"The pressure makes children sick. I speak from personal experience. To score under 95 per cent is considered failure. Bad performance is punished."
I grew up in that culture in America having a Chinese mother and belonging to the local Chinese community. The interesting aspect to it, is that it represents a curve as everyone gets a 97+ on their tests. It felt like 97 was the median in the class. It just happened to be instead of having scores from 50-100, you had them compressed from 90-100. Scoring below a 90 is equivalent to getting an F in the local Chinese community as only a few ever scored that low.
I personally appreciate having gone through that and all the brainwashing that occurred with that mindset. I know one of my strengths is the ability to work well under pressure, where often my motivation is correlated with pressure. While I never made the connection in college, I innately understood the curve and how to play the game due to being curved at a young age.
The worry I have at times with correlating motivation with difficulty is whether I am creating an invalid proxy for value. Sometimes the work leads to something of value, but they are not directly linked as there are plenty of difficult things out there that generate little value to society and oneself.
That said, bringing it back to the OP's concern about his children's education, I don't know what it's like to go through a full Chinese system as I highly appreciate the mixture of Western education in my upbringing. I had a nervous breakdown in high school after realizing the falseness of my quest I had around accomplishments and achievements. If it weren't for the liberal arts of Western culture (arts, music, and literature), I don't know how I would have came out of that mental breakdown. I began to value the Renaissance man who was balanced in a variety of topics and sought the balance of academics, the arts and social skills. I wonder if it weren't for those concepts, if I would have trained myself to seek higher and higher goals in mastery over academics as I saw with some of my childhood friends who had a stricter Chinese upbringing.
I grew up in that culture in America having a Chinese mother and belonging to the local Chinese community. The interesting aspect to it, is that it represents a curve as everyone gets a 97+ on their tests. It felt like 97 was the median in the class. It just happened to be instead of having scores from 50-100, you had them compressed from 90-100. Scoring below a 90 is equivalent to getting an F in the local Chinese community as only a few ever scored that low.
I personally appreciate having gone through that and all the brainwashing that occurred with that mindset. I know one of my strengths is the ability to work well under pressure, where often my motivation is correlated with pressure. While I never made the connection in college, I innately understood the curve and how to play the game due to being curved at a young age.
The worry I have at times with correlating motivation with difficulty is whether I am creating an invalid proxy for value. Sometimes the work leads to something of value, but they are not directly linked as there are plenty of difficult things out there that generate little value to society and oneself.
That said, bringing it back to the OP's concern about his children's education, I don't know what it's like to go through a full Chinese system as I highly appreciate the mixture of Western education in my upbringing. I had a nervous breakdown in high school after realizing the falseness of my quest I had around accomplishments and achievements. If it weren't for the liberal arts of Western culture (arts, music, and literature), I don't know how I would have came out of that mental breakdown. I began to value the Renaissance man who was balanced in a variety of topics and sought the balance of academics, the arts and social skills. I wonder if it weren't for those concepts, if I would have trained myself to seek higher and higher goals in mastery over academics as I saw with some of my childhood friends who had a stricter Chinese upbringing.