Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother - new book about Chinese parenting

Parents Forum
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<p>No, I’m not talking about people whose ancestors secured their elite positions years ago. I’m talking about people who became well-to-do, upper class (beyond upper middle) economically through their own volition, and laughing at the thought that they care about classical music proficiency. They’re more likely to spend big bucks going to pop or rock shows, and they have no interest in opera, even from a benefit / charity standpoint. Their cultural markers are more contemporary than classical music.</p>

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<p>Many of today’s pop music, dance, art came from classic. My girls, through their classical ballet training, are proficient in many different types of dance, and it includes hip hop. They were trained by a Russian piano teacher, but they taught themselves to play country and rock on the piano. D2 started to play violin when she was 6. She has a violin that costs as much as a piano. Her teacher graduated from one of those well known music conservatories, but their favorite thing to do when D2 became proficient was to fiddle.</p>

<p>To appreciate classic(music, art, dance) is like knowing about history, literature, math, science. A well educated person should have some understanding or appreciation of it, even if he/she may not be an expert. It is the same reason why I am a big supporter of liberal arts education, even if the degree is not as lucrative as some pre-professional degrees.</p>

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<p>Cobrat-</p>

<p>Playing a classical instrument lost its cachet in the west a long time ago, well before the 20th century. Up until about the 19th century, I would say mid, playing a classical instrument, especially among women, was considered a desirable thing in the upper ranks, playing an instrument was routinely taught at finishing school and so forth. And while there are well off people who are patrons of classical music, it isn’t a big deal there any more then it is in the ‘lower classes’ here. That died roughly in the mid 19th century and was never as big a thing here in the US, from what I can tell. It probably died around the time that music went from being a private, salon kind of thing, to being performed by professional orchestras and chamber musicians, which started in the 1840’s. </p>

<p>Someone, I think yourself, mentioned Eastern Europe, and that was a bit different. First of all, unlike among Asians, classical music was a major part of the culture going back, i remember reading that Budapest around the turn of the 20th century had the highest rate of telephones in the world at that point, and the reason was because they used to have the ability to phone into concerts. For the Jews in those countries, it also was a way to avoid some of the more onerous restrictions upon them, a child studying at the conservatory family would be able to avoid curfews and such, and if the child made it it was a leg up the ladder. The most famous example was the St. Petersburg conservatory, with the legendary teacher Leopold Auer, and students like Millstein and Heifetz. It continued on into the Soviet era, where classical music could be a road up in an otherwise bleak existence for anyone, especially Jews. </p>

<p>I am still trying to figure out the whole thing with playing classical instruments, mostly the violin and piano, it is something I obviously have had exposure to, I still am not totally sure what it is about, but I have some clues. One thing I am certain of, it isn’t, as some people have tried to claim, that there is great love of classical music among people either Asian immigrants or American born, my experience as audience at classical concerts and from what I hear from others all over tells me that isn’t the case, that in areas with large Asian populations you don’t see very many Asian audience members, and especially nowhere near the percentages you see in music programs (roughly 80% of the violin and piano students these days are Asian in the various pre college programs). </p>

<p>I think it is a combination of things, where this comes from. For some, I wonder if the cultural belief that this was part of the upper class didn’t come from the colonial era when the western powers held sway in China and elsewhere and there is some element of that I suspect, that this is de rigeur…</p>

<p>With Korean girls from Korea, some of it does appear to be something of a throwback. While I can’t say how big an influence it is today, with girls of upper class Korean families they are often encouraged to go into music, they often will make music their vocation from an early age, will be tutored at home, have lessons multiple days a week and have as their goal getting into one of the big conservatories, winning competitions and so forth. The reason, at least in part, is that in Korea, especially among the upper classes, arranged marriages are still common, and that was considered, at least as of the last references I saw to it, written about 20 years ago, part of catching a good husband.</p>

