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 ...
The essay by Amy Chua is fantastic. I don’t know if calling your child a “pig” is the best idea, but the rest of her advice seems pretty sound.
It depends on what you’re trying to accomplish as a parent. My aim is for my children to reach adulthood with the character, knowledge, and skills to achieve the goals they set for themselves. Ms. Chua’s aim was to force her daughters to achieve the goals she set for them.
There’s not much common ground between these philosophies.
I think too many parents view their kids as fragile and don't realize they're capable of accomplishing a lot more, if only they're pushed.
I think that's one of the good things about these "model minority" families, whether they happen to be Southeast Asian or East Indian.
They know that one of the best ways of demonstrating love for their children is showing them that they believe they can succeed, if it the process doesn't seem appealing to modern parenting sensibilities.
Yes, that's a good point.
I think the concept that I most agreed with Chau was that children’s opinions don’t matter as much as we in the West tend to think. Kids by nature lose interest in a great many things the second they become difficult and no longer fun. Or as my own father said, as soon as it becomes work, you don’t want to do it anymore. When quiting isn’t an option, the child often masters the skillset and it magically becomes fun again.
I sense there is a story behind that comment. I myself had a chinese girlfriend (ABC) but the relationship was doomed to failure because she didn’t know how to relax, and I got an A in relaxation.
“Home Schoolers in America whose children are routinely kicking the butts of those who go to public schools.”
Prove this (without using self-selecting statistics).
Learning how to play the viola is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but learning how to master a skill you thought was beyond your reach is a lesson that you can apply in almost any other area of life as you grow into adulthood.
RE: Prove this (without using self-selecting statistics).
What do you mean by self-selecting?
Does the study made by an outfit called National Home Education Research Institute for instance, count or not ?
SEE HERE :
If not, what study will satisfy?
You are entitled to your opinion of Ms. Chua, but I would suggest you lighten up. My wife recommended the article to me, saying “You’ll love this — it’s a hoot.” I found the article to be very tongue in cheek, in some spots wickedly funny. She makes some legitimate points about how American parents coddle their kids and are sometimes too concerned with the kid’s immediate gratification and self-esteem at the expense of long term character building. The article is a wonderful example of using an extreme counterpoint to underline a legitimate concern.
“If not, what study will satisfy?”
You made the claim. Prove it. I’m all for Home Schooling, but the statistics that are associated with its superiority over other educational venues are self-selecting, in that they do not compare like statistical pools.
If you have something else, I’d like to see it, otherwise your claim is unsupported.
Again I point you to that orgainization whose website I just gave you. Will the study they made be considered a good study to you?
Very often, when a statistic comes out ( e.g. PPP poll showing how Sarah Palin is going to lose if she runs against Obama), people start saying the study is biased.
It just so happens that the National Home Education Research Institute did some study comparing Home Schooled kids and Public School kids. Is this self-selecting (i.e. biased) or objective ?
I don’t know. Their study has been referred to time and again.
Well I’m considered to be rather intense, and that’s not helpful either. A combative Irishman doesn’t exude calm.
We had our battles over colonialism. I refuse to apologize for my ancestors, when her family has reaped the benefits (Christianity), and life abroad in the west. Much of the good things in her life have come from Christian missionaries who came over to Korea.
She, as most do, takes considerable pride in her Korean heritage. This is a good thing, but she needs to accept that Americans were liberators who helped free her people from the Japanese (who she hates), and the Chinese (who she also hates), and that I take pride in the accomplishments of my culture, the Anglo-Irish heritage which helped build one of the largest empires of the world.
It was hard to get her to see and to understand that English people are as proud of themselves as she is of Korea. She once argued that English people had no cause to be proud for they were a long way from England notwithstanding her residency in the west which not only accepts her, but challenges her to contribute.
She’s a nice gal, all in all. But don’t talk to her about the Chinese or the Japanese.
“It just so happens that the National Home Education Research Institute did some study comparing Home Schooled kids and Public School kids. Is this self-selecting (i.e. biased) or objective ?”
If they compare like socio-economic groups in the two populations it is valid. If they compare Home Schooled population with the entire public school population (this includes inner city low-income, single parent households, illegal immigrant children that don’t speak english) the statistics are self-selecting for a particular favorable outcome.
