Growth-Minded Education: The Process of Solving Matters More Than the Answer

Introduction

Making a child is easy; being a good parent is genuinely hard. Along the road of a child’s growth, what different modes of learning does each stage of life call for? How do we guide a child toward higher realms of knowledge, into the company of the excellent? If they go abroad to study, what difficulties might they run into? And if the parents are entrepreneurs, how early should a child begin preparing for the family’s succession?

Joyce, a partner at Flourishing Tree Family Office, opens this column on the education of family children to share, as someone who has walked the road herself, experience that may offer parents a little insight and help.

”On Awareness”

In the stories of many entrepreneurs, there is talk of the moment they left home. The protagonist is often unlike their brothers and sisters—unwilling to settle into rural life, resistant to doing the same work as their parents, setting off alone for the city with a single bag over the shoulder. Parents must recognize that whether a child is “obedient” or “disobedient” is in fact a question with two faces.

When it comes to how they educate, parents constantly face the dilemma of whether to let go. Looking at it along the axis of time, we are often afraid to let go: we think the child is still young—how could they understand?—and so we want to keep them by our side. Only then do we feel they are being filial, and only then is our authority as parents not threatened, which is something that matters greatly to those of us in the East. So when parents want a child to obey, it is often not because obedience itself does the child any good, but because it flows from our own conservative instinct. In reality, a person may feel powerless before their boss, their spouse, their own parents—and so they turn around and place that pressure on their child. Unable to control their own life, they transfer that need onto controlling the child.

The reason we see so many entrepreneurs emerge in the West is that Westerners regard the child, too, as an independent individual, with the freedom and the right to make their own choices. In our Eastern society, the education we receive is steeped in the spirit of Confucius and Mencius, of Confucianism, and it constrains through notions of ruler-and-subject, father-and-son. I believe that “cultivating an entrepreneurial spirit” is something that provokes a great deal of unease; in China, the so-called “good child” is almost always the obedient one, and we rarely praise the rebellious child.

But as parents we ought to have this self-awareness: to constantly ask ourselves whether we are managing too heavily, whether we are respecting the child’s decisions—rather than using “I’m his mother” to dictate to the child or to hold them hostage morally.

Using parental authority to solve a problem can sometimes settle the matter in front of you more quickly, because the child loves you and does not want to make you sad, and so they suppress themselves inwardly. Over time this becomes a kind of habit, and when the suppression accumulates to a flashpoint, it erupts all at once.

What the future will lack is not knowledge, but method. Education in the past was “knowledge-based education,” and it produced a great many people of this sort: their schoolwork was excellent, yet the ways they proposed to solve problems were never quite what we needed. Because they believed every problem ought to have a direct answer, and did not stop to think about “why,” or about “how to solve it.”

The concept of “growth-minded education,” by contrast, is not about telling you the answer, but about telling you how to solve the problem. This is not merely a change in the nature of the knowledge; rather, we should participate together in the child’s growth, so that we come to know what they truly need and what problems they actually face—because the problems they encounter are certain to be different from the ones we met in our own childhood.

The Education of Every Child Is a Hundred-Year Enterprise

When we talk about the education of children, more often than not what we really need to talk about is the parents. In becoming a parent, we require no qualification whatsoever; everyone is different, and so different problems are forever arising. Some parents, for instance, firmly believe that a child cannot be made into anything worthwhile without a beating—and my hope is that, through whatever influence I can bring to bear, I can loosen that conviction a little in their hearts. That is where the meaning lies.

Education is in truth a matter spanning a hundred years. When we become parents, we come carrying the baggage of the previous generation; we need first to set that baggage down, and then to labor on behalf of the next—and this is an enormous undertaking. It is like a handcrafted object: to obtain a fine object, the pair of hands that makes it matters greatly.

That pair of hands is, very often, the parents. Before raising a child, understand first your own “instruction manual.” We are shaped by the way our own parents raised us, and that in turn shapes how we raise our children. Some overcorrect—children raised by severe parents, out of a compensating impulse, may indulge their own offspring to excess; others carry on their parents’ methods, remaining just as strict with the next generation. And none of this is something that mere acquaintance with “scientific parenting” can change. In this hundred-year enterprise of education, only by first coming to understand the first half of your own story can you approach, with equanimity, the education that makes up its second half.

”Return” and “Independence”

Parents in this country are keen to discuss the education of their children, and they hold that a child getting into a famous school, or graduating from one, finding suitable work and a family, amounts to success. But my own view is different. Education leads, in the end, to two places: one is return—return to the family; the other is independence—the acceptance of solitude.

Parents often pour endless effort, time, and money into their children’s education, yet when the children have grown and the parents have aged, we frequently see children fretting over the prospect of parents or in-laws wanting to move in together, children scheming in every way to seize a parent’s house or property. But true education is that which guides a child back to the family. It has nothing to do with wealth or renown; it is that, having passed through the trials of life, a family is willing to keep one another company—and the warmth of that companionship is something of great importance.

Yet even as they return, we still hope they possess the capacity to live independently. Time will flow away in the end, and we all hope that, when we are no longer here, our children will have the strength to face everything alone. Solitude is an eternal theme; kin, lovers, children, friends are all but a stretch of fate in this mortal world, while one’s own solitary company is forever. To possess this strength is to be able to enjoy an inner peace, and to pass through a lifetime with composure. And this, precisely, is the happiness we hope, through education, to give our children.