"Parenting: Education is about discovering yourself, not copying yourself with money.

It was winter in Australia in August 2004. On a very quiet night in Melbourne, I was sitting in the auditorium of a private secondary school, watching a group of Grade 7-9 secondary school students enthusiastically performing a stage play about a young girl's experience of growing up and pursuing her dreams. The story is about a young girl's growth and pursuit of her dreams. The story, the stage performance, the music and the lighting design are all directed by these adorable kids, and the choreography, the music and the singing are all of an unexpected caliber. As they are in their teenage years, they still have some childishness left, but their stage presence is sure and confident, and the parents and adults on stage encouraged their efforts and talents with the most enthusiastic applause.

The children here are not under the pressure of tutoring, and apart from the 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. school day, they have a lot of time to devote to various kinds of club activities or sports to explore their personal interests. In the first few days of school, the school even arranges for the whole class to live together in the wilderness for a few days, learning how to cook together and undergoing all kinds of training and physical activities in the wilderness, making full use of the close interaction and learning of classmates, instead of competing with each other in education.

After 3:30pm, it was not hard to find a group of school children running on the green grass, playing American soccer or tennis in one of Melbourne's many parks, while their parents were sitting in the park waiting for their children to be picked up and taken home. Look at the watch, and think of the parents in Taiwan who are rushing their children from school to another tutorial class, as if they are afraid that their children will lose their competitiveness or fall behind in the rankings if they waste a bit of time on having fun. Of course, if this goes on for a long time, the child will bounce back, and then the parents will have to busy themselves in another negotiation with the child, which often ends up with the parents having to exchange their child's performance with another material object.

Comparing the two, it is not difficult to realize that there are differences in cultural thinking and parents have very different values in educating their children. The point is that the children in the village of Earthquakes will certainly create a new life together and even compete with each other in the next 10 or 20 years in some corner of the world. However, the strengths required are not only the scores, report cards or even a diploma that can be compared with each other, but also the real strengths.

As parents of Taiwanese children, in a highly competitive society, baptized with utilitarian values, tested by real life and competition in the workplace, they bring their children along with the flow, not daring to go off the rails, and eagerly investing in their children to win at the starting point under the replicated education model of filling in the ducks, caring about nothing more than whether or not to keep up with or surpass others, but easily ignoring the uniqueness of the child himself or herself, But it is easy to overlook the uniqueness and spontaneity of the children themselves. When parents spend a lot of money and fill up all of their children's time, what they often buy is the wrong attitude of their children.

Parents often ask me whether they should send their children to expensive schools. Will the corresponding learning outcomes be better? In the face of these parents' doubts, I always recall a story: a mother would dress her daughter up every day before school, wearing tens of thousands of dollars worth of brand-name dresses, glamorous like a super princess, the child wore beautiful clothes all day long, and did not dare to do anything, because her mother had told her that the clothes were very expensive and could not be dirty, and the little princess had to watch her good friends happily playing in the sand, sliding down the slide ....... of course, of course, the little princess had to look at the good friends happily playing with sand and sliding down the slope. Of course, the cute beauty and elegance of the little princess did get a lot of praise, the most happy than the parents, but the original belongs to the child's innocence and happiness of childhood, but was a brand-name to screw up.

When my daughter was about two years old, she went to and from school with me every day, and I would play classical music in the car with her. One day I told my daughter, "Listen to this! The music is telling a story." She listened curiously for a while, and then asked me suspiciously, "Is there no one talking in the music? So I started to make up a story along with the melody and rhythm of the music, and it became an important program for us in the car. One day when my daughter was in middle school, she suddenly took the initiative to tell me the story inside the music, and with the rhythm and melody, she seriously expressed the mood of the music... It went on like this for several years; one day her flute teacher told me, "My daughter enjoys learning music very much, and what's remarkable is that she has a particularly strong ability to interpret music". Since then, my daughter has often done amazing things, such as secretly writing her first novel in the summer of her fourth grade year in elementary school, writing an English novel in her first year of college, and most importantly, being an understanding, learning, helpful, happy, and positive child, all of which should be directly related to the way she has been able to listen to and learn from her heart through music since she was a young girl.

Money and quality are not absolute equals. A child's good performance often comes from close parent-child interaction and genuine companionship. If a child can truly feel that "learning is so much fun! then life is bound to be rich. With the rapid development of technology, should we continue to believe in using money to build a heavy shell for our children to climb up the ladder step by step, or should we allow our children to have a healthy body, mind and soul, and rich life experiences, so that they can fly confidently and lightly... The answer is not difficult to choose for smart and hard-working parents!

Text/Lin Mei Hui