Education: What Lies Between Expectation and Reality

Many developed countries nowadays are facing low birth rate phenomenon, for example are some East Asia countries, such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. In Taiwan for example, based on data released by Taiwan Ministry of the Interior on 2006, Taiwan statistic for newborn baby from more than 300,000 in 1996 has been decreased to around 200,000 in 2005, which means every woman in average only give birth to 1.12 child. By definition, low birth rate is a phenomenon in which birth rate reach < 2 child/woman. Therefore, it’s maybe not a new phenomenon in some countries. In Taiwan, low birth rate phenomenon is starting in 1990 with birth rate 1.81 child/woman.

Taiwan is a country with strong withholds of its traditional culture values, among the most fundamental is filial piety values which strongly emphasize on child duty toward parents and not the opposite. These values sometimes put children in a much difficult situation since the common understanding within the society is that any conflict occurs between parents and children are child responsibility. It’s definitely the opposite mindset compared to what largely believed in western society. Yet, these values still continuously decrease after the occurrence of low birth phenomenon, causing what Taiwanese called as ‘Helicopter Parents’ and ‘Strawberry Generation’.

Helicopter Parents

Strawberry Generation

Low birth rate had cause parents to over spoil their child. These ‘Helicopter Parents’ will immediately intervene and get involved anytime their child need to make an important decision, facing problems, or make mistakes, therefore eliminate child opportunity to learn independently and create a ‘Strawberry Generation’. Who Taiwanese called as ‘Strawberry Generation’ is a generation of children that will immediately break down when facing a small problem, just like a strawberry that could easily smashed with only a small pinch. Therefore, ‘Helicopter Parents’ create ‘Strawberry Generation’, definitely not the opposite.

A very common phenomenon occurs in many aspect of child education nowadays, even though that the occurrence degree is different between countries, I’d like to call it ‘Strawberry Education’ phenomenon and simply define it as an education that creates a ‘Strawberry Generation’. Amy Chua on her book titled Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother said that she able to push her children to achieve their best performance because since the beginning she believes that they have the ability to achieve it. Believe on child ability will naturally bring high expectation towards them and lead them to success. In other words, it could say that ‘Helicopter Parents’ doesn’t believe that their child has ability to success, they put a low expectation towards them, and lead them to become ‘Strawberry Generation’. Once more, ‘Helicopter Parents’ create ‘Strawberry Generation’, not the opposite.

Basically, child education is both parents and society’s responsibility, therefore the term of ‘Strawberry Education’ become interesting because it implies that actually the ‘Helicopter Parents’ phenomenon has spread its influence to educational institution and create the ‘Strawberry Education’. In our earlier generation, when a child face a problem in school, for example bad grades, and teacher consult the problem with the child’s parents, the most possible thing happen next is a condition in which a child should responsible and explain to both teacher and parents about his/her low grades. However if the same problems occurs nowadays, the most possible thing happen is a condition in which parents blame teacher because of their child’s bad grades.

‘Helicopter Parents’ phenomenon not only influences education institution, but also influences mindset of the whole society. In this era of modern technology, any information could be widely spread easily through internet, especially with the help of social media. Moreover, with the abundant amount of information received everyday, in most cases there is no time available to thoroughly read and think over what we read. Therefore, build a certain opinion into people mindset is only a matter of time, and nowadays it’s may just need a relatively short time.

Now let’s imagine what will happen when these groups of ‘Helicopter Parents’ meet and discuss about child education issues with another not yet become ‘Helicopter Parents’ group. They may enthusiastically share their opinion about their version of ideal ‘Strawberry Education’ and, since people tend to quickly agree on ideas that will make their life easier, therefore the idea will quickly spread and believed. As previously said that believe on child ability will naturally bring high expectation towards them, the same logic also applied here. When ‘Strawberry Education’ idea becomes widely believed, its common practice also becomes widely expected.

So, what’s actually the importance of expectation?

