The Neanderthal School of Wizardry Part One, Motivation For Change

"The first step in solving a problem is to recognize that it does exist."
                                                                                      ---Zig Ziglar

Schools have been around for a couple of thousand years, possibly longer. The idea of mass schooling for every child, on the other hand, has only been about a couple of hundred years old. This is a quantum leap that propelled the countries that practiced them to never before achieved heights. No longer is education restricted to a privileged few. Every kid gets an education which significantly enhanced his/her productivity and effectiveness.

As good as we have it in education today, there are a few drawbacks to the current education system. Drawbacks that could be remedied with today's technology and new approaches.

The biggest issue is the lumping of students of all abilities into a single class room. What this does is that the speed and depth of the teaching is targeted to the middle of the class. The slow ones suffer because it is too fast for them. The smart ones are bored and unchallenged.

Unevenness of the teacher quality is also an issue. Just as a great teacher has the ability to inspire a student, a bad teacher could really ruin the subject for the kids. I know this all too well as my kids have had both.

Kids always want to compare what they do to their peers. Problem is, they get discouraged if they end up at the bottom all the time. My son plays basketball. He is a pretty good player for his size. The problem is that he is small for his age. As a result, he feels that he is not making progress and year by year, he is losing interest in the game. When a kid sits together with his classmates, he can't help but to compare his performance with his peers. If he does badly, this could be pretty discouraging for a young person.

Developing character is the most important job of raising a kid today, but schools are mainly focused on learning knowledge. The teachers are there just to keep the order in school. In some schools, the teachers are afraid of the kids. Some parents also teach their kids things like cheating and bullying. Not only is this very bad for their kids to learn, but there is a echo effect where other kids would see this behavior and pick it up. School should do a better job developing the character for the kids.

Today, schools mainly push the knowledge to the kids. If a kid can pull the knowledge as he is ready to absorb it, then the kid develop discipline, self motivation and self direction. He has more ownership of the learning process. The kids also are used to make more decisions for himself and manage his own affairs at a young age.

Kids today are not given enough latitude to explore and find areas that they are interested. Not only does the school herd the kids into a few tracks, the parents are also imposing their idea of what is good for the kids. In areas where there are high concentration of Asians, parents are pushing the schools to go to overdrive. In these areas, kids don't have enough time to sleep, let alone do any sort of exploration. Parents also have their ideas of what is good for the kids. Unfortunately, most do not try to understand what the kids wanted to learn and try to cram this to their kids just because this is "good for them". For a kid that is already so busy that he does not have time to sleep, taking on extra-curriculum activities that he does not want to do adds to the burden without stoking their interest. Kids need some time to explore, uncoerced, subjects that might be of interest to them. Once they found their interest, they need to have the freedom to pursue it. This also means losing the baggage of learning things beyond the core knowledge that they have no interest or ability in doing.

Finally, while our kids spend the biggest part of their day with their fellow students, the interaction with their peers was a byproduct of having to learn at the same location instead of designed to teach them social skills which they will need when they grow up, and to help them mature. They spend the majority of their time sitting next to other students with minimal interactions while the teacher teaches. In some classes they do projects together with other students, but the focus is to complete the work. In recess and lunch they get together with their friends. Many learn their social skills that way, but it was left to their own device. Most kids did OK, but it could be a lot better. Some kids fall through the cracks because they are a little off. Most young kids do not want to associate with kids that are off. In the past, kids have time to play with other kids after school, but with the high intensity of after school learning and after school programs, kids don't have much time to play with their friends the way we once did.

Raising Kids, Some Observations

"Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives.”
                                                            ---William A. Foster

One thing we in the West are good at is our ability to thoroughly understand something and professionalize it. Every endeavor has been crafted down to a science. Running a business used to be something that gets passed from father to sons. Now there is a whole groups of professionals looking at every aspect of running a business. With MBAs, finance and economics, nothing is left to chance, no stone left unturned. The same zeal is applied to raising dairy cows. From breeding to gestation interval to every aspect of a cow's life is controlled. The average American cow produces 21,000 lbs of milk. In contrast, a cow from China only produces 6600 lbs of milk.

If only this ruthless efficiency is applied to raising kids. When it comes to raising kids, there seems to be left to each set of parents, who is new to the game, to figure this all out. There are no owners manual when you have a kid, no training program. What is more, the best practices do not get spread out like the other professions. This is the last frontier ripe for applying some of the professionalism we have developed for our other endeavors. 

