The topic of schooling came up over lunch on Friday with some friends. Son attends a local primary school. We could have, on account of Husband being an ang moh, sent him to an international school but I never saw the point or merit of that. I went through the local school system and emerged, I think, fine. If it’s good enough for his mother, it’s good enough for him.

When queried why I decided to put him through a system notorious for its high pressure and seemingly narrow focus on academic achievements, I often offer the explanation that no system is perfect. It sounds lame, I know, but that’s how I view it. Systems are by definition, devised to meet the majority needs of the majority. This means it is inevitably inadequate. And it gets even more challenging when it comes to education, of which academic competency is a necessary but insufficient component. For something as wide ranging as education, it would be unrealistic to expect the system to be able to do it all. Parents, like it or not, play a critical role.

Local schools are known for their relentless focus on academic achievements. This brings with it pressure, and a requirement for hard work and discipline. International schools on the other hand, embrace creative learning, with much less focus on homework and exams. I’m generalizing here but you get the idea. Which is better? I think the more relevant questions are – what makes for comprehensive learning, what will equip the child to survive and thrive in the world he grows up in, and how do we get there?

Is it possible to excel in life with just rote learning and no creative problem solving skills? Of course not. But is it possible to get far, from bouncing around with ideas but with no hard work and discipline to achieve a direction? The road to success is littered with failures. Does the child have the ability to deal with the stress and pressure that comes with the pursuit of success, in anything, and the resilience to keep going when (not if) he’s tripped up by failures? Even in the world of technology, that most creative of industries, name me a titan who isn’t known to be a workaholic never-say-die perfectionist? Steve Jobs? Elon Musk?

Survival is not, and never meant to be, easy. A variety of skills, soft and hard, are required. Systems have to choose a position in this spectrum and then structure it for the majority, which makes it as I mentioned, inadequate by definition, for any one child. So parents have to step up, to fill in the blanks. Just because we pay taxes doesn’t mean our kids’ education is solely the responsibility of the state’s!

I chose the local school system for Son because I believe discipline, hard work and resilience that comes with the ability to manage pressure, are the bedrock upon which everything else will be built. Given my demanding job, it’ll be hard for me to create the environment at home for purpose of training these skills. So I “outsource” this part of his education to the system. My focus as his mother, as I ask of myself, is to fill in the other bits the system can’t deliver. Hence, I encourage his pursuit of music and sports. I balance the high stress environment by allowing him, as I have found out from casual conversations with other parents, rather generous TV and iPad time. I believe, strongly, that we have to subsume our instinct to protect our children from pressure/stress to the longer term responsibility of equipping them to deal with it, because we cannot always shape reality to suit them. The world in which we live, is stressful.

I try to inculcate independent (and hopefully creative!) problem solving in the day to day – my first response to his cry for help is “动脑筋” （exercise your brain). I don’t prescribe one way of solving his “problem”, nor do I allow Husband to (I’ve discovered men have the tendency to think theirs is the best way, but another story for another day!). And I don’t help until he’s tried everything he can. I drill the messages of the importance of filial piety, generosity and kindness, with stories I tell since he was little. And I watch like a hawk, ok, tigress, how well he puts these values into practice, far more keenly than I watch his grades. Through these efforts, I hope to provide him with as balanced an environment as possible in which to learn, for a lifetime.

Yes, I’ve obviously got the grand theory all worked out. Ask me in ten years’ time how it has worked in practice!

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