教子不易

早一陣子，看到一篇關於如何管理軟件開發的文章。其中，作者以管教孩子去譬喻管理軟件開發不能完全量化，我覺得頗有意思，節錄如下：

Imagine you’re trying to control a teenager’s upbringing. The very idea of controlling your child ought to make you at least a little bit queasy. Yet the stakes for control couldn’t be higher. If you fail in your task, fail utterly, lives can be ruined. So, it’s absolutely essential that you not lose your grip entirely. You’re like a fencer who’s learning to hold his sword as though it were a bird: too tight and the bird will be injured; too loose and it will fly away.

Now apply “You can’t control what you can’t measure” to the teenager. Most things that really matter—honor, dignity, discipline, personality, grace under pressure, values, ethics, resourcefulness, loyalty, humor, kindness—aren’t measurable. You must steer your child as best you can without much metric feedback. It’s hard, but then parenting is hard. You get a little bit of measurement in the form of school grades, and you’re grateful for it. But you also know that your child’s math grade is a better indicator of achievement than his Spanish grade, because math understanding is easier to measure. And his “grade” in comportment is much more likely to tell you something about the teacher than about the child.

("Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come And Gone?" by Tom DeMarco)

第一段說明了要適當教養孩子的重要性，第二段提到要達到有多困難。

很希望我們能將最重要的那些素質帶給兩個孩子，亦明白在今時今日的香港，要實行有多難。我們的社會，實在不重視人的人性，而喜歡將一切量化，簡化，以方便處理。唯有盡力抗衡這種文化。