Changing the world with the children To a friend, I once had the same idea as yours: changing the world with the children. But around ten years ago, I had an experience of teaching to a young girl living opposite our flat. She was just a kid, indeed we saw her growing up since her birth. My parents even helped to raise her before and during he went to the kindergarten. It was then that I tried to teach her some easy short poems, thinking that it will do her good when she gets older. There was no difficulty for her, she just treated it as a game or a song. And she liked it very much, feeling happy when she could recite the whole piece. But the problem come with her parents. Her father insisted that she had to learn to write the characters at the same time (you know how difficult the Chinese characters are). And her mother always complained, saying that reciting poetry did not help the kid to get good marks in school, that it was a useless hobby wasting her time of study. After a few poems, she did not come to our house. I used to hear a lot of scolding and shouting, commanding the girl to do all the homework assigned by the school (in Hong Kong children are bombarded with homework very early in life). She obviously did not like it at all. I imagine if she could choose, she would rather come over our place to play, to eat, and to recite poetry. Now she is studying primary school, she often stays home surfing on the net, not as active as before. Those happy smiles in childhood are lost in her face. She gets fatter and doesn't like to say hello to you. I think she suffers from a bad image of her self. I don't know how to help her nor what to say to her. Teachers are very important, but parents are even more significant. My failure was that I could not change the child, without first changing the attitudes of her parents.