The biggest issue has been that people raise kids were doing things not for the kids but for themselves. For example, nowadays many have adapted a very soft way of treating the kids. They will not doing anything to get the kids mad because they want to be the kid's friend, they want their kids to like them. If we are doing things for the kids and not for ourselves, we would not care if the kids are mad at us, if this is for their own good. Another example is found with tiger moms, they drive their kids to the brink. Often times, there is a competition between adults to see whose kids got into the best colleges, or who went to the best summer camp. This is the same competition as who has the best handbags, or who drives the best car. It is for the parents. Though they will couch this as for the kids own good, if a kid did not do well, it is the parents that "lose face". The well being of the child is lost in this competition. 

The other issue is that we follow what is trendy. History is repleted with example of trends that seem sensible at the time but looks completely foolish in retrospect. The Tulip mania is an example, but when your relatives and your friends are all doing it, you feel that you will miss out if you don't join in the action. Not only do we follow what our friends do, the best of the lot will up the game and take it to the next level. In my kids school, there is so much work that they both stay up until at least 11:00 pm. This is crazy for kids who are 10 to 14 years of age, but most of their peers are doing the same. Some stay up until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning. None of the parents are concerned of the harm that this does to their kids. In fact, they are the reason why the school drive their kids so hard.

There has to be a better way. In my next few posts, I will discuss a new model for schooling the kids.

Raising Kids Part Five, Character Building And Good Habits

"If I take care of my character, my reputation will take care of me".

                                                                         ---Dwight L. Moody

As I pointed out in my previous posts, we as parents don't have much control over how smart our kids turned out. It seems by the time they turn 17, up to 85% of their IQs are genetically determined. The remaining environmental factors were mostly not related to how parents raise their kids. If, at the end of the day, all the work to enhance their abilities have come to naught, perhaps we should focus our effort on something that we could influence.

In my life, I have seen many cases of smart people that are so flawed in their character that their intellect simply did not matter at all. Take the case of Fanny(not her real name), a first generation Chinese immigrant who grew up in San Francisco. When she was young, her family lived with relatives. Her family did not have good relationship with the host. She developed a victim mentality at a young age. Fanny got into one of the U.C. schools and later into a medical school. While in school, Fanny always try to minimize paying for anything, to the detriment of her friends and roommates. Before she leaves for home, she would write down the reading on the watt meter and again when she returns. She would argue that she is not responsible for that portion of the electric bill. When it was her turn to provide toilet paper, she would go around the campus and steal the cheap toilet paper that was in the campus bathrooms. However, when the shoe is on the other foot, she would never be shy about asking people for favors, again, totally disregarding the well being of the person she is asking the favor. When school ended, she asked one of her roommates to take her home, but she had not packed, so she made them wait for four hours while she packed up her stuff. In addition, it was very out of the way for the roommate since she was not going to San Francisco. Fanny even asked to move into the parents of one of her acquaintance during her medical internship and ask to use their car! The end result? Fanny went through her life without any friends. People, once they knew her, avoided her. She went through a bout of depression and needed to consult a psychologist for her depression. If Fanny was an anomaly, it might have been funny, but based on my experience, she was just an extreme example of how many Chinese immigrants behaved. Some of the enmity White people have for the Chinese were due to racism and jealousy, but some of their anger were directed at the behavior of people like Fanny, who shows complete lack of respect or concern for other people. Many of the Chinese from China, who were raised as a single spoiled child, are equally flawed in their characters. Character building, not learning more knowledge, is the number one job for the parents. I would say that it is also the number two and number three jobs of the parents.

Of all the character traits, by far the most important is integrity. Integrity means keeping your promises and treating others like you want to be treated. Integrity is the basis of all human transactions. As we meet people, we are learning who we can trust and who can get things done. Treating others as we like to be treated help us form that bond in knowing that we could be counted on to help our friends in good times and bad. Keeping our promises, under promise and over deliver shows that we can get things done. Opportunities in life come to us because people know they can count on us to get things done.

