Would you pay someone 50,000 yuan ($7,486) to try to teach your six-year-old how to become a CEO? How about paying extra for "Western nobility etiquette" training?
Premium training courses for children, which cost premium prices, have proliferated among China's nouveau riche in recent years as they try to ensure their children have an upper-class upbringing to go with their upper-class possessions.
Experts said parents' lack of reason and common sense about education are behind some of the more bizarre courses, but the appearance of these courses in general is a normal phenomenon.
Elite courses
"Building the future leadership of children between three and eight, equipping them with the competence that a leader needs," read a slogan outside a training institute in Guangzhou, capital of South China's Guangdong Province, the Xinhua News Agency reported on August 18.
According to institute staff, it offers courses like "maintaining the temperament of CEO," once or twice a week.
A two-day "Western nobility etiquette" course held in the Pudong Shangri-la Hotel in Shanghai was advertised as costing 9,800 yuan, and promised that a world-famous tutor would teach children "orthodox Western etiquette," "etiquette in theaters" and even "etiquette while having British afternoon tea."
According to 2015 statistics provided by the Answer Marketing Consulting Company, a Beijing-based market research and consulting firm, the average amount that a family spent on training their children accounted for 26.7 percent of the total money they spent on their kids, making it the largest segment of spending.
"The children who attend our courses are from either rich or powerful families, and most of them are attending international schools and planning to study abroad or immigrate," Jiang Yun (pseudonym), a former coach at a golf club in Shunyi district, Beijing, told the Global Times on Thursday.
The club's price list says that a 45 minute one-on-one lesson with a foreign coach costs 1,500 yuan, with 180 lessons over 12 months comes in at a pricey 119,000 yuan.
"Some of them also play hockey and ride horses as well," Jiang added.
"Families have special etiquette needs, but how the parents behave around their children might be more important than attending some training courses," a mother from Ji'nan, capital of East China's Shandong Province, told the Global Times on Thursday.
"When I chose after school courses, I usually consider my son's interests, and I hope with certain courses, he can learn about patience, teamwork and how to face failure," she said, adding that her son has learned a lot from the cartography, baseball and chess courses held by her community.
Market view
In the first half of 2016, the China Consumers Association has received and processed 2,626 complains about education training services, most of which were related to false advertising and unfair business practices. Every year for the last three years the number of such complaints received annually has exceeded 5,000.
These courses show the materialism of China's society, in which people tend to chase high-end products, even in education, Xiong Bingqi, vice president of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, told the Global Times on Thursday.
"Education has been commercialized, and some parents even lack common sense about educating children," Xiong said, noting that it is more important for young children to learn about social rules and to form basic personalities, instead of leaning about leadership or being a CEO.
"However, in terms of the development of the market, high-end and high-price courses might be good news, because it offers more choices for consumers who have different needs," Li Luling, founder of the Answer Marketing Consulting Company, told the Global Times on Friday.
Li said that the appearance of such courses is a normal phenomenon for a changing market, but it might "annoy" some people.
Both Xiong and Li suggested that parents, when choosing courses for their children, should consider the economic condition of the family; the abilities and personalities of their children; and the quality of the courses and the institutes.
