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Chinese Children Learn Class, Minus the Struggle
September 23, 2006 1:26 AM
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: September 22, 2006 - Copyright The New York Times
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SHANGHAI, Sept. 21 — Every weekday this summer, Rose Lei drove her daughter, Angelina, 5, to a golf complex at the edge of central Shanghai for a two-hour, $200 individual lesson with a teaching pro from Scotland.
Chinese students play with teachers in the FasTracKids program in Shanghai. The goal of the program is to teach teamwork and leadership skills.
But now that the school year has started, little Angelina will have to cut back on the golf, limiting herself to weekend sessions at a local driving range. In addition to her demanding school schedule, she will be attending private classes at FasTracKids, an after-school academy for children as young as 4 that bills itself as a junior M.B.A. program.
Ms. Lei, 35, a former information technology expert and the wife of a prosperous newspaper advertising executive, is part of a new generation of affluent parents here who are planning ways to cement their children’s place in a fast-emerging elite.
A generation ago, when people still dressed in monochromes and acquiring great wealth, never mind flaunting it, was generally illegal, the route to success was to join the right Communist Party youth organization or to attend one of the best universities.
Now the race starts early, with an emphasis not on ideology but on the skills and experiences the children will need in the elite life they are expected to lead. In addition to early golf training, which has become wildly popular, affluent parents are enrolling their children in everything from ballet and private music lessons, to classes in horse riding, ice-skating, skiing and even polo.
The intense interest in lifestyle training speaks not just to parents’ concern for their children’s futures but also to a general sense of social insecurity among China’s newly rich.
“These people are rich economically but lacking in basic manners, and they are not very fond of their own reputation,” said Wang Lianyi, an expert in comparative cultural studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in Beijing. Of the 35 million Chinese who traveled overseas last year, he said, many were shocked to discover that they were often viewed as having bad manners.
To address that, some of the newly affluent, like Ms. Lei, take their young children for extended stays overseas. London and New York are popular choices, because the children can get a head start on speaking Western-accented English.
Others are signing up for finishing schools popping up in China, which promise to train youngsters how to become proper ladies and gentlemen in the highest Western tradition.
The best known of these programs is run by a bluntly spoken Japanese woman, June Yamada, who charges about $900 for a two-week course that includes a brief stay at a five-star hotel here. Teenagers must bathe before dinner, take afternoon tea, wear formal dress and relearn how to walk, how to eat, how to dance and how to engage politely with members of the opposite sex.
“I don’t just teach them what to do and what not to do, I teach the girls how to be women, and the boys how to be men,” said Ms. Yamada, a former fashion writer who wrote a popular book on manners here. “We’re probably the most expensive school in Shanghai, but nobody is complaining and they keep coming back, so we must be doing something right.”
Ms. Yamada said she insisted that a parent attend the classes with any student she accepted, “because if the parent is spitting watermelon seeds or chicken bones right out of their mouth at home, what is the use of all the fine things we are teaching?”
Posted at 1:26 AM