Posted on 01/10/2011 8:40:44 AM PST by SeekAndFind
An article in the Wall Street Journal called "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior" has American mothers (and others) in a furor.
It's written by Amy Chua, a Yale Law professor, whose daughters Louisa and Sophia are clearly, well, superior--presumably due to the parenting methods that Chua describes (methods that would appall many American parents).
Are Chinese mothers superior? Read Amy's article (excerpt below) and you be the judge.
If the goal is efficiency, excellence, and success, it would seem that this Chinese mother, at least, has most American mothers beat. And it's not hard to extrapolate that superiority toward a future world in which China wins and Americans dream of glory days when we were hungry, committed, and self-disciplined, too.
(Of course, Amy Chua is an American mother, and her kids are Americans, but leave that aside for a moment...)
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
RE: If Chinese parenting is so good, why has China been a backwater for centuries?
I can think of many reasons.
1) ARROGANCE. For many centuries ( especially during the Manchu dynasty ), the attitude was this — We have LITTLE to learn from the West, We are the Middle Kingdom, THEY LEARN FROM US, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.
Well, that did them a lot of good — even as Japan was already learning and absorbing Western technology during the Meiji era ( mid 1800’s ), the Chinese were still rigidly clinging to the old Literati style examination system made formal during the Song Dynasty 800 years before.
2) Clinging to old Confucian traditional style of education is not a bad thing. But the moment you cling to old habits and ignore progress from the rest of the world, you guarantee that only the literati and the elite bureacurats prosper and the rest of the peasants don’t.
It is not a surprise that the Chinese who LEFT China during the dynastic periods to trade and learn from other countries were the ones who prospered.
3) Eventually, the Chinese themselves noticed their backwardness after they were unable to defeat the British and even the “inferior” Japanese who occupied a large swath of their territories in the late 19th and early 20th century.
This gave rise to the New Culture Movement ( Shin Wun Hwa Yin Tong ) that swept away the old educational order and opened China to Western style education.
Of course, we had the disastrous 30 year period from 1949 to 1977 with China again becoming enslaved by a Communist Regime ( which gave rise to the disastrous Cultural Revolution ) that impoverished and starved millions of Chinese and purged millions of intellectuals.
The Chinese have looked back at their history and are determined not to let that happen again. They are slowly getting there.... BUT... are till in effect CONTROLLED by one party.
That too, will slowly change. It is not a closed world and anyone can learn from everyone else ( both the good and the bad ).
Excellent article. And notice that the underacheivers in this country have no father and a mother who does not encourage her kids to work hard and get ahead, but instead blames their failure on “Whitey.”
They compare their best against our worst, so natch when you do that, the Chinese come out on top.
First of all, China is not “kicking our ***.”
In fact, the reason China is the recipient of so many insourced jobs is because its cost and standard of living are both so low, and its population so abundant, that companies fall all over themselves trying to get a piece of the slave labour action.
Outside of a couple of made-for-TV cities like Shanghai - which are essentially fancy but useless bling built using Western corporate welfare money - China is just another tin-pot hole waiting for its geriatric, power-obsessed oligarchy to collapse, so that it can have another round of warring states.
Mom seems overly cocky and preachy.
One possible factor I’ve seldom seen mentioned is the drastic difference in social ranking between China and most of the rest of the world.
In most of the world, soldiers ranked highest, often becoming nobles and even kings. Merchants were next in the scale, with peasants at the bottom.
In China, and to a lesser extent in Chinese-influenced societies, the literati ranked highest, with peasants next, then soldiers at the bottom. The emperor was above and outside this scale, as a kind of God-King.
In western cultures, aristocrats and successful merchants could accumulate wealth for generations, building up sufficient capital to fund massive endeavors.
In China such wealth was always intensely unstable, subject to expropriation by the government whenever there was a shift in the political balance, often followed by purges of the wealth-holders and all their friends.
Partly for this reason, Chinese private enterprise has had a strong tendency to operate partly or completely underground, and/or drift over into actual organized crime. In traditional Chinese society there really wasn’t much difference in the way wealthy merchants and wealthy criminals were regarded, so why try to be honest?
These comments are overstated and simplistic, I am fully aware. But I think there may be some value to them.
BTW, per your ARROGANCE comment.
For at least two thousand years China HAD always been the most advanced and civilized nation of which they knew. It took most of the 19th century for them to get through their heads this was no longer true. But given the strictly limited contact most Chinese had with foreigners, it’s not surprising it took this long.
RE: They compare their best against our worst, so natch when you do that, the Chinese come out on top.