If you compared home-schooled kids with, say, (to make it thread-relevant) public-schooled Asian kids from professional families, that would also not be relevant. However, if you did this you could say that public schools are “better” by citing the statistics. It would be meaningless, but you could do it.
The bottom line is that public, private, and home schooled environments are fine and should all be available to parents, but when it comes to saying one is “better” than another, then statistical games come into play.
Groups that support home schooled kids have no reason to provide balanced and statistically relevant information - when their market is home-school families. That the statistics of homeschoolers show that they do “better” than another non-representative statistical population helps these groups sell whatever it is they are selling. That’s why they publish the stats, afterall. It makes people feel special.
From the site you noted:
“Homeschool student achievement test scores are exceptionally high. The mean scores for every subtest (which are at least the 80th percentile) are well above those of public school students.”
This is a self-selecting statistic. If you took a like demographic pool in the two groups, it is likely there would be little difference.
Does it matter? well, this study classifies test scores as “exceptionally high” but maybe they aren’t as high as they could be (perhaps encouraging complacency, when improvements should be made) but you wouldn’t know unless you compared statistically relevant populations.
RE: If you took a like demographic pool in the two groups
What is a like demographic pool ?
Here is their methodology:
Demographics of the Families and Students
The median income for home-educating families ($75,000 to $79,999) was similar to all married-couple families nationwide with one or more related children under age 18 (median income $74,049 in 2006 dollars; or roughly 78,490 in 2008 dollars).
Homeschool parents have more formal education than parents in the general population; 66.3% of the fathers and 62.5% of the mothers had a college degree (i.e., bachelor’s degree) or a higher educational attainment.
In 2007, 29.5% of all adult males nationwide ages 25 and over had finished college and 28.0% of females had done so.
These homeschool families are notably larger – 68.1% have three or more children – than families nationwide.
The percent of homeschool students in this study who are White/not-Hispanic (91.7%) is disproportionately high compared to public school students nationwide.
Almost all homeschool students (97.9%) are in married couple families. Most home school mothers (81%) do not participate in the labor force; almost all home school fathers (97.6%) do work for pay.
The median amount of money spent annually on educational materials is about $400 to $599 per home-educated student.
Academic Achievement of Home-Educated Students in Grades K-12
Homeschool student achievement test scores are exceptionally high. The mean scores for every subtest (which are at least the 80th percentile) are well above those of public school students.
There are no statistically significant differences in achievement by whether the student has been home educated all his or her academic life, whether the student is enrolled in a full-service curriculum, whether the parents knew their student’s test scores before participating in the study, and the degree of state regulation of homeschooling (in three different analyses on the subject).
There are statistically significant differences in achievement among homeschool students when classified by gender, amount of money spent on education, family income, whether either parent had ever been a certified teacher (i.e., students of non-certified parents did better), number of children living at home, degree of structure in the homeschooling, amount of time student spends in structured learning, and age at which formal instruction of the student began. However, of these variables, only parent education level explained a noticeable or practically significant amount of variance, 2.5%, in student scores; the other variables explained one-half of 1% or less of the variance.
Bear in mind that we homeschooled our son through HS, and my daughter until HS. Real world experience taught me that homeschooled kids weren’t the rocket scientists portrayed by the homeschooling industry. So I’m extremely skeptical of any study made by the industry.
Now some real world evidence like X% of MIT admissions were homeschooled, that would be real evidence. A study by a home education foundation, not so much.
Gotcha. I’m Irish as well, but I wouldn’t identify myself as anglo-Irish. My family hated the English and everything they stood for. But that’s another story.
My ABC girl was like a type double A personality that wouldn’t quit. Worse her extreme obsession with money and how much I was putting back got really old, really quick. I imagine she’s driven a couple of guys to suicide by now.
“What is a like demographic pool ?”
Compare a population of kids from homeschool families and public school families - where both are 2-parent familes, same income ranges, and same educational attainment.
These would be “like demographic pools” for statistical purposes.
Comparing white, 2-parent middle class parents with college degrees with a pool of single parent, poor families with GED’s would yield an irrelevant statistical comparison (for deciding which type of education is “best”)
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