Sports are supposed to teach kids about cooperation and competition. However, many parents have taken this to the extreme. I have seen parents bribing coaches to get their kids more play time or play a more important role in the sport. One of the girls even trampled on her friends to get ahead in her sport, citing her dad who taught her that "friends are there to be used". In a modern society, in order to compete, we form groups, companies, political parties, churches, circle of friends. To be an effective competitor, we need to work well within the group. That means having integrity within our group and even toward the competition, because your competitor today maybe your group tomorrow. To cheat and to trample on your friends is precisely the wrong lessons that the kids should be learning. They will go through life cheating and trampling on people that they know. I have known many people in high place in a corporation. My kids were playing sports with their kids. They were CEOs, CFOs, VPs and directors in small companies, large corporations and important start ups like LinkedIn. None of the people who made it to high places in a corporation teach their kids to cheat or trample on their friends, or treat their friends as someone to be "used". They all teach their kids to have integrity and to treat their teammates well. Some of them coach the team. Instead of giving more play time to their kids, they mostly assign play time and roles based on ability of the kids. What they teach their kids speaks volumes on what it takes to get ahead in the work place.

Tenaciousness and follow through are also important traits to have. To get anywhere in life, we will experience our share of failures. The important thing is to get up after you failed and do it again. Follow through means when we start something, we should see to it that what we started gets completed. Many of the angel investors who fund start ups have expressed that even more important than a good idea, they are looking for a team that is tenacious, because they knew that the start up process is full of setbacks and disappointments. It is how the team handles them that determines if they will succeed.

We Chinese are a practical people, but intellectual curiosity is not our strong suit. Take Chinese medicine, There were a few pioneers like Hua Tuo, the father of Chinese herbal medicine who tried to find out what impact different plants have on the human body, but most who practice Chinese medicine just took what they learned as gospel and not investigate further about how the human body works. It was the West that had discovered the workings of different organs. The Chinese had a lot of inventions early on, but with something like compass and gun powder, we never tried to understand why it worked. Interestingly, in American college campuses today, there is also a stifling lack of intellectual curiosity. Charles Murray was to give a talk at Middlebury College the other day, a bunch of thugs just prevented him from making the speech. They are not interested in a debate as a college should be doing, they just want to shut people up when they encounter views that are different from theirs. Intellectual curiosity is the engine of new discovery and human progress. We need to teach our kids to get into the habit of always asking a lot of questions. When we encounter something that we don't understand, don't just pass it by. Try to understand it. When we half understand something, ask more questions until we completely understand it.

Self direction is another trait that the Chinese can do more of. Perhaps due to our heavy handed style of parenting, many of our kids just know to study, but do not have an internal compass and know what they want to do with their own lives. This goes back to making kids do things on their own and making more decisions early on.

Many people are not very punctual. However, if you ask them to examine their lives and see how many important meetings they were late to, they will be the first to admit that they were on time for these important meetings. Being punctual is showing respect for the other people involved. It goes back to having integrity. We should have integrity with every person that we deal with, not just the important ones.

Finally, exercising regularly and having discipline are important. Exercising keeps our body in prime condition. Discipline helps us control our behavior. both are prerequisite for everything else that we do in life.

We don't have much control over how smart our kids are, but we can shapes their character and their habits. Things like integrity, learn to compete and cooperate with a team, tenaciousness, follow through, intellectual curiosity and self direction are characters that we can teach our kids. In addition, they should get into the habit of being punctual, exercise regularly and have discipline.

Raising Kids Part Four, Independent, Critical Thinking

“In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.”
                                                          ---Galileo Galilei


The year was 1958. In China, chairman Mao had ushered in the era of the Great Leap Forward. The thinking goes, China needs to modernize, and since steel production is a sign of modernization, and China is mostly rural, Mao has asked all the farmers to produce more steel. The thinking also goes, that the pests like rats and birds are eating too much of the crop, so besides taking the labor to produce the steel, they organized the villagers to bang on their pots to scare away the birds.

The precious labor that was diverted from farming melted down useful metal parts like door hinges and bells from temples and turned them into useless low grade steel if they were lucky, in many cases, they failed to produce even that. The banging of the pots and pans killed off the birds, who also ate the worms and insects. The next year there was insect infestation that ate far more crops than the birds ever did. All the manpower that went into making useless steel means not enough people are tending the fields. By some count, fifty million people, 7-10% of the population at the time, died due to the shortage of food in the ensuing three years, marking it one of the worst man made disasters in recent Chinese history.

How does a nation, with one of the highest IQ in the world, marched locked step like lemmings into the path of disaster based on the directives of one person? It is quite simple. The Chinese culture, based on the Confucius tradition of filial and piety, does not allow subordinates to question the authority. Any dissent, real or imaginary, was brutally put down at the directive of Mao. Many of the capable leadership inside the Communist party were purged because Mao fear that they might dethrone him.

