A large part of the reason I have put my autobiography online is to help students with authoritarian parents cope with their parents’ interference in their education. Previously, a person whose parents disagreed with his or her educational or career choices had the option of trying to hide them from their parents. With the Internet, this has become essentially impossible.
Because most people aren’t going to read my rather long autobiography, I have distilled what I want to say on the misconceptions held by traditional Chinese parents about education and schooling into a few important points which I will discuss below. This way, any student caught in the situation that I was in can print this out and use it to tell their parents that they are on the path to destroying his or her academic career.
There may be any number of reasons why traditional Chinese parents have these erroneous beliefs. China has historically had to manage a huge population, and thus the educational goals of traditional Chinese culture focus on stability and hierarchy, emphasise standardised testing, and discourage individual creativity — in other words, traditional Chinese culture is diametrically opposed to the values required to become a successful scientist. Also, immigrants who were educated elsewhere may falsely assume that their children’s experiences in school will be similar to their own.
I do not claim that these misconceptions, or the actions inspired in parents by them, are necessarily always harmful. In fact, children of parents who hold them may do quite well in high school, and possibly even in the first years of university. This seems to be supported by anecdotal evidence and by the popular stereotype of Chinese students as hard workers with good grades.
However, the pressures and restrictions imposed on their children by parents who hold these misconceptions are most certainly crippling disadvantages for any student wishing to enter graduate school in science, which is my concern. But what is far more damaging than any particular erroneous belief is the authoritarian attitude that parents simply cannot be wrong merely by virtue of their being parents. If parents are willing to abandon their erroneous beliefs when they are shown not to correspond to reality, the damage inflicted on their children will be minimal. Otherwise, they may end up doing enormous damage to their children’s careers.
The points below apply not just to traditional Chinese parents, but to authoritarian parents from any cultural background. But I am of course writing from my own personal experience, although I suspect that these experiences are shared by a large number of people who may not want to draw public attention to the deficiencies of their parents.
1. The way to succeed in school is to “study”, and to “study” means only to read text books assigned by the school and to repeatedly do the drill exercises found therein.
Wrong. While such a strategy may result in good grades in elementary or high school, the only skill it can develop is the ability to follow instructions well whether they are understood or not (which may in fact be a very useful skill in certain jobs or situations). It will leave undeveloped the far more critical skill of thinking for oneself.
In the upper years of university and in graduate school, it will no longer be advantageous to mindlessly follow instructions, leaving students who have depended upon their ability to do so for their high grades unable to remain on parity with students who have been encouraged to learn how to study for themselves all along.
I have witnessed this firsthand among my high school and undergraduate classmates who behaved exactly like how my parents want me to behave. Fortunately for me, I did not obey my parents.
2. Anything not on the school curriculum is a “waste of time”.
Wrong. I learned almost everything that I would need for graduate school outside of the classroom. I would even go so far as to say that I would have been much better prepared for graduate school if I hadn’t been forced by my parents to waste so much time on school work that I didn’t need to do.
Granted, a part of the reason that sticking to the school curriculum was such a waste of time for me was that my parents had coerced me into an undergraduate program other than the one I wanted to enter (see point #5 below). I therefore had no choice but to take courses I had neither any interest in nor any use for, while pursuing my actual interests outside of my official courses.
However, even if a student is in the undergraduate program of his or her choice, discouraging him or her from going outside of the curriculum is still a bad idea. For one thing, the contents of the curriculum may have been decided by political or economic factors such as sources of funding or the whimsical preferences and tastes of the curriculum designers, and may therefore have very little to do with the needs of any particular student. Furthermore, the nature of the curriculum design process is such that there is an inherent lag, and the curriculum will always be far behind the cutting edge in any field, and especially those in which progress is rapid.
For example, my high school computer science classes did not cover computational complexity, even though it was an established topic in the undergraduate computer science curriculum at the university level. Group theory was covered neither in any of my high school algebra classes nor in any of my undergraduate classes in engineering, even though knowledge of it is assumed by many of the courses I took in graduate school. And while I was an undergraduate, there were no courses in quantum computing, which were subsequently introduced into the curriculum after I had already started graduate school. At each stage, my parents criticised or punished me for studying topics “not on the school curriculum”, but these turned out to be exactly the topics I would need to know for my graduate studies.
Any parents who punish their children for studying topics outside of the school curriculum will most certainly damage their academic careers far more than can be made up for by any additional time they may have gained to study topics that happen to be on it.
3. Social connections are not important. The best students are socially isolated and study alone. The way to succeed in school is by sticking to others of the same ethnic background.
Wrong, wrong, and wrong. Being socially well-connected is very important for academic success. My personal experience as well as observations of others tell me that the best students and academics are those who have a large social network to whom they can turn whenever they need help.
