[Skybird]

This education style does not fly in our culture anyway, not if driven to such obsessive extremes. Since a long time, individualism and collectivism are being seen very different in Asia and the West.

However, what the total laissez-faire left-leaning pedagogues in Germany want - no schoolnotes, no differentiation made between different skills of children, if children do not meet classroom goals then solving the problem by lowering the demands, and finding sociological excuses for every misbehaviour and even criminal and violant acts - cannot be the solution.

Children and juveniles need freedom, but also they need boundaries and limits set up to them, borders they are not allowed to pass. This is needed last but not least to given them the chances to not only define themselves by wishes what they want to see themselves as - the great persuasion of dilettantism - but also by rubbing and rattling with and against these limits and and boundaries, and by that realising what they can - and what not. It also helps to learn that nothing is for free except the love of one's parents, and that from nothing comes nothing.

If I had children, they maybe to some degrees would be given even greater freedoms of some kind than what I see in befriended families, and hear from them about other families they know - but I also would set up some principle rules that maybe would be even surprisingly sparse, but would be non-negotiable. Where there are rights, the older one gets the more there will be duties. I believe in both freedom and being relaxed - but that being paired with discipline. No discipline of a character-breaking point. I mean constructive, excesses-avoiding discipline, and goal-orientation. And understanding causal links between action and consequence, targets one sets for oneself - and the needed action to acquire them.

So Tiger-Moms? Not with me. Anti-authoritarian education? Not with me. Relativising of skills, talents, and performances, and even negation of differences in children in the name of "social equality" ? Not with me.

Modern times and the many books and idiotic texts on education and how to be a perfect mother or father, have turned parents into clueless fools quite often, whose demands of what they dream of as a future for their children often skyrocket high into the heavens nevertheless. Well, nobody gets born as a parent, but when having gotten babies, people, at least most people I'd say, learned by the process to become good parents nevertheless. It seems to me that this natural learning process today gets messed up and even prevented in many, and gets replaced by books' and magazines' and ideologists' input instead.

Freedom AND discipline, a sometimes difficult balancing act. That is the trick, I think.