Quote

I grew up in a Chinese family where the parents' No. 1 priority is the kids' education.

Our parents decided not to teach us Chinese. It was an era when they felt we would be better off if we didn't have that complication.

At a moderate calculation, among a million of persons inhabiting the metropolis, there are, at least, twenty-five thousand children who attend these schools, and cost their parents as many pounds sterling, per annum.

My children were educated in what were then Chinese schools, and they learned English as a subject. But they made up when they went to English-language universities. So they didn't lose out. They had a basic set of traditional Confucian values. Not my grandchildren.

The Chinese model calls for giving your kids very little choice - and I've come to see that you can go too far with that. On the other hand, I also believe that Western parents sometimes give their young kids too much choice.

In China, you've got six people buying for one child. But the thing is, you've got the largest rising upper-middle class in the world.

I was raised, myself, by extremely strict but also extremely loving Chinese immigrant parents. To this day, I believe that their having high expectations for me, coupled with love, was the greatest gift that anyone's ever given me. And so that's why, even though my husband is not Chinese, I try to raise my own two daughters the same way.

There was one public school for boys, and one for girls, but Jewish children were admitted in limited numbers - only ten to a hundred; and even the lucky ones had their troubles.

Every single kid in my group of friends at school was from a single-parent family.

A lot of schools benefit from parents who are first- or second-generation immigrants, who expect the best for their children.