Parenting month 101: Education

A major theme of the past month was education.  We live in a fairly competitive school district, especially among the asian population. We agreed early on NOT to be the kinds of parents who expected their kids to be at the top of the class, because there are too many crazies here who do, and we did not want to pay that kind of price in time and effort.

Probably the most well known expression of this is Kumon, the chain enrichment center which exists to provide many opportunities to get more practice in things like math problems and other academic skills.  The problem, as noted by a recent speaker at Pittsburgh Chinese Youth Center, is that practice only helps in skills development and speed. But in real life, there is no benefit of perform academic tasks faster, and academic skills are actually not what is important.  What is important are the ability to learn new skills and the ability to solve problems.  Neither of which is improved by repetition of learned skills.  So what are parents concerned about the academic achievement of their kids to do.

First is the recognition that academics is not the only place this question shows up. Every coach will say that the motivations of children change day-to-day, and that it is the parents that keep the kids in the long haul, where the benefits do not show up until the children get older.  But it has to start early.  As it is in youth sports, so it is in every other aspect of life.  But, also like in sports, the way to get there is not by specializing early, it is by giving the child challenge in the form of variety.  And at the higher levels, this means having the child learn to face and work through challenges.

So in what our children do, this is how we want to approach it.  For music, it means that the goal is not to repeated play the same piece over and over again until it can be note perfect, it will be to work learn hard pieces until it is understood enough to become expressive, and to move on before it gets too comfortable.  In martial arts, the goal is not to learn and do a sequence of movements, it is to improve every single time a movement is done, until every aspect of it is right (and knowing that mere mortals will never reach that state of perfection).  For the academics, it is encountering problems that you have not learned to do, and learning how to attack them until the solution comes out.

So, we did not do Kumon (the standard in our area), but a few years back we discovered the Art of Problem Solving and have been going through the Beast Academy curriculum.  And we have been looking for the types of activities that will provide what strength and conditioning coaches call stimulus, that provide opportunities for the kids to learn problem solving techniques and we will lean away from the activities that reward recall and repetition. And look for others going along the same path.