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) perform a survey and compare happiness and test score of students in 65 countries. Happiness was ranked based on the percentage of students who agreed or disagreed with the statement, “I feel happy at school,” while test score were ranked based on Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)’s test score result. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a worldwide study also held by Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in member and non-member nation of 15-year-old students’ performance on mathematics, science, and reading. The program starts in 2000 and repeated every three years. Since it starts, PISA top performer list from year to year are significantly dominated by Finland, Singapore, and East Asia countries such as Japan, South-Korea, China, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan.

Undoubtedly, as reflected in the diagram above, those countries are included in the best test scores quadrant. However, how about the happiness rank? Singapore and East Asia countries except Korea are included in the happy quadrant, while Finland students, who live in a country that well known worldwide with its ideal education system, surprisingly feel unhappy. Discuss about Finland ideal education system is talk about flexible curriculum, nonexistence of rank system, small amount of homework, low frequency of exam, fewer school days/year, longer break time, etc. Compare with another group of PISA top performer countries’ education system, it’s definitely the 180 degree opposite. So, how come they still feel unhappy? The answer is because this ideal education system apparently still couldn’t meet their high expectation.

Finland students grow with expectation that school should be an exciting process of playing while in the same time gain knowledge, while in fact, no matter how flexible an education system is, school is still a place to study and we can’t expect every learning process to be forever exciting. Meanwhile, another group of PISA top performer countries’ students grow with the understanding that school is hard but they need to face it anyway since it will benefit their future, therefore they still feel happy while studying in a strict education system instead. Expectation is important, however somehow most of the time we fail to understand which influences could create a correct expectation and which couldn’t.

Many child education theories nowadays are strongly believe that children education process, whether at home or at school, should always be able to keep the children happy. Therefore, a fact of unhappy Finland students seems very disappointing. On one side, parents and society struggle to create the best child learning environment to meet their ideal version, yet the students still feel unhappy. Some theories even explain about ‘scary’ impact on child future when this ideal happy conditions are not met, to name a few are low self-esteem, increase of aggressive character, and even brain damage. Don’t scold your child when they do a wrong things or use negative words to talk to them, they will become a child with low self-esteem. Don’t push your child to do something that they don’t like or restrict them to do something that they like since it will increase their aggressiveness. Don’t’ be to early teach them reading, writing, or understand simple math because it will result to brain damage. In fact, children of my generation, include me, all experience this ‘hardship’ era of education, and yet most of us now are not a person with a low self-esteem, aggressive character, or even experiencing brain damage, and the most important is we definitely are not ‘Strawberry Generation’ type.

In Taiwan, basically both home and school education still uses relatively strict method even though if the ‘Helicopter Parents’ phenomenon start to appears. However, phenomenon of child’s low self-esteem, aggressiveness, and brain damage seems to be rarely seen here and Taiwan students still feel happy instead. Once again, it’s all about managing the expectation. As an illustration, when parents and society start to believe that children should never hear negative words from parents or other person, this believes gradually will becomes a widely accepted norm. When it becomes a norm, not only more and more parents or older generation will receive this influence, but also the children. This condition will then become children’s basic expectation on how they should be treated by their parents, teachers, etc. Furthermore, when there is a parent in a family or a teacher in a school that fails to treat children according to this norm, the child will feel that he/she is not treated well and unhappy, maybe also leads to low self-esteem, aggressiveness, etc. Don’t forget the fact that not only parents will interact with each other, but children also interact with each other and this interaction will worsen those negative feeling once they find out that the other children receive the different treatment from their parents or teachers.

Furthermore, when this phenomenon gradually transforms the whole society as a system, any effort of research performed will definitely prove the cause and effect hypothesis, for example use negative words to a child will leads them to become a low self-esteem child. It may be proven because it’s true that those child having a low self-esteem problem. The question is, “Does it really simply because parents’ usage of negative words that creates their self-esteem problem? Does children of current generation really born with such mentally weak character? Or parents whose gradually lost confidence toward children that create those children with weak character instead?”