There are currently 259 customer reviews on Amazon. I can’t speak for the author as far as her stating this is the “Chinese way.” For years, we’ve attributed Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Indian academic prowess to simply being Asian. The author, Amy Chua, a lawyer and Yale professor, has created an “Ann Coulter-esque” controversy with some of her remarks on Western versus Eastern methods of parenting.
We are diverse as a country: we are a country of immigrants (as is Dr. Chua), and many millions of dollars have been spent promoting the strength of our obvious asset – diversity.
However, part of the problem is our education systems are as diverse as our cities and states: before the 1954 Supreme Court “Brown versus Board of Education” decision, that diversity was called segregation.
I recall a spelling book in particular. Written and mangled pages, pencil marks that completely obliterated any typed text, the only available legible copy was the teacher’s own and another (good) student copy owned by the department she would manage to get and make copies for us. Back then, the challenge was to rise above our circumstance of segregation; to show ourselves as worthy of education as any human being on the planet. I can’t find a source for the next quote, but during those times, education was truly “the secular god of the black community.”
Your life could completely change by what you learned. Booker Taliaferro Washington took himself from an illiterate nine-year-old to a builder of Tuskegee University (literally: the majors built most of the first buildings on the campus). The icons of the Civil Rights movement were educated or at least self-taught: Martin Luther King (D. Div), Medgar Evers (Business Administration, applied to UMiss Law School), and Ralph Abernathy (M.S. Social Work and 5 Honorary Doctorate Degrees).
I do plan to purchase the book and read it. But I can’t just call it “Western parenting,” as the sole problem in our educational system: first, there’s the problem of what was not fixed.
We no longer as a society have the stigma once given teen pregnancy in the past, and have children raising children into their second and third generation: the maturity of the parent has something to do with educational accomplishment.
We’re still by and large de facto segregated, largely the result of housing patterns birthed by “flight” to the suburbs. Educational books and computers are now purchased from the same vendors, but the quality is still “separate and unequal.” The funding of most schools and school districts is a hodge-podge calculus of property values and test scores: the higher both are, more resources go to the school and/or district; the less, then you have a condition not much unlike the pre-Civil Rights era. The demographics of said districts can offer socio-economic as well as linguistic challenges that don’t occur in the aforementioned suburbs except in smaller representative datum.
There is one aspect of western culture I think we should take steps to ameliorate: what I call “EIC” or the Entertainment-Industrial Complex. I of course, use this as a paraphrase from President Eisenhower’s oft-cited farewell address on the Military-Industrial Complex.
Its influence is vast, since teachers are “good” if they are “entertaining” and funny. Which I really don’t have a problem with to a limit.
There were some professors I absolutely feared. I took a course in the 2nd part of chemistry: I needed it to graduate and go into the US Air Force; else I’d have to do a “Date of Commissioning Change,” which at the time was not granted.
Professor Stevens walked into our classroom wearing a black trench coat on a hot summer day. He looked the part of Darth Vader. He lit a cigarette (North Carolina: tobacco is king, you could DO that kind of thing back then). After a long drag, he made this statement:
“I am Arthur Stevens. EVERYTHING you’ve heard about me…is true! I will take drop slips at this time.”
There was a snow flurry of drop slips that rushed from the auditorium-style seats to Stevens. He spent the greater part of the one-and-a-half hour period signing quickly and methodically. After literally the smoke cleared it was me and six chemistry majors. At the end of the summer session, I was the only passing grade with a “C.” Professor Stevens said: “Mister, you know more chemistry in my class with that C than in easier professor’s classes that make A’s.” I was inclined to agree with him, taking my C and running!
Science and Mathematics in particular are both disciplines and pleasures in and of themselves: to get lost in the complexity of a problem induces a meditative calm. The answer cannot be downloaded or Google searched: it must be comprehended, converted from word to formula, mastered and the effort at solving appreciated. Einstein compared the feeling to “being in love” or a religious experience.