When I was young, my parents continually lied to other people about how much time I spent “studying” (see point #1 above), by which they meant alone. (I could never understand their motivation for this lie. If their purpose was to impress other people, wouldn’t it have been much more impressive to exaggerate in the other direction, and tell them that I had the highest marks in the school despite not studying at all? Now that would’ve been impressive.) Having their parents lie about how much time they spent “studying” is a common experience among my relatives, friends, and acquaintances of Chinese background. There is enormous pressure to “study” alone and to dissociate from others except for those who have comparable or higher marks. The natural consequence of this, of course, is that the students with the highest marks are pressured not to have any friends whatsoever.
Again, this may result in good grades in high school and in the early years of university. But there are certain skills which can be learned or honed only through interacting with others, and by the upper years of university or graduate school the difference will become very obvious.
And finally, even if traditional Chinese parents allow their children to socialise, they nevertheless pressure them to limit their social interactions to those who share their ethnic or national background. My parents continually attacked anyone I associated with who wasn’t of Chinese background (the only exception was an undergraduate classmate who is Indian, because he had higher marks than me). Once I started graduate school, they kept suggesting that I work with professors of Chinese background and that I spend more time with Chinese graduate students, as if other people didn’t exist. My mother became obsessed with criticising me for having Iranian colleagues.
My parents’ behaviour was extremely damaging to my career because I passed up many opportunities to collaborate with people whom I knew my parents would criticise me for working with. A person who restricts the pool of his or her collaborators based on ethnic or national background will never be as successful as a person who operates without any such restriction. The reason basically boils down to the standard economic argument against racism (or any form of discrimination based on attributes other than those directly relevant to the situation).
I don’t deny that it is possible to obtain a graduate degree, and even a Ph.D., while limiting one’s interactions mostly to others of the same ethnic background. Apparently many people do. I’ve met several people who have graduated with Ph.D. degrees from Canadian universities and yet are barely able to speak English (or French). But these people are not anywhere near the top of their fields, and usually leave academia as soon as they graduate.
4. Extracurricular activities are a distraction from school (except for music lessons).
Wrong. Extracurricular activities are very important for practising and reinforcing skills taught in the classroom, as well as for learning skills not taught in the classroom altogether. Furthermore, extracurricular activities are a way of meeting people who share one’s interests whom one would not otherwise meet (see point #3 above).
And honestly, what’s up with Chinese parents’ fetish for music lessons?
5. It’s important to have a prestigious degree.
Wrong. It’s far more important to work on what one believes to be significant and relevant. The degrees and honours will come naturally later.
At the end of high school, I wanted to prepare myself for studying quantum computing by enrolling in a general science program in university and choosing my own courses. My father thought that this was not “prestigious” enough and coerced me into entering an elite engineering program instead. He insisted that after I graduated I would be “qualified” to do anything I want.
I did not return to quantum computing until my Ph.D. Some of the most important discoveries in the field were made in the meantime. I would most certainly have been in a much better position in terms of my research if I had started right away when I entered university (or even in high school), instead of waiting until I had earned “prestigious” degrees which “qualified” me to do research in the field.
When I was an undergraduate, I turned my attention to information processing and retrieval in languages written in the Perso-Arabic script, because I expected the Muslim world to become much more prominent in global politics after the fall of the USSR. I also studied the Islamic religion and the history and languages of several countries in the Muslim world. My parents continually criticised me for doing this since these subjects had nothing to do with the degree for which I was studying. However, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, people turned to me for my expertise, despite the fact that I had no degrees in the relevant areas. (I would later earn a Master’s degree in computer science for information retrieval, but for bioinformatics rather than languages written in the Perso-Arabic script.)
The obsession with earning degrees puts the cart before the horse. There are many people with prestigious degrees who end up not accomplishing very much. Conversely, a person who is accomplished will be recognised whether or not he or she has a degree to symbolise his or her accomplishments.
6. I know better than my child what is in his or her best interest.
Wrong. Your child has far more time than you do to think about his or her future. If he or she is adamant about what he or she needs to do to succeed in school, then he or she is most certainly right.
If your child is or has been in the gifted program, he or she is very likely to know much more about the education of children than you do. This is because the school often sends home literature on gifted children which you’re too busy to read or to pay much attention to, but which your child has devoured voraciously for lack of better things to do. Anything you do will then be compared to what the latest research in developmental psychology says a good parent ought to have done in the same situation.
It is well-known that authoritarian parenting is damaging to children and that children should never be discouraged from pursuing their interests. And yet traditional Chinese parents adhere to an authoritarian style of parenting that discourages their children from (or even punishes them for) studying anything outside of the school curriculum. This needs to stop, and children should be allowed to study whatever they want to study.
– davinci
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