This is our reading of Henry Ren's dispatch for Bloomberg Weekend, 2026-10-08: China's Young People Are Turning to an 84-Year-Old Cambridge Professor. Read the original →
The facts first, so we are not arguing in the abstract.
In 2025, an 84-year-old emeritus professor of social anthropology at Cambridge, Alan Macfarlane, began posting five-to-ten-minute videos on Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social media platform. Seventeen months later, more than 2.5 million people were following him. Young Chinese users in their twenties and thirties call this stranger from England Dumbledore. In the comment thread they ask him, in volume: how do I face my parents' expectations? Do I study what they want, or what I want? Is an ordinary life worth living at all?
What does this mean for a working teacher?
It means: your students are listening to someone give lessons. Not in the classroom. In their phones. The person they are listening to does not know more than you do, and probably does not know them better than you do. He is simply speaking to them in an order you can learn to speak in, this week.
What he does.
He calls his method social therapy. Three steps.
Step one, acknowledge the problem is real, and that it is not just this one person's problem. When a young person asks "I do not know how to face my parents' expectations," his first sentence is not advice. His first sentence is a version of "this is presumably quite a widespread anxiety and worry for young people in China." He moves the young person off the island labeled "something is wrong with me" and onto a continent labeled "many people are here with me."
Step two, hand over a measure of hope that is not empty. Not "it will all work out." Just: before you decide this is permanent, give yourself one more step.
Step three, offer a concrete, small, doable-today next step. Not "you should be more resilient." Instead: "next time you eat with your parents, try saying this exact sentence to them: ..."
The order is the point.
Most teachers, hearing a student say "I cannot do this," skip step one and go directly to step three. "Here, let's try again." "Listen, in this step you want to think like this..." The intent is good. The teacher believes they are helping. But in that student's body, in that moment, they are using all their strength to hold off a scarier question: "am I a stupid person?". Skipping step one, from their body's point of view, confirms that "this is something I was supposed to already know." The information they take in is not the step you explained. It is "the teacher also thinks I should already know this." Their body closes the door on this lesson, no matter how clearly you explained it.
Validate first, then teach. Reverse the order and everything changes.
In the classroom, concretely.
Imagine you are teaching a math problem and a student says in the middle of class: "I cannot. I am just bad at math."
The step-one-skipping response is: "Do not say that. You can do this. Here, let us walk through this problem step by step." Good intentions, no effect. What the student hears is "the teacher is pressuring me to keep going." The door at this hallway did not get opened; the energy for the next hallway did not get activated.
The three-step response is:
"That this problem looks hard right now is normal. (Step one, acknowledge the problem is real.) Several people in this class are stuck in the same place in this unit. You are not alone.
I believe you can get through it. (Step two, hand over hope that is not empty.) Not that you will understand it today, but that across the next few practices, we will walk it through.
Right now, we are going to do only one thing: do not solve the whole problem. Just tell me what the first second looks like in your head when you look at this problem." (Step three, a concrete, small, doable-today action.)
On the surface, those three sentences take twenty seconds longer than "here, let us try again." In fact, they move the student out of the inner room labeled "I am stupid" and into another room labeled "this problem is hard." Only in that second room is actual learning possible.
The same order applies at parent-teacher conferences.
A parent sits down and the first sentence is "my child has an attention problem."
Step-one-skipping response: "You can try these methods..." Good intentions, no effect. What the parent is hearing is "the teacher has already decided this is a problem with our family." She cannot hear the methods.
Three-step response: "Attention drifting in class is something several children in my class are navigating right now. (Step one.) I believe he will build it up over time. (Step two.) The one thing I want to ask you today is: in the last week, when he sits down for dinner at home, what state is he in? Calm, or already very tired? (Step three.)"
When that parent walks out of the meeting room, what her body felt is not that she and her child were evaluated, but that she and her child were seen. And that she was seen is the deciding factor in whether she will walk the second mile with you.
Why this matters especially for this generation.
The students you are teaching were born into a different moment than you were. The reality they walk into on the day they leave school is urban youth unemployment at 19%, entry-level jobs they trained for already taken by AI, and a particular shape of exhaustion we are calling neijuan in Chinese, in which the whole group works harder and gets less. Many of them, deep underneath, are already asking the questions Macfarlane's comment thread is asking: "is there something wrong with me, as a person?"
A teacher who walks all three steps, every time, leaves inside the student's body an underlying experience: there really are adults who are willing to acknowledge "this is hard" first, and then walk me through it a step at a time. That experience stays with the student longer than any specific lesson's content.
What strikes me about Macfarlane is that he understands the weight of what he is doing is not "transmitting knowledge", he already published the content in his books , but "telling another person that they are not an island." His translator Qin Yuchen said it very precisely in the Bloomberg piece:
> "He has a rare ability to discuss large and sometimes difficult questions in a warm, personal and accessible way." , Qin Yuchen to Henry Ren, Bloomberg Weekend, 2026-10-08
That ability is not reserved for Cambridge professors. You have an entrance to it every day. All you need to do is reverse the order once, then again, then again, until it becomes the first thing out of your mouth.
As a note, this "acknowledge first, then advise" pattern is not only for teenagers. It is the same order used in the Fraga piece on tantrums for parents, with Juli Fraga's "be a detective, not a CEO" formulation. Different age, different setting, same shape.
One last reminder.
Walking all three steps will not pay off visibly every time. Some students need three months. Some need three years. Some of them will think back to the first sentence of that math lesson only after they themselves have become teachers, or parents. But that one sentence is in them. The sentence you skipped is also in them, in another form.
That decision, skip or walk all three, is not actually about those twenty seconds. It is about which of your moves that child will replay, decades later, in front of a child of their own.
### Questions to sit with
1. The last time a student said to you "I cannot," did you skip step one and go to step three, or did you validate first and help second? Looking back, if you had the chance again, how would you open?
2. In the half-second before you respond to a student (or a parent), what are you most often preparing? A method? A correction? Or a sentence that says "I see you"?
3. In your own life, has any teacher or elder ever spoken to you in the order "acknowledge first, help second"? What did that relationship leave with you? Which part of it are you now passing on?
from Henry Ren
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