This week, I wrote the following letter to the parent of a student in an attempt to clarify an issue I’ve had with her son (whom I’ll call Peter). Like many kids raised under Hong Kong’s exam-oriented education system, Peter was taught to see teachers as authority figures and to work in silence. Even after his family emigrated to the UK a few years ago, these values have remained deeply ingrained. Now that he is in a more liberal learning environment where students are encouraged to speak up and challenge the teacher, he continues to default to his quiet, deferential style.

In my letter, I mapped out the potential disservice Peter may be doing to himself if he doesn’t move beyond this pattern. Since many Hong Kong children who have relocated to the UK face similar challenges, I thought it would be worthwhile to share my thinking with a wider audience.

 

This little story about the film director Stanely Kubrick often comes to mind whenever I reflect on the purpose of tutoring.

To prepare for the opening credits of The Shining (you can see the final results here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9spGH0YMkj8&ab_channel=KevinLynch ),  Kubrick asked a camera crew to go to a glacier park in Montana to do some test shots. The mysterious grandeur of the ice-laden mountains somehow failed to move them, so they completed their assignment out of a sense of duty, even suggesting to Kubrick as they handed over their footage that it had been a mistake to assign them to such a less-than-spectacular location. When Kubrick saw the shots, however, he was blown away. “It was plain that the location was perfect but the crew had to be replaced,” he later told an interviewer. Kubrick then sent a famous photographer to the same spot; this time he got back “some of the most beautiful mountain helicopter shots I’ve seen.”

As a writer, my concern is whether my work will be dismissed by the leading experts in my field the way Kubrick dismissed the first film crew. As a tutor, my concern takes a different form: whether I’m doing enough to help my students get a real chance at earning the approval of those who will shape their careers in a decade or two.

It may be this philosophy that sets my tutoring apart from the typical tutoring center, the kind Peter used to attend, where “learning” consists of repeating the same exercise countless times for the sole purpose of achieving higher exam scores. The truth is, I’m already seeing my students as adults in corporate settings, competing for resources and recognition the way I once did (I worked in the business world for six years). My job, as I see it, is to help them develop strong communication skills, so their professional growth won’t be limited by poor communication.

This is why I’ve kept telling you I’ve been bothered by Peter’s silence during class, a tendency I attribute, rightly or wrongly, to the passive learning style he seems to have grown accustomed to. In the AI age, the cost of passivity is now higher than ever. Just this week, a well-known tech YouTuber, responding to widespread fears of AI-driven layoffs, urged his followers to identify something their companies aren’t working on yet —like the need for an AI audit department—and then “go to your organization’s leaders and say I would like to spearhead this department.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1PQRGLJ1HE). If Peter remains silent and passive, can he compete in Western work environments where speaking up and taking initiative are the norm? And with Hong Kong’s economy on a downward trend with little hope of reversal (barring political change in China), by the time Peter graduates, Hong Kong may not even be an attractive place to launch a career. He may therefore need to build his future in the West, and adapt accordingly.

Maybe we can start by asking Peter to watch this video of a Canadian-born Chinese who graduated from a top computer science university in Canada. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NQ4KvZAuT8) His degree demanded that he do 5-6 internships before graduating; he had to hustle to find them himself. Maybe we can ask Peter to imagine, in the future, assuming he and someone like the YouTuber are equally talented, who can get ahead faster, given how vocal and enterprising the Youtuber is?

 

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