Chinese parents are often described as fanatics when it comes to educating their children. But one American father in Shanghai has devised his own cultural literacy program, which he hopes will give his 9-year-old daughter an edge with top universities and overseas social circles.

Professional executive and management consultant France Houdard says one of his priorities is to introduce his daughter — whose name has been withheld by request — to the West’s major cultural and historical events by age 10. By age 15, he hopes the girl will have acquired the intellectual, cultural and social skills of an average university student.

“People usually think it’s too early to teach children so many things,” Houdard told Shanghai Daily. “But I’ve found that children are really capable of doing it after I trained my daughter and some other students of different ages.”

Living almost her entire life in Shanghai with a Chinese mother, Houdard says his daughter has long inhabited “a Chinese world.” To build her knowledge of the West, Houdard initially “outsourced” his daughter’s cultural education to private tutors and expensive international schools.

Last year though, the girl’s performance at school took a worrying turn. After several poor test results, Houdard took a closer look at the school and his daughter’s education.

He began helping her more with her homework and quickly discovered glaring gaps in her knowledge. For instance, he found that his daughter didn’t understand that France and US were two different countries. She also didn’t know where they were.

This lack of knowledge about the West worried Houdard, who was himself raised overseas. What’s more, as a management consultant, Houdard made a living teaching CEOs and company heads how to internationalize their businesses.

If these gaps in the girl’s education remained unaddressed, he feared, she might not be a competitive applicant when it came time to apply for university. And if she entered a school in the US, would she be able to fit in with her American classmates?

“I’m not saying that she must go to Harvard or Yale,” Houdard said. “I just want her to have the freedom to choose among schools like Harvard, Yale, Tsinghua, Peking, Fudan and Shanghai Jiao Tong universities, while not limiting her opportunities today.”

Taking action

Houdard’s daughter was born in New York, but was brought to Shanghai when she was just three months old.

“She has very limited interaction with America,” the father explained. “She speaks Chinese 95 percent of the time and spends only 5 percent of the time speaking English with me.”

Looking at his daughter, Houdard reflected on his own childhood. With a French father and an American mother, he was born in France and lived in a small town there for 10 years.

“My mother began to worry about the same questions I’m asking for my daughter when I was 10 years old and my brother was 7,” Houdard said.

“She was thinking about what she should do to give us more opportunities later in social, educational and professional fields. So she took us to America.”

But when they arrived in America, Houdard and his brother found it was hard to adapt to their new life.

“We spoke English very well with our mom,” he recalled. “But we found we couldn’t speak with anybody else, because we didn’t have the American cultural literacy. For 10 years, I’d been watching French TV, making jokes with French friends and dealing with a French world. But none of that worked in America.

“It was a very, very difficult adjustment. It took me two or three years to be really catch up and communicate with other children, to understand their jokes, sports and everything they were talking about,” he said.

“I’m afraid my daughter might experience the same helplessness and loneliness I experienced when she studies abroad in the future. So I have to do something for her.”

But instead of moving with his daughter back the US, Houdard decided to stay in Shanghai and take matters into his own hands.

“I love Shanghai and I like the fact that she is going to be perfectly able to work and communicate in a Chinese environment and also foreign environments,” he said. “I’ve worked in 40 countries and lived in seven countries. I want my daughter to be able to have the freedom to travel around the world wherever she wants.”

Content is king

As Houdard prepared to focus on educating his only child, he reduced his business travel schedule significantly. He also consulted his mother and brothers, who are educators.

While his daughter remained enrolled in a local private school, after class Houdard began introducing her to major periods in Western art. To help her remember this new information, Houdard provided her with symbols and mnemonics to associate with various periods and movements.

Houdard also created a story to help the girl remember the names of the world’s countries. She can recite the names of 196 countries in under 90 seconds.

Other parents soon got word of Houdard’s program and asked if their own children could join in. In response, Houdard organized a “summer school” for about 15 students. The program proved popular, encouraging Houdard to offer weekend classes during the semester.

The energetic father explained to Shanghai Daily that one secret to his success has been drawing on his own past experience as a consultant and executive trainer.

“If you cannot attract your clients, they go away,” he said. “It is the same with children. If your content is not interesting, they will not listen to you.”

To make the content more suitable for children, Houdard compresses information collected over months into speeches lasting about five minutes.

When teaching Western art history, for example, he mentions only three famous artists from each period, along with brief descriptions of their defining characteristics. To help them better understand the significance of these works, he also offers an overview of the history of each period. Houdard also provides his daughter with books on specific artists if she wants to do a “deep dive.” This method of adding new information to previously-acquired knowledge is called scaffolding.

“With the structured scaffold ... they can process information they learn in the future by themselves and fill in the scaffold automatically,” he said.

Patrick Kelly, whose son is also in Houdard’s class, also had positive things to say.

“He has a model which allows you to take in information ... and put it in a scaffold that allows you to access and present it very quickly. I do believe it can benefit my son to give him a mental framework for all subjects of knowledge,” said Kelly.

A mother who runs a boutique furniture store was also inspired by Houdard after taking her daughter to attend one of his classes. Impressed by his knowledge, she invited him to hold a weekly salon about Western art for her clients.

As demand for Houdard’s cultural literacy program grows, he is now thinking of developing his classes into a full-fledged education business. Many videos of his earlier lessons, including several on math subjects, have been made and the father believes they will find an eager audience.