Tuitions and the rat race..

I've just been told by my gal's tuition teacher that my gal knows nothing... her exact words. May I add 'in Chinese and BM'. And because of that she has been caned. My two kids struggle with these two languages though my elder one started picking up BM okay in secondary school. In fact he found BM manageable enough.

My gal knows a lot actually... she can tell me that a lime in the fridge will remove bad smell. She reads Little Women and finds it enjoyable that she reads it repeatedly. She asks questions out of the blue like.. what is the kidney for? She loves Enid Blyton books and reads quite voraciously. She is willing to try new things and finds joy in learning even the many things I take for granted. She loves to swim and also squeals with laughter when she thinks she is better than her papa in squash... The problem, all of these things are in English.

In the other 'Chinese' world, she is lost. She's in a Chinese school. In this world, she 'knows' very little. Hence, her life becomes regimented by the tuitions. Learning takes on a new dimension... the rote kind. The kind where kids are sandpapered according to the mill specifications. They are varnished with the same kind of varnish, all bumps and telling marks are removed.... eventually their individuality and creativity will be stripped to the minimum. If she does not rebel, she might become good at regurgitating out whatever is expected... she might even do well. However that's still some way off. She, however will be imbued with traits like hardworking, stamina from long and arduous tuitions.

There is a high probability that she will end up like a product housed in common packages with plain paper wrappings. Her creativity, individuality and originality will mostly be covered by the wrappings. The demands of our society now..... we produced them in the specs we feel the market demands.

Yet when we look at old furniture... it's not those uniformed and beautifully sandpapered and varnished furniture that are priceless. The priceless ones are usually those who have the grains of their original wood showing through or those which followed the contour of the wood... those furniture that has been shaped with the type and shape of wood in mind.

We agonize over what is good for her and 'needful'......