Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business2023-12-19
The love of parents for their children is far-reaching. "Children's education is a lifelong thing, is a long-term choice, like the competitive development of enterprises, but also need strategic considerations, standing in the future to see the present.
Professor Liu Jin of Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business recently wrote an article pointing out that if we conduct a strategic analysis of children's education from the perspective of parents, it is not difficult to find that many of the things people often do in education do not match the long-term goals of education, and the things that education strategy requires people to do are often ignored. Here's what he thinks about it.
Author |Liu Jin.
* |The Economic Observer.
Liu Jin. Professor of Accounting and Finance at Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business and Director of the Investment Research Center.
Strategy is the optimization of a set of long-term options. The development of the country, the competition of enterprises, and the growth of individuals are all long-term choices, so they must have strategic considerations.
Long-term things are not only long-term, but more importantly, there will be many unexpected changes in the process. This uncertainty dictates that our strategy must be dynamically adjusted, so that we cannot deterministically extrapolate the future from the present state, but must look at the present backwards from the future.
The purpose of long-term selection optimization is to start from the future results, work backwards along the timeline, find the optimal choice for each node, and then thread these nodes together to obtain a set of overall strategic planning from the present to the future.
As parents, if we want to look at children's education from a strategic perspective, we must first realize that the education of children is a lifelong and long-term thing.
The bond between parents and children is the strongest link in the world, there is no time limit, and it does not end when the children **. If the child is not well educated, and when he reaches the age of thirty or forty, he still has such and such problems, and he has not matured and cannot support himself, and the parents will never be able to retire from the problems of their children, and they will continue to be troubled by various problems of their children. Therefore, parents must work backwards to develop their children's education strategies, as with all long-term strategies.
Since there are children, a person's life is not isolated, children are an important part of the parents' life, and the education of the children is also an important part of the parents' life planning.
There are many ways to look at your child's education. For example, the perspective of the children themselves, or the perspective of ** and society. The optimization results for each angle will be very different because each angle represents a different benefit. Here we will only analyze the perspective of parents.
In addition to the children themselves, parents must be the people who care about their children the most in the world, and they are also the people who invest the most in their children's education in the world, so their perspective has a decisive role in the growth of their children.
From a parent's point of view, having children has nothing more than three ultimate goals:
The first is to pass on the ancestry;
The second is to raise children and prevent old age;
The third is to enjoy the joy of family.
The importance of these three purposes will change with the times. For example, the inheritance of the family will be very important in the traditional Chinese culture, "there are three unfilial pieties, and no queen is greater".
However, with the popularization and impact of modern ethical concepts, people pay more attention to the happiness of the world, and gradually ignore the various traditional obligations to their ancestors, so the consciousness of inheritance is becoming more and more indifferent.
Another example is raising children to prevent old age, which is an implicit contract between parents and children: parents bring their children into this world, raise them and educate them well, and when the parents are old, the children will repay their parents in turn and give their parents a pension.
However, with the socialization and transformation of modern society to support the elderly (social insurance, pension institutions), the society has replaced the obligations of some children to their parents (different social degrees), so raising children to prevent old age has been diluted a lot.
Overall, two of the three purposes for which parents want children have been largely diluted, and only the joy of family has remained constant. The declining fertility rate of modern people is not unrelated to the weakening of parents' motivation to have children.
So, what kind of children do parents need to raise to meet their three goals?It is not difficult to see that if the children are healthy, full of love, and successful in their careers, parents can meet their own goals to the greatest extent.
There is no need to discuss the importance of health, whether physical or mental health is the most important pillar of all happiness, without health nothing can be said.
Career success is also easy to explain, because career success can provide a material basis. Parents and children, like children, live in the material world and need material help. In order to simplify the discussion, ordinary people often equate the material base with money, but in fact, fame, social status, official position, etc. can provide material support, which has a very similar role to money.
"Love" is a topic that is less discussed by Chinese parents. Some people will ask, from a selfish point of view, as parents, children only need to love ourselves, why do we need to expand love and rise to a universal level?The reason is simple, because love is an ability. Most people have the ability to love themselves, but loving others is not an easy task, as this love often requires working for the benefit of others at the expense of one's own interests.
