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In the first part, this paper will give family education differences reflected in the novel, including different understanding of family values, differences in aims of family education, in methods of family education, and in contents of family education. In the second part, this paper will give reasons for family education differences between China and America. In the third part, this paper will analyze the results of two different kinds of family educations. It is leading to two kinds of different results. In the fourth part, this paper will tell inspirations of the American family education to Chinese family education including updating the concept of family education, paying attention to the children’ all-round development, and raising independent thinking ability of children.
Ⅱ. Differences in Family Education Between China and America Reflected in the Novel
2.1 Different Understanding of Family Values
Family is the foundation of society in China. Family is the fundamental element of Chinese society. Members of a family generally live together or nearby. They help and support each other and respect the elders and parents. They are friendly with other people, but believe that strong relationships need time and patience to build to make them solid and long-lasting.
Chinese education has too many expectations for children, and the children were controlled too much. They become weak who are mostly in fear of making mistakes, and they are afraid of failure. So in order to avoid mistakes, they give up the chance to put forward questions, give up learning. When children grow up, children lose not only creation and power of imagination, but also probably be afraid of losing, because their knowledge of studying, thinking, logic and reasoning is limited. In today's so fierce competition world, only the strong can get achievements. Chinese education system is not to shape a real child, but always to shape the children become what they want to. Parents do not give children their own rights to become their own shape, but let them be manipulated by China’s education. Interest is very important for both adults and children, and to let a man does what he does not want to is only waste of efforts. To Respect your child, regarding him as an equal man, who can enjoy equal rights to speak, for example, the rights of criticizing and resisting. An obedient child is not necessarily good boy, and he will not necessarily have great ambition. China has repeatedly stressed how solid the foundation Chinese education owns, and how bad children in the United States performed in science. But we see the fact that America is a forever precursor in the world in scientific and technological area.
In the novel, these women moved to the United States for decades, but they are raised by traditional education and abide by the Chinese values which have been penetrated in Chinese blood for thousands of years. For example, mothers of June and Waverly force their daughters to learn what they are not interested in. And now the Chinese parents’ expecting their children to be talents is a completely common phenomenon, and in The Joy Luck Club, parents always hope that their own daughters can achieve their own dream. They don’t care about their feelings and real needs, and cannot be in a calm mood to accept their daughters’ true colors.
American parents’ duty is to make children truly enjoy their childhood, to play sports, to make friends, to go outing, to do things they like to do. American parents never help children tutor homework because they think: if parents are teachers, what the children’s school teachers do? If a child’s homework is wrong, they also don’t give them the right answer, they can let a child think twice, and they think that everybody makes mistakes. No mistakes, how to improve? They lay stresses on the children’s self-confidence, never attacking children, and they never say that children are stupid. However, they constantly praise them. They also won’t let children sacrifice weekend time to learn. American parents talk little about kids’ school work. Children' performance is their own things. In America, parents’ aims are to train their children to have the ability of adapting to environmental variety and the ability of living independently. Based on this concept, most American parents emphasize more to train their children’s ability of independence once they were born. They generally believe that children’s growth must rely on their own experiences, because they think that children should form a self-supporting will and the capacity to live independently since their childhood. And the capacity comes from the training in the early age. The so-called training contains many aspects, such as work, temper will, patience, the spirit of hard work, etc. However, the most fundamental training is the ability of adapting to hard conditions. Through the process of work, children will form the labor sense, learn some work skills and form a habit of labor. Besides, children can learn how to overcome difficulties, temper their will power, develop their talents and skills, rich their knowledge, and form a habit of hard work and during thrifty process where children will obtain the independent survivability and take the responsibilities for the society. In addition, children can easily make lots of friends, and parents will not be too much interference in it. But friendships don’t last long and they change a lot over time. Young adults generally have their own lives and see their parents and families a few times a year, on holidays.