The twitter feed shows hundreds (or thousands, I didn’t count) of anti-Chua posts. Amy Chua simply follows the Chinese model of parental discipline but is evidently at the extreme end of the spectrum.The issue is not Chua, but the China culture and system itself; China is the country that challenges our nation’s future more than any other, and the differences in education processes and attitudes are likely critical, especially in the long term! In an important sense, ‘The Future of America’ may be at stake!
Within the education sphere are two separate but closely related challenges with which any nation must deal: national scholastic standards and the accompanying roles of parents. Regarding the former, every country deals with children differently, and there is no question that our national standards are not be as demanding as China’s . But when adding the parenting issue, the gap widens: all available facts describe parents in China as being tough while ours are soft: tough beats soft!
Last week the media reacted vigorously to a book by Yale Law Professor Amy Chua who describes her experiences bringing up two young girls, the older one a star while the younger rebelled. The public reacted to book reviews in the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, effectively debating the ‘Chinese mother’ issue; while most were angry with Prof. Chua, they did not address the reality that China’s parenting habits are in fact impressive overall when one considers the parents’ extraordinary degree of involvement!
Tough attitudes are generally not adopted for entertainment, but for success. And of the several reasons China might be better managed overall than the U.S., one would be its education system which includes ’intimate’ parenting (‘standards’ which help define the education process nationally: levels of excellence, of requirements, of attainments and perhaps of moral conduct here and there).
All Chinese mothers are not Prof. Chua! While she worked excessively while hoping to assure the superiority of her daughters, her approach seeming quite unique even in China, where a high percentage of Chinese mothers (with help from fathers) work hard to ensure the success of their children.
Examples include: kids are not allowed to complain, to watch nonsense TV, to play non-educational computer games, to choose their extracurricular activities unilaterally, to receive poor class grades, and so forth. If not carried too far, where’s the flaw? OK, so families believe that children need to study and work hard at everything they pursue, and only when they begin to visibly excel in mathematics or music or whatever, do the kids obtain praise.
What’s wrong with that?
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