If you’re referring to this study here :
http://www.care2.com/causes/education/blog/shanghai-scores-at-the-top-u-s-scores-at-number-26/
Where Shanghai, Korean, Hongking and Singaporean kids rank on top, while the USA ranks in the mid twenties, a lot of people have commented that it isn’t comparing their best with our worse, but their best with our AVERAGE.
A lot of people doubt that the kids in Asia who took the tests given were a representative sample of their kids. They complain that those who took the test were “picked”.
Not sure though, how accurate that claim is.
RE: But given the strictly limited contact most Chinese had with foreigners, it’s not surprising it took this long.
The question is this — HOW LIMITED?
Contacts with the people in the Middle East, India, Japan and Korea were already in existence for over a thousand years.
Heck, the Chinese were controlled by the Yuan Dynaasty ( Mongols, which many of the Hans considered Barbarians ) for close to a hundred years.
And let’s not forget the SILK ROAD, where foreigners from as far as Venice actually plied their wares from the West to as far as the Eastern Coast of China.
The Ming Dynasty in fact had superior sea faring navigators as good if not better than Columbus himself who went as far as Western Africa ( some even surmised that Zheng He, one of the foremost navigators might even have discovered the America’s ahead of the Europeans ).
Places like Vietnam, Burma, the Philippines were not unknown to the Chinese as well.
Maybe the Chinese did not go far enough. I wonder how they would have felt had they encountered the countries during the Rennaisance for instance.... any honest man would have learned that there was a vast wealth of knowledge out there waiting to be tapped OUTSIDE the confines of their own vast Empire.
While the accuracy may be in doubt what we do know is that the average is dragged down by the antics of the welfare class kids who make it damn near impossible to educate anyone. This also is why the home schooled seem to be superior to public schooled since there is not 1/10 the BS the former have to deal with.
It is also evident that very few of the Asia children are from the welfare class or born out of wedlock.
In mom’s defense, she has raised girls who’ve played Carnegie Hall, and never brought home so much as an A-
Unless there’s a female child in her womb, then Chinese mother’s are murderers.
Chinese-American parenting is different from Chinese parenting, which, on the whole, is dreadful. Successful immigrants as a whole, however, tend to regress to the mean after three generations or so - I watched it happen in Chinese school over the years. The main reason is a reliance on government schools and allowing use of unsupervised media.
The woman in the article has 2 daughters.
Then she’s not chinese, she’s an American (or where ever she lives)
Chinese live in China, Americans live in America
The claim about selction bias is almost certainly true with respect to Shanghai, but not the others. As for our best...they actually did worse compared to their best than our average did compared to their average.
The people who allege some psychometric or statistical error in the tests that somehow is responsible for our terrible performance are usually people who have a government school habit and don’t want to give up their middle-class welfare entitlement.
I read the WSJ article with interest, as there are many chinese families where I live. I appreciate their perfectionist tendencies, and I would like my kids to learn to get some things absolutely correct. But American parenting does have some strengths that Chinese parenting seems to lack. 1.Many Chinese kids in America get a chance to experience faith. They join churches. They learn charity and morality and that every human life has worth. 2. American kids have more time to make life-long friendships, and get into a vast array of hobbies and pastimes. So maybe they don’t all play violin, but they play electric guitar, go fishing, fix cars, bake cookies, care for pets or draw cartoons. 3. Our culture in movies and stories emphasizes that there is more to life than winning a prize or getting a perfect score. We also have a lot of reminders that that late bloomers can triumph, that oddballs come up with great inventions, that people from disadvantaged backgrounds can overcome hardship by their own effort. 4. I’m willing to bet American parents say I’m sorry more often than Chinese ones, when they have messed up.
So if every kid in the US was a fiddle player and pianist all would be well. That would be real nice but then who would make the fiddles and baby grands. Pursuit of happiness anyone? What good is 1600 on the SAT if you’re clueless in everything else? How about driving a car,...
The question is did she play there professionally or was it some school connected concert? I know people who have sung at the hall because the organization they sing with rented it out.
My friend’s Mom played Carnegie Hall a a child piano prodigy. However she’s kind of a mess now.
Maybe her daughters have been blessed with a healthy gene pool from their Yale mom. I’m not ignoring their hard work but they may have an advantage the their Mom is not acknowledging because it wouldn’t make her seem as heroic.
A pinch of humility would have made the article go down better.
What about Americans who live in China?
Are they automatically Chinese?
Fascinating.
Well, why else would they take them from Shanghai?
Chinese people aren’t stupid. There’s no incentive for them to be accurate or fair.
I don’t buy their nonsense at all. Try having a Korean Christian girlfriend, and you’ll really get to see the verneer stripped away. ;)
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