We are battered by social media accessible by cell phones that have become electronic pacifiers. A recollection: The initial push was back in the early nineties when carriers wanted children to carry pagers. Motorola had “technology camps” for youth at sites all across the US for the expressed purpose of getting marketing ideas to convince reluctant parents of WHY they should purchase pagers for them. The weeklong camp cost parents – employees, mind you - $250 for their kids to participate (one was my oldest). It worked.
Pagers eventually went the technological way of the dinosaur for most of society, though a few firms still require some doctors and DBAs to have some. Text messaging in the US fetches a pretty penny in the BILLIONS of dollars for commercial carriers. Thus, even though the technology exists to block cell phone tower signals to eager teens too bored to pay attention in class, the legislation their lobbyists’ enacted keep any school from designing an effective electronic deterrent (i.e., signal transmission blockage) to classroom instruction. What we have is a threat of taking the phone and charging a miniscule $15 to recover it from the office. What has not been assessed is the untold loss of revenue this electronic “Attention Deficit Disorder” is causing us as a nation.
It has turned our youth into “bottom-line” problem solvers, i.e., the answer versus the process mastered for finding the answer. It is the equivalent of buying the biggest salmon you can find fresh at the supermarket and then posing for the cover of “Field and Stream” as if YOU caught it! It has turned our youth into lethargic consumers, not entrepreneurial producers.
As I stated, battered: the teacher has the choice of 1) taking the electronic pacifier from the aggressive teenager, who in turn has an equally aggressive parent that may curse you out for doing your duty; 2) ignore it, and give the teenager the failing grade they richly deserve, which will energize the equally aggressive parent into cursing you out when they say: “why aren’t you teaching my child?” as if said child is “perfect,” “intelligent” and cannot see how they could be failing your class. Therefore, it must be that you, the teacher, cannot teach!
The current statistics are not good for American education. At the end of a cycle: K-12 (High School Graduate), K-16 (College), K-16+ (Graduate Degree) there should be a fully functional member of society ready to work, not sing or rap; not dribble a basketball or chase a football – WORK! The aforementioned takes unprecedented ability and is truly a “one in a million” shot, American Idol as a prime example. Education however, is properly stressed having the goal of preparing workers for jobs in the country OF the education.
Yet, we politicize our educational goals by giving a platform to “Creation Science”/”Intelligent Design” and have the only nation with a full-fledged museum dedicated to this primarily political (not personally spiritual) stance. That is evidence [to me] that critical thinking skills are bereft, congregations are preyed upon as political demographics and no one has read the other part of the First Amendment that implied to Thomas Jefferson a separation of Church and State (to, in my opinion, the edification of both).
So, I can see why we’re a little upset that a (relatively) recent immigrant, Dr. Amy Chua, has looked at our parenting skills and found them wanting…
After all, our kids are “perfect,” “intelligent” and the only reason they’re failing – texting, tweeting, and Facebook updating – is that their teachers “cannot teach” (NOT!)
We have allowed popular cartoons and DVDs to act as de facto babysitters to our children. The television never goes “off” as in times past: there’s a smorgasbord of available channels to “surf” whether your provider is cable, telephone or satellite. There is a sense of “entitlement” in the American teen that I call “American Exceptionalism on steroids.” Part of this exceptional attitude is from parents that provide everything their children desire, at every economic and social stratum without working for it or consequences if certain educational goals are not met (i.e. formula = parents + if student is flunking --> take the cell phone, I-pad and I-pod-PLEASE!). Return said devices when the expectation is met. By the way: SET expectations! Your parents did. They were not mean and they clearly did NOT need to be your friends! We do not realize it was the struggle that made us, shaped us and molded us into who we eventually became. To abandon that pattern is to throw out a uniquely simple formula that produces results every time. To revere/respect/FEAR your teachers and professors only settled you into the ardent and rewarding process of learning. That is not a “Chinese” or any other ethnic “way.”
It used to be distinctly American…
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