For kicks, allow me to begin by suggesting that you link to the following video, which addresses the intelligence of students at our 25th best university in the U.S., UCLA (the students are being questioned on campus about the Middle East):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_2SbkRybBk
My first post which addressed the recent Amy Chua book controversy, claimed that what we learn from the book is less about ‘tiger’ parenting than about China’s growing strength via a disciplined parenting culture which inevitably leads to superior education; it was dated 1/20/11, and finally in today’s (1/26/11) New Yorker magazine, the article ‘America’s Top Parent’ supports the thesis!
Allow me to excerpt from it (and I corrected some of its grammar):
“It’s just about impossible to pick up a newspaper these days without finding a story about the rise of the East. What began as an outflow of manufacturing jobs has spread way beyond car parts and electronics to include information technology, legal advice, even journalism.
On our bad days, we wonder whether this thinking is garbage. Last month, the results of the most recent Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests were announced. It was the first time that Chinese students had participated, and children from Shanghai ranked first in every single area. Meanwhile, students from the United States came in seventeenth in reading, twenty-third in science, and an especially demoralizing thirty-first in math. This last ranking put American kids not just behind the Chinese, the Koreans, and the Singaporeans but also after the French, the Austrians, the Hungarians, the Slovenians, the Estonians, and the Poles.
‘I know skeptics will want to argue with the results, but we consider them to be accurate and reliable,’ Arne Duncan, the U.S. Secretary of Education, told the Times. ‘The United States came in twenty-third or twenty-fourth in most subjects. We can quibble, or we can face the brutal truth that we’re being out-educated.’
Why is this? How is it that the richest country in the world can’t teach kids to read or to multiply fractions? Taken as a parable, Chua’s cartoonish narrative about browbeating her daughters acquires a certain disquieting force. Americans have been told always to encourage their kids. This, the theory goes, will improve their self-esteem, and this in turn, will help them learn.
After a generation or so of applying this theory, we have the results. Just about the only category in which American students outperform the competition is self-regard…..
Our problems as a country cannot be reduced to our issues such as educators or as parents. Nonetheless, there is an uncomfortable analogy here: For some time now, the U.S. has, in effect, been drawing crappy, smiley-face birthday cards and calling them wonderful. It’s made us feel a bit better about ourselves without improving the basic situation. As the cover story on China’s ascent in this month’s Foreign Policy magazine sums things up: ‘American Decline: This Time It’s Real.’
(End of excerpts)
It’s hard to believe that Chua’s book would be causing quite as much stir without the geopolitical subtext. What’s clear to me and should be to you, is that our education system is killing this country’s power relative to others, and neither of our two parties has the brains or guts to discuss the issue head-on (by revolutionizing our current ‘soft’ education system models), Obama’s State of the Union address last night notwithstanding. Thus , each succeeding generation (and I have a 3-year old grand-daughter) will unfortunately but likely suffer.
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