<p>Mostly I suspect that it is because the parents believe that in some way it makes the kids perform better in school, and many of them believe it is a good hook for getting into a good school, and potentially getting better aid and such (these I am more certain of, I have heard this said directly by the parents of Asian music students). Put it this way, a lot of the parents would be horrified, no matter how good the kid was, if they wanted to go into music, because to them it isn’t worth it, given the horrible rate of return on being a musician. Obviously some Asian kids, like some kids of any background go into music(believe me, it takes a parent with a cast iron stomach to see their kids go into music <em>lol</em>), but for many of them they believe that it has some special charms to it or advantages and is not really about the music itself. </p>

<p>Personally, I think all kids should be exposed to music, I think it has benefits that go beyond the idiotic “mozart effect” that is a crock, there is something special about all forms, and understanding it is a special thing that I think pays off in many ways. I think kids should be encouraged to play an instrument, and it doesn’t have to be classical, what I object to is the mindless nature of the way more then a few kids are pushed into it. Frankly, I see those kids every week, the ones forced into it, and a lot of them not only don’t care about music, they probably will drop the instrument in college and probably won’t even listen to music, because the experience was that harsh, and I can’t blame them (some of this is having watched these kind of kids play, and also what my child reports back in talking to them. Put it this way, when they hear that my child loves music theory, loves the music, listens to it, reads scores and such they look at him like he announced he liked spinach and rutabaga pie covered in castor oil), and that is sad, because what has that really accomplished?</p>

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<p>Unless we’re talking neo-classical metal or other classically influenced sub-genres, most contemporary music from blues to rock to hip-hop are derived much more from a mixture of traditional African music and various American folk musical traditions than Western classical music. </p>

<p>In fact, those very precursors to modern “pop” music were genres traditionally disdained by the mostly middle/upper-class classical music listeners of the 18th, 19th, and early-mid 20th centuries as “low-brow” and “low-class”.</p>

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<p>Plenty of kids during my adolescent years wanted to pick up an electric guitar to be the next Hendrix, Van Halen, Nirvana, Clash, or Green Day. </p>

<p>Unfortunately, far too many parents…including many ostensibly more open-minded non-Asian-American parents do their best to strongly discourage any ideas of picking up an electric guitar. </p>

<p>Hopefully, it is not because said parents have so little faith in their adolescent children’s level of common sense that they think they’d be dumb enough to haul in a Marshall stack, Stratocaster, dime all settings, and then give an impromptu demonstration to college admissions staff…
:D</p>

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<p>musicprnt - I am really sorry that you have such a negative view about those kids learning music. It seems like you come across a lot of them, especially Asian kids, for you to be able to make such a sweeping statement about them, so I would assume you must be a teacher or something. As someone who is just a parent with 2 kids in ballet for over 15 years, I don’t think I have come across enough kids to be able to generalize any particular race in the dance world.</p>

<p>For both of my kids, learning ballet, playing piano and violin have all being very positive for them. D1 stopped training for ballet professionally when she went to college, but she continued to dance, and she has even taught at a local company. I am going next week to her school to watch her perform probably for the last time before she graduates. D2 started to teach piano to little kids in our expat community. She is enjoying it tremendously.</p>

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<p>Odd if were the case that a professor of law at Yale would not be considered to have “already made it” or not be considered a member of some elite group and therefore need to use the children’s piano or violin playing as additional status symbols.</p>

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<p>musicprnt has made lots of good comments on kids and music. I wonder if s/he can tell if that’s an Asian or non-Asian kid playing by listening not watching.</p>

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<p>Asian kids would be more technically correct, but without a lot of emotion, and no love for music. With train ears, it probably would be easy to tell.</p>

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<p>C’mon, I can answer that: of course not. There’s no restriction on playing with musical understanding and expression, based on country of (parents’) origin–nor is there any restriction on playing in a way that is technically exacting, but not very interesting.
Also, if 80% of the students are Asian, and you hear someone in the latter category, if you guessed “Asian,” you’d stand to be right about 80% of the time, anyway.
So it’s a hard experiment to run.
On the other hand, the practice that orchestras have instituted of “blind” auditioning, with the performer screened from the evaluators, has had an interesting impact on the gender-composition of orchestras.</p>

