[Answer] What Is the Best Education for a Child?

[Answer] What Is the Best Education for a Child?

When I saw this question, the words of Confucius came to mind: “What a profound question!” If this had been three years ago, I might have launched into a long and confident answer. But ever since Yuanyuan was born, one by one, the opinions I once took for granted have started to feel precarious. I no longer dare to make sweeping assertions; I can only offer this as a discussion.

The so-called “best” is itself a subjective measure, so it cannot really serve as an objective standard. For a baby dung beetle, learning how to eat dung well—without any derogatory sense—is the best education. For a baby panda, mastering the skills of mating and fulfilling the mission of reproduction is the best education. A thousand pairs of parents may hold two thousand different ideas about what “best” means, so it is difficult to judge what is truly best for a child. Parent A may believe that academic achievement and intellectual training are the highest form of education, with the Ivy League as the ceiling and Tsinghua or Peking University as the minimum target. Parent B, however, may believe that freedom and happiness outweigh everything else, and that for the sake of freedom, all else can be sacrificed, allowing the child to grow naturally and carefree. Which one is “best”? I would not presume to say.

Personally, I think that if a child can grow up in a relatively relaxed environment, maintain basic physical and mental well-being, learn enough knowledge and skills to adapt to society, and discover their true interests and have the chance to develop them, that would already count as quite good. Even so, this is a long and demanding journey—an ideal as remote as the old fantasy of “going down to Yangzhou with a fortune at one’s waist while riding a crane.” Still, if one can hold on to such an ideal while accompanying a child through the years of growing up, then for that child, perhaps that is already good enough.