Least you think that this only happens to a conforming Asian culture, we need to go no further than 2007 in the U.S. to see that this also happens in the West. We are a society that pride ourselves in freedom of the press and land of financial professionals. The paradigm at the time was that housing could never go down much. Of course this is absurd based on the law of economics. There were enough signs of danger that a few people like Robert Shiller, Bill McBride and John Paulson saw the train wreck coming, but for the rest of us, including all the very smart people with fancy degrees from Harvard and such, we never saw it coming until we felt the reverberation of the Titanic hitting the iceberg. Massive financial institutions like Lehman Brothers disappeared in spite of having legions of PhDs in Finance and Economics from all the fancy schools.

Ray Dalio of Bridgewaters, the largest financial management firm in the world, built the firm on the culture of "Radical Transparency". Every meeting, no matter how high up, is recorded and opened to everyone in the firm, high or low, to read and provide feedback. This would certainly drastically reduce the chance that the firm would go down the wrong path.

A kid needs to be taught from an early age to use reason and logic. He also need to follow his own compass. If we see something that is different from what we inherently felt to be true, we should analyze it with our own logic and come to an unbiased conclusion. If we are wrong, we should accept the new thinking and incorporate it into our knowledge, but if we are right, we should have the courage to follow what is right. Only if a culture allows challenge from others, only if a leader is comfortable soliciting objection from subordinates can we minimize the repeat of things like the Great Leap Forward.

Raising kids Part Three, Initiative

"Success depends in a very large measure upon individual initiative and exertion"

                                                                                              --Anna Pavlova

I am a fan of the Jewish people. With the hands of their neighbors at their throats, they manage to pull off some pretty amazing things. With the founding of Israel, they fought the six day war that pitted three well established countries against the fledgling nation, they manage to become victorious. In South Africa, they manage to take one of the most abundant minerals on earth, through clever marketing and supply restriction, turn it into a gem that every man must fork over at least ten percent of his salary to buy for his bride to be. Living in desert which lack the water for even basic functions, let alone growing crops, they managed to, through conservation, recycling and desalinization of the ocean, create an oasis where they now have surplus of water for the nation. In Hollywood, they managed to create an empire by telling people tales that they want to pay good money to see.

Intellect plays a big part in this.  The Ashkenazi Jews are one of the smartest peoples in the world, yet there is something beyond just being smart which allow them to achieve all this success. I believe that what allowed them to achieve all that success is their ability to seize the initiative. Someone had to make a choice between living a comfortable live working as an accountant. or go start a new venture making movies. While many people have seen diamonds as a mineral, or even as a gem, it takes someone with initiative to see the future in something that everyone must buy for their bride to be( diamonds were not always the gift of choice from the groom ).

If passion gives you a sense of direction in life, initiative is what converts that sense of direction, along with your intellect, into actual accomplishments. Many of us take what we see everyday for granted. But yet, everything that we touch, from the house we live in to the car we drive to the television that we watch, it did not exist at one point in the human history. Someone, after coming up with an insight into some natural phenomenon, had to be the first human to create it.

Growing up in China, I was not much of a sports guy. I did not understand the zeal that Americans have for sports. It was not until my kids started playing basketball that I realize basketball and sports in general provide great training and build a lot of skills that kids need when they grow up. Basketball is a game that rewards initiatives. A player passes the ball to his teammate. Out of nowhere, a short kid jumps a couple of feet in front of the intended target and steals the ball, then dribbles it all the way to the other side and do a lay up. This is a scene that I see over and over again watching kids play basketball. She just used her initiative to tilt the game in her team's favor beyond the athletic ability and skill the team has.

We Chinese are law and order kind of people, yet if you look at the results, we have a lot of initiatives where it counted. Originally came to build the rail roads, the Chinese made a living operating restaurants and laundry mats. Fast forward to 2017 in the Bay Area, we work as engineers and managers. We are doctors and nurses, We run supermarkets and bakeries. There are Chinese mechanics, insurance sales and real estate sales. In 2007, when the real estates crashed, I know a lot of Chinese bought houses at the low point. If you look at what is happening in China, it is even more impressive. To grow double digit for several decades means millions of companies have to be started from scratch by someone. This happened with Mao still looming large, where everything was owned  by the state, with the stultifying  mindset from that era. The Chinese went from making shoes and toys to making  everything under the sun. Now they are pushing to be a big maker in robotics.

However, if you observe who are taking these initiatives, it is still a small minority of the population. The vast majority could do a lot better. They will do a lot better if we teach kids from a young age to do more things of their own will. Kids should learn from a young age to take the bull by the horn. Sports is an excellent tool to teach kids take more initiatives.