Your anecdotes don’t prove any point. I’m part Asian, and some of the homes I’ve spent time in feature well appointed bookshelves. This is anecdotal as well.
“Its NOT an academic tradition. In most cases we are talking about the children or grandchildren of peasants and laborers;”
Are you suggesting that peasants and laborers do not aspire to educate their children? I can tell you that you’re wrong. It is, in part, as a result of these impoverished conditions that caused these Asian families to pursue an education.
I am not making my point I’m afraid.
There are poor people the world over - most everyone in the world is poor or only recently came out of poverty.
Why do the Asian poor, with NO academic tradition, outperform the African or Latin American poor, which come out of societies that are no worse educated ? Fujian province in the 1960’s was no better off than Mali or Bolivia.
SOME Asian homes have educated members and books. Asian homes where people are “fresh off the boat” in San Francisco for instance, mostly don’t. And THEIR children, books or not, beat the academic snot out of everyone regardless. Why ?
This is not anecdotal. We have the statistics to back it. Asian kids in San Francisco (an excellent real life laboratory for this), with high poverty, non-English speaking parents, low literacy parents, are still the cream of the crop.
There are no answers. This is perhaps the most pressing social and economic question there is, anywhere. If we can make other people perform like these people the economic benefit would be tremendous.