The Education of Little Chihang

This summer, I had the very solid pleasure of spending three weeks in the company of Chihang, a ten-year-old boy from Hong Kong who was here in the company of his parents. Three weeks of his cheerful, engaging and vibrant company, that is, whenever he was not studying. I think that amounted to a handful of hours over the course of those three weeks, the count depending whether you count sleep or reading Harry Potter hours among those.

Chihang was here for his summer vacation from the semi-private school he attends in HK, but he had lessons to do every day. Some were given by his school. Most were structured by his parents. And sometimes, at eleven o'clock at night, when I might say good night to my visitors and make my way upstairs, Chihang and at least one of his good and devoted parents would still be sitting at my dining room table, laptops open, working on lessons. It made me think a lot about the way I'd raised my own children and the way we value or devalue education by way of our disciplines.

I think Americans must value education less than any other distinguishable population on earth, except perhaps opium addicts and Eskimos and I'm really not sure about the latter group; it just seems possible they have other more pressing concerns. I use "education" here in a broader sense than just the formal institution of education; I use it to mean deliberate applied effort to increase knowledge, understanding and mastery. For those of us fortunate to live in societies with formal, public educational structures and institutions we and our children are free to attend, this definition of education also attempts to cover the way we enlarge the education institutionally provided, with lessons and activities and camps and tutorials, with sports and opportunities to practice instruments of music and of science.

Actually, the Purple Baccalaureate is French!

I first realized how lax we Americans are when my oldest daughter was in elementary school. She attended what was, by any standards of measurement, from student happiness to student performance on national tests to eventual student academic success, among the nation's very best schools for children. It was a benefit, a very important benefit, of living in the smallest house in one of the wealthiest little communities in the US. It was a very highly educated community, as you might assume, where even your bike repairman and your real estate agent might very likely hold some form of esoteric doctorate or have travelled to Tibet or Monrovia. It was a community full of scientists imported from nations all across the world, given visas in exchange for their intellectual labor in the big research labs anchored in this affluent little city at the foot of the beautiful Rockies.

Among my daughter's good friends at this school was a Chinese girl, her father one of those scientists. She, and her family, with whom I inevitably became familiar, gave me my first close-up look at the different ways Chinese and Americans treat education. This little girl, whose feet dangled too high from the floor to reach the pedals of the grand piano in her living room, practiced piano three hours every day. I, meanwhile, was struggling to get my daughter to put in the half hour of practice we had agreed upon as reasonable for her clarinet. I asked the girl's mother in a tone that surely betrayed both my wonder and my dismay, "However do you get her to practice so long???"

She may have blinked once before answering in that unruffled, quiet voice I have since come to associate with the Chinese. "Very easy. I sit next to her at the piano." It wasn't long after that my own daughter and I came to a new agreement about her clarinet lessons; she could practice or not as she chose. If she wanted to play it well, she would practice. If she did not care to play well, she would at least put the reeds in the press that let them dry and wipe the clarinet clean before running out the door to play on the jungle gym.

Years later, as that same daughter prepares to start her own PhD program far away from my home, Chihang is sitting at my dining room table working earnestly on a design for a high speed train built of titanium. It's eleven o'clock, and his parents are quietly engaged in their own work in order to make sure the boy keeps to his work, in order to be available for his inevitable questions and to critique his final product. His reward for finishing this will be an excursion to the State Capitol, upon which excursion he will write an essay tomorrow afternoon, reciting what he's learned about our state's history in order to anchor it with the guy wires of his second language, English.

Some of our recent graduates at UW

The girl who practiced the piano three hours a day? She's working for a major American retailer, in New York City, doing some kind of buying or merchandising work. I'm sure she's very successful, and I'd put money on her having graduated with honors from some MBA program at a prestigious American university in record time. I'd put considerable money on this, and I'd win. But I'd put more money on my own daughter, whose path to academic excellence has been somewhat longer and more circuitous than most, doing something momentous and astounding in this world.

Freedom does have its benefits. Creativity is often found to thrive there on its playgrounds. Why is it, do you think, that American universities are the ones that teach the world? That said, maybe it's time we start teaching our own children a little more about the value of education. We have taken it for granted now too long.