Don't fall into the pitfalls of private tutoring.

Author: Zhang Wei, Jin Ge
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-01-01
Features: On a park bench, a father asked his son, "A deaf and mute person goes to a hardware store and wants to buy some nails. Because he cannot speak, he has to gesture. He makes a motion with both hands as if hammering a nail, but the clerk gives him a hammer. He shakes his head, and then the clerk understands and gives him nails. Just then, another blind person comes in and wants to buy scissors. How does the blind person do it?" The son quickly makes a motion with his fingers as if cutting something and proudly says, "The blind person does it like this." But he then hears the father scold loudly, "You idiot! The blind person can just say, 'I want to buy a pair of scissors.' He's not mute." The child's excited expression disappears, and he lowers his head aggrievedly. Some "riddle" questions can indeed cultivate and enhance a child's creative thinking skills. The essence of "riddles" lies in breaking conventional thinking patterns and replacing them with novel, clever, and unexpected ideas. The father in the example above used this method to guide his child, which was a good approach. However, he was too eager for quick results, wishing his child could become an inventor overnight. A single word like "idiot" could potentially stifle his son's creativity and initiative.
The same example: There are 10 birds in a tree. You shoot one with a gun. How many are left? Answering that 9 are left is wrong. The correct answer is none left, because the rest of the birds fly away in shock. Some argue that 9 are left is correct because they are stunned; others say only one is left because it is the mother of the shot bird, who doesn't want to leave. In reality, there are many ways to stimulate creative thinking, but many family approaches go in the opposite direction.
On one hand, some parents are too permissive with their children, as if the child is merely an appendage to them. They impose their own wills on the child, dictating what the child can and cannot do. This absolute authoritarianism directly leads to children losing independence and the ability to think for themselves. How can they talk about creativity? On the other hand, for today's only children, parental love often goes to another extreme: spoiling and indulgence, allowing them to run wild. They don't distinguish right from wrong and put the child at the center of everything. In daily life, this manifests as blindly satisfying all of the child's demands, working tirelessly for them without principles, and not giving them the chance to do things themselves. As a result, children develop dependency, lack initiative, or become stubborn, ultimately losing their creativity.
What's more important is that many parents have already fixed their own ways of thinking into a rigid pattern and actively replicate this pattern in their children's thinking: they don't ask why, only know that something is so but not why, believe there is only one correct answer, and do exactly as the book says. (P34-35)