Children provide financial support to their parents, and parents have more money, but their children have less money;Children solve problems for their parents, and parents are satisfied, but children need to spend time, and their income may be reduced, or they will miss out on opportunities for promotion at work. To love someone, you must see that person's interests as the same as your own, or even more important. A lot of people can't do this because it's a competency that isn't easy to acquire. Selfishness is natural, but loving others requires effort.
It is precisely because love is an ability that if a person cannot love others, he will most likely not be able to love his parents. Therefore, even from a selfish point of view, in order for children to love themselves, parents must develop their children's ability to love others.
There are three ways to cultivate ability:
One is to let children know the importance of love;
The second is to teach children how to love others;
The third is to find various opportunities for children to practice the actions of Xi lovers and do things that sacrifice their own interests for others.
In this regard, many parents have the opposite direction of their children's education, and they will teach their children not to suffer losses and to take advantage of others.
The root of this practice is a misunderstanding of parents: generally speaking, due to strong animal instincts, parents will show a strong altruistic tendency in front of their children, and generally will completely equate the interests of their children with their own interests, or even take them more seriously, the so-called "pity the hearts of parents in the world". It is because of this unconditional love that parents tend to extend their own selfishness to their children, turning "me" into "me and my children".
Parents will think "my interests and those of my child are completely aligned, and as long as the child is good to me, it is good for him to be selfish to others".
But we need to realize that the love between parents and children, if it stays at the level of animal nature, is actually one-way.
Parents love their children, and children will love their children, but on the contrary, the love from children to parents, after the children, is not natural and has no evolutionary basis: parents love their children to help their children survive, and therefore maintain the survival and continuation of the parents' own DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid);A child's love for their parents does not directly contribute to the succession of the family, and from an evolutionary point of view, children should focus on their own offspring.
Therefore, the reverse love of adult children for their parents is an ability that requires education to acquire. The emphasis on filial piety in traditional Chinese culture is to emphasize this kind of love and obligation. However, the limitations of filial piety education are too strong, and a stronger and more basic education is to cultivate children's ability to love others. If children have the ability to love their friends, colleagues, and even strangers, how can they not love their parents who are kind to them?
With health and love, parents are more than half successful in educating their children. The last piece is to improve the probability of career success through education.
How to do this?Let's start by looking at the drivers of business success. There are two components to a person's success in their careers: controllable factors and uncontrollable factors. The former includes education, one's own efforts, one's own choices at important nodes, etc.;The latter includes all macro, meso, and micro factors that cannot be influenced by the individual.
Many people romantically believe that human success is the result of individual efforts, but do they not know that uncontrollable factors play an equally great or even greater role. If we study some people who have made outstanding achievements in their careers, such as big scientists, big entrepreneurs, big stars, etc., we will find that great achievements often come mainly from uncontrollable factors, rather than controllable factors. Time, place, and people are all indispensable.
But parental education cannot be about burning a pillar of incense and praying for good luck for their children in the future. What parents can do is to be aware of the serendipity of success first;The second is to focus on controllable factors, the most important of which is the ability and responsibility of the child.
Competence is the ability to solve problems, including scientific ideas, and the ability to translate ideas into action. Responsibility is the willingness to do the right thing at the expense of one's own resources and interests. Ability and responsibility are indispensable: if the child has the ability but does not take responsibility, he must be passive, prevaricated, or just talk on paper;If the children have the responsibility but no ability, they will only have the courage to do things, and they will bear all kinds of failures in their efforts. The common denominator of competence and responsibility is that both are proactive, not passive.
Willingness to see problems, to be able to see problems, and finally to be able to solve problems requires initiative. Therefore, it is very important to promote children's initiative from an early age. A large part of initiative is natural, but there are also parts that can be acquired.
One way to do this is to help your child "discover" initiative. A child may be bad at math because his mind is deserting while he sits there reading a book. But if he likes to play football and you lock him in the house, he will try to sneak out and play football. This is initiative, and love can produce initiative.
