Culture and education or getting A's is hard work

Any of you bloggers out there have a day where there are too many topics of interest to blog about? I'm having one of those of today. To the point I stopped blogging all together for I didn't know what to write about next out of some ten or so choices.

NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has an interesting piece in today's paper. Yes I subscribe to NY Times select. I just 'love' to read Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd.(Time for mad laughter)

Kristof's column begins with a question- Why are Asian-Americans so good at school? He then goes into detailing the experience of Xuan-Trang Ho.

Trang came to the United States in 1994 as an 11-year-old Vietnamese girl who spoke no English. Her parents, neither having more than a high school education, settled in Nebraska and found jobs as manual laborers.

The youngest of eight children, Trang learned English well enough that when she
graduated from high school, she was valedictorian. Now she is a senior at Nebraska Wesleyan with a 3.99 average, a member of the USA Today All-USA College Academic Team and a new Rhodes Scholar.

Simply amazing. You seem to read these Asian wonder girl(or boy) stories on a regular basis. They rarely fail to amaze me.

Kristof goes on-

Increasingly in America, stellar academic achievement has an Asian face. In 2005, Asian-Americans averaged a combined math-verbal SAT of 1091, compared with 1068 for whites, 982 for American Indians, 922 for Hispanics and 864 for blacks. Forty-four percent of Asian-American students take calculus in high school, compared with 28 percent of all students.

Among whites, 2 percent score 750 or better in either the math or verbal SAT. Among Asian-Americans, 3 percent beat 750 in verbal, and 8 percent in math.

They do so well the California University system raises the admission standards for Asian-Americans. You often read someone saying they're over represented in the colleges. I've often felt this talk borderlined on racism.

Trang gives her own explanation for this phenomonon.

"I can't speak for all Asian-Americans," Trang told me, "but for me and my friends, it was because of the sacrifices that our parents made. ... It's so difficult to see my parents get up at 5 each morning to go to factories to earn $6.30 an hour. I see that there is so much that I can do in America that my parents couldn't."

Trang I'm sure your parents are very proud of you.

How does Kristof account for Asian-Americans sucess at school. Remember the columnist's wife Sheryl WuDunn is Chinese-American.

One theory percolating among some geneticists is that in societies that were among the first with occupations that depended on brains, genetic selection may
have raised I.Q.'s slightly — a theory suggesting that maybe Asians are just
smarter. But I'm skeptical, partly because so much depends on context.

In the U.S., for example, ethnic Koreans are academic stars. But in Japan, ethnic Koreans languish in an underclass, often doing poorly in schools and becoming involved in the yakuza mafia. One lesson may be that if you discriminate against a minority and repeatedly shove its members off the social escalator, then you create pathologies of self-doubt that can become self-sustaining.

I'm wondering if Kristof is alluding to Blacks in America in that last sentence.

First, as Trang suggests, is the filial piety nurtured by Confucianism for 2,500 years. Teenagers rebel all over the world, but somehow Asian-American kids often manage both to exasperate and to finish their homework. And Asian-American families may not always be warm and fuzzy, but they tend to be intact and focused on their children's getting ahead.

Second, Confucianism encourages a reverence for education. In Chinese villages, you still sometimes see a monument to a young man who centuries ago passed the jinshi exam — the Ming dynasty equivalent of getting a perfect SAT. In a Confucian culture, it is intuitive that the way to achieve glory and success is by working hard and getting A's.

Then there's the half-reason: American kids typically say in polls that the students who succeed in school are the "brains." Asian kids typically say that the A students are those who work hard. That means no Asian-American ever has an excuse for not becoming valedictorian.

Yes, yes and yes. Hard work pays off at school. I know, for the most part I was a lazy student. It would have been great if each class was American History, terrible if they were all geometry.

A happy intact family gives a boy or girl both security and support at home. I don't think this can ever be undervalued.

What do you think about Kristof's theory?

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