The summer holiday has begun. However, not all students will be enjoying their vacation. Facing intense competition, few parents would allow their children to relax for two months, when they could use that time to make their children more competitive.
Learning is a process. To ignite students’ motivation, their curiosity and appetite to explore must be nurtured, which would help develop their cognitive frameworks. That cannot be achieved overnight, and there is no such thing as “pre-emptive preparation.” Enrolling an unmotivated child in a “transition class” or “cram school” before starting elementary school is not “pre-emptive preparation.”
Amid a falling birthrate, private tutors and cram schools are capitalizing on parents’ ambitions by promoting “first-grade transition classes.” Parents who believe in “pre-emptive preparation” send their preschoolers to “first-grade preparation class,” where they get an early start on learning Mandarin phonetics, English pronunciation and mathematics.
More than 80 percent of parents said they were anxious about their children’s education, a survey conducted by the Child Welfare League Foundation showed. Sixty-one percent of parents said they had arranged for their children to start learning early, hoping that could give them a competitive edge.
There are even tutoring centers for elementary-school students, with some of them attending math classes as early as third or fourth grade to prepare for private junior-high school entrance exams.
Parents are worried that their children would lose at the starting line. Tutoring centers see this as a business opportunity. Both sides see children as something to invest in. Are they doing this for the children’s good or for the parents’ peace of mind? Are children’s abilities, willingness and interests being considered? Is it really a good idea for parents to make such decisions for their children? Is it possible for children to have a happy childhood anymore?
Shiao Fu-song teaches at National Taitung University.
Translated by Fion Khan
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