So if parents can help their child find something he is passionate about, he is more likely to have great initiative in this matter. Extracurricular activities play a very important role here.
The purpose should not be to develop children's test-taking ability or master a skill, but to give children a lot of experiences to help them find what they love to do. Because only love can persevere, and only persistence can be excellent. So in order to excel, you must find love.
The second way to help children gain initiative is to make them understand the importance of something. Using mathematics as an analogy, if a child refuses to learn Xi mathematics, it is obviously very unlikely that he will grow up to be a mathematician.
But the things that need to be made for him to understand are:
First, since he doesn't like it, he will not be encouraged or asked to do anything related to mathematics in the future
Second, since mathematics is a basic skill and is directly related to entrance exams, it is important to master the basic skills of mathematics, because failure to reach the basic line will cause huge losses in school, so that the child cannot pursue what he is really passionate about.
After understanding the connection between learning Xi mathematics and the child's pursuit of his passion, the child is likely to transfer part of the initiative to pursue his passion to learning Xi mathematics, because the purpose of learning Xi mathematics is actually to assist him in pursuing his passion.
Since initiative is so important in education, what role does academic education play in the development of children?There are two facts in this:
First, people with high academic qualifications and graduates of prestigious universities are generally more successful than ordinary people, with higher incomes and higher social status, but the extent of the excess is not very large;
Second, the vast majority of highly educated people and graduates of prestigious universities do not have remarkable achievements, and the vast majority of people with great achievements do not necessarily have high academic qualifications or graduated from prestigious universities.
A good university education certainly has a role in people's growth, but the effect is far less than people think. The core reason is that a good university can recruit students who are already excellent, rather than a student with mediocre qualifications who can be cultivated into a talent after going to a good university.
Therefore, if an excellent student with strong ability and responsibility fails to go to a prestigious university for some reason, he can still become a talent in an ordinary school, but the process is more difficultSimilarly, a student who has no ability and responsibility, even if he has experienced the baptism of a prestigious university, has a very low probability of becoming a talent.
Therefore, parents must have a deep understanding of the role that academic education can play in their children's growth.
Academic education has two functions:
The first is to let children master basic knowledge to improve their ability;
The second is to bring brand effect to children who can go to good universities through the implicit information displayed in the selection process.
Brand is a real asset, and a degree from a prestigious university can bring children higher credibility and more opportunities. When dealing with strangers, or in a bureaucratic system, a degree from a prestigious university can often be of a big difference.
But in the larger free market, this brand effect is short-lived, and the only effect is to bring some opportunities for corporate interviews to children, once the employer has more ability and information on responsibility in the interview and trial, this brand effect will be greatly diluted.
Therefore, in the long run, learning Xi knowledge and cultivating ability should be the core of academic education. The reason why parents all over the world focus the entire educational process on going to a good university is that vanity is at work, and parents try to turn their children's schools into bargaining chipsThe deeper reason is because people often have a psychological misconception that going to college is the end of education and growth.
Don't you know that going to university is actually only the starting point, and the main body of learning Xi and growth is to continue to hone in practice for thirty or forty years after joining the work. Cultivating ability and responsibility is a lifelong thing, and going to college is only a small fragment in between. In fact, even if you learn Xi knowledge, school is not the most important place. Reading books and reading newspapers, if you can persevere, will shape the composition of people's knowledge far more than taking a few courses in college.
After we analyze the education strategy of their children from the perspective of parents, it is not difficult to find that many of the things that people often do in education do not match the long-term goals of education, and the things that education strategy requires people to do are often overlooked.
It follows that failures in education, big and small, should be the norm. If we summarize the key points in the analysis, we finally find that there are only a few core points in education:
First, we need to protect our children's physical and mental health
Second, it is necessary to cultivate children's love for others;
Third, we should cultivate children's good Xi of using their brains and loving to read;
Fourth, it is necessary to cultivate children's ability and responsibility, and cultivate initiative;
Fifth, try to give your child a variety of experiences to help them find their passion.
Other than that, everything else is the little things.