Even if we are left with the responsibility of teaching our kids logical thinking at home, and I do believe parents have a responsibility to teach our children at home, don't you think an educational environment where children are presented with problems and challenged to come up with solutions vs. given information and asked to repeat it back is a richer and more meaningful learning environment.

Further, if we teach our children to think for themselves at home won't that create problems if they are in a school environment that does not accept that.

Also, how will children not taught within their lower educational system at a young age to be creative and produce their own ideas be successful in foreign upper educational environments outside of China?

Finally, if we do not teach our children, at home and in the educational environment, to be creative thinkers how will they come up with future world-changing ideas (e.g. save our planet from the course of self destruction we are on)...

www.edinformatics.com/inventions_inventors/

Take a look at the list above, only nine of these inventions, admittedly some important ones, came from China.

Laotau - my 3.5 year old speaks Putonghua, Kunminghua, English and Spanish. (why French? a very small portion of the wolrd's population speaks French and a great majority of French speaking people speak English).

en.wikipedia.org/[...]

#1 Mandarin
#2 Spanish
#3 English

#16 French

When my kids are in upper school I will encourage the to learn Hindi and Arabic which, with Mandarin, Spanish and English, will allow them to converse with early 80% of the world.

One last thing, if our kids are overburdened with homework after school when will they have time for important things like sports, arts, nature, socializing, etc. - all equally important to RWA?

JM

Thank you all for the thoughtful and inspiring input. It's great to hear from other education-minded parents and professionals. Hopefully we will have more discussion on this head in the near future.

Hi, I'm new to this site. I found this posting thread helpful and the discussion about schooling philosophies very interesting.

I'm Chinese-American and planning to move to Kunming with my daughter next year. She'll be 3.5 at that time, and I am looking into public/state schools. Some of you seem to have young children attending public schools. Can you share some information as to how that process works? Which public/state schools are your children attending? How early in advance? Do you just call up the school? What age does "kindergarten" in China begin? Do you need a "hukou"? I appreciate any info! Thanks!

Regarding the rote learning, I think I can be ok with that (although I'm writing this without any real experience yet so I may just be naive) and hope that I can balance it out with activities outside of school that will be more exploratory, creative, etc. Especially if there are other parents with a similar aim.