Heard an interview with the founder of AirAsia about his childhood. Apparently, his father bought him a flight ticket to study in UK when he was a teenager. He landed in a boarding school and had to literally swim out of the deep end to survive. What he initially thought was a punishment turned out a blessing in disguise as he can weather any kind of tumble which had made him what he is today. He calls it Darwinism that propelled him to success!
My brain started thinking again when I heard of Søren Kierkegaard's fiction 'Fear and Trembling'. It is a highly controversial text which described the anxiety that went through the mind of Abraham when he heard God's call to sacrifice his son, Isaac. he described the anxiety that he must have had in the three and a half day journey up a hill and the splitting of firewood for the process.
And it both cases, the sons just submitted themselves without a fight!
What makes the fathers so cocksure that what they are doing is indeed in the best interest of the child or of mankind?
Much too often, we have seen kids who were thrown into the deep end just drown. Some keep deep resentment against their parents, blaming all their failures to their parents. Others give up the fight by indulging in destructive activities of worse, intractable depression.
So, are you going to take the path of least resistance, the path much traveled by others? Or are you going to a gamble, take the responsibility of the future of your kids in your own hands by venturing into something like home schooling or packing them off to boarding school?
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