I hope my son will live more happily in the future and do not want to leave too many psychological shadows on him as he grows.

Parents naturally hold a position of power over their children. When children are very small, it is easy for us to believe that control will educate them better. Precisely because of this traditional notion, parent-child education in many families is full of authoritarian, even totalitarian overtones.

Being a controlling parent is the easiest thing in the world; we can subdue children through all kinds of punishment. The problem is that such education inevitably produces serious consequences once children enter adolescence. They may be so worn down by negative influence that they never recover, or, intensely resenting their parents, rupture relations with them, and in the end hate each other like enemies, unable to live in peace.

People raised in such families are easily controlled by totalitarian ideas as adults; they either become totalitarians themselves or become the slaves of totalitarians. Shutting up opponents through punishment or threat becomes their main way of communicating, so they easily turn violent. They are deeply convinced that this is the best way to handle conflict.

Being a truly open-minded parent is not easy; I believe anyone who has been a parent understands this. After all, threatening a child is the easiest thing to do, while communicating with a wayward teenager is very hard, so we easily give up communicating and adopt the far simpler method of violence.

I too can easily make this mistake. To prevent myself from becoming an authoritarian parent and harming my child, throughout my son's childhood I repeatedly emphasized this idea to him: parents and teachers are not always right; we make mistakes too; if you think we are wrong, you can argue back and stick to your own views. I took a lot of criticism from my wife for this; she worried that I was raising the child to be too rebellious, so that he would not obey teachers at school. Thank goodness, my child's teachers all rate him positively, and no teacher has ever complained to us that he is rebellious.

So my child has his own independent personality, and to this day my son and I can still talk humorously and intimately about many things. Although he once, in adolescent rebellion, declared he would kill himself to protest my control—even a father like me still made the child feel over-controlled, which shows how repressed children under even more control must be inside.

Speaking of humor, I think it is extremely important in family education. I seldom lecture the child with a stern face; I prefer to debate with him humorously. When I occasionally need to point out his shortcomings, I use a humorous story to expose his wound, so that he accepts the criticism with a laugh; he often criticizes me the same way. Humor is a lubricant in human relations; it keeps our father-son relationship from reaching the point of swords drawn and confrontation.

My son's junior-high homeroom teacher always thought my child could never have a rebellious phase, because she felt he was a gentle person. But in fact, the rebellious phase is a physiological and psychological phenomenon; its absence would go against nature. If parents and children have long respected each other, enjoy equal status at home, and have built good communication, even if the child shows rebellious reactions, nothing much will go wrong. Only families that have long refused to solve problems through communication and blindly worship authoritarianism will be destroyed by their children's rebellion.

Children encounter all kinds of problems as they grow and can hardly meet their parents' "psychological expectations"—the main reason is that most parents' expectations are unreasonable; they always want the child to stay excellent exactly as the parents wish. And under social influence, the standard of "excellent" keeps rising, so most children cannot possibly meet it. As parents, we must have the patience to "wait for the flowers to bloom" and not always expect our child to rise above others. It is enough, in my view, that he keeps striving through temporary ordinariness and maintains a positive, happy attitude.

I am not very interested in rising to the top, largely because in my teens I was conspicuous and did many things to stand out, which brought troubles I never expected. Some came from others' jealousy; others came from my own inner sense of superiority, which made me arrogant and self-willed and led me to make many mistakes. Thank goodness, in high school I met an excellent teacher who broadened my horizons and opened for me a wider door to learning, and I gradually cured myself of arrogance.

Excellent children mostly have the fault of arrogance; almost none of the outstanding friends around me escapes this spell. I have many friends who graduated from top universities; they cannot see their own faults, while others see them clearly. Honestly, some things about them are very unpleasant, so they are actually disagreeable in dealings with family and friends. Some people who were outstanding in their teens, after marrying and building careers, make their homes utter chaos. Why? They are too arrogant.

Parents need enough patience to wait for their children to grow. My son likewise has many small faults and sometimes makes me angry. But I always comfort his mother that these are unavoidable things in growing up. Moreover, from a human standpoint, no one can be perfect, and we cannot demand that every behavior of a child be proper.

If a person did everything absolutely correctly, that person would not be human but a machine or a fraud. Moreover, the worldly standards of "correct" and "positive energy" are themselves deeply problematic. We must accept, from a human standpoint, all the behaviors in our children that disappoint us. How exhausting it must be to be a completely correct, completely positive-energy child! Why push our own child into such a furnace?

As long as a person does not make mistakes on major issues—does not kill, commit arson, embezzle, abet evildoing, infringe others' interests, or make enemies and sow disaster for himself—that is enough. Human beings are essentially just transient creatures; we sojourn in this world, and a lifetime of peace and joy matters more than rising above others, and happiness matters more than being outstanding.

If one can accept this idea, I believe most of the things in one's children that look like shortcomings to adults can be tolerated and accepted. Children not accepted by their parents are unfortunate; they spend their whole lives ill at ease. Those insecure adults almost all carry, from childhood, the shadow of not having been accepted by their parents.

Education is a long-haul endeavor; those eager for quick results often end up forcing seedlings upward. If the whole society worships authoritarian and totalitarian ways of education, then our children, and our children's children, may have to go on cycling through this mindset and social environment.