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<p>Oldfort, my experience is based through being involved with music with my child a number of years, plus as someone who goes to a lot of performances at the student level and beyond, plus I have some music training and enough of an ear to discern what I am talking about. In addition, through various teachers and professional musicians I have heard very similar things said, it isn’t exactly a big secret in the music world. </p>

<p>The problem isn’t that kids are being encouraged to play music, it is that they are being forced to do it, and I don’t think that has the kind of benefit you are talking about, other then the kids do achieve a certain level of technical mastery through a lot of hard work, but I don’t think they are getting any deep meaning out of it, there is very little passion there or interest in the music itself. When kids choose something they want to do, feel a call for it, they end up learning about it. What I see with the kind of kids I am talking about is they don’t display any interest in the music, other then learning to play the notes, they don’t learn much from what I can tell. For the kind of student I am talking about, things like Music theory and music history and chamber and orchestra are boring, and they give enough effort to get through it, but other then that are bored and indifferent and it shows. I don’t know about you, but it is more akin to when we are taught to learn the times table, while that is a needed skill, few people have fond memories of learning the times table.</p>

<p>BTW, it has nothing to do with being Asian or not, it has to do with how the kids get into music and how they are taught it. Back in the ‘good old days’, when Jews sent a lot of kids into music, there were complaints about the same thing, kids who played woodenly, who didn’t have passion, etc, and for every heifetz there were probably kids of Jewish (or any background) who played like crap, for much the same reasons. I read an account of someone back in the days of Heifetz et al, whose parents forced him to go to the conservatory to play violin like so many other parents…he kind of worked out an agreement with his teacher, the teacher kept quiet the student wasn’t going, and was still getting paid, and the kid went to the library or whatever to read and do what he wanted (he became a fairly well known writer as an adult). There are also kids of Asian background who are fantastic musicians, who actually have a passion for what they are doing and really care about it, some of them are unreal, and I hope they make it as musicians, because they are a joy to listen to and watch.These also tend to be the kids who like doing music theory and ear training and are enthusiastic about orchestra and chamber.</p>

<p>There is further proof of what I am talking about. As noted in the original thread, the tendency with the ‘tiger parents’ is to force their kids unto the piano and violin, which are major solo instruments. The kids you see playing the ‘other’ instruments, like brass, percussion, woodwinds (the flute is something of an exception or the clarinet, in that they both are solo instruments, albeit on a less scale then piano and violin), and with those kids almost all of them are passionate about what they are doing, the kids on the orchestral instruments aren’t there because they were forced, because to the Chua like parents orchestral instruments unlike piano and violin, don’t have the cachet and don’t even register IME (mostly because with orchestral instruments, there isn’t the competition circuit to ‘prove’ you are #1, they are ‘team player’ instruments and there is little glory in being principal clarinet or bassoon or french horn in their eyes, their theme might be ‘orchestra is for kids who aren’t good enough to be soloists’). </p>

<p>Lake, I can’t tell an Asian musician from a non Asian, but I can tell you someone who is technically skilled but lacking in musicianship. I have heard bad playing like that from a lot of students over the years, and not all of it was Asian students. The kids who are forced to play are pretty easy to listen to and figure out, they play technically strongly, but it is also pretty easy to hear they are playing in a way that doesn’t stand out, that sounds exactly what it is, someone with high level technical skills playing back exactly what they are told. Among other things, the shaping of notes, the expression of the music is lacking, the playing often sounds like a generic playing you can hear on any CD. When you have a kid who is into it, is musical, they haven’t been trained like that, they have been taught to find their own voice there. Put it this way, if I hear a recording that sounds just like other students in the same studio, almost exactly the same it isn’t hard to figure out what is going on. </p>

<p>BTW, it isn’t just being ‘forced’ that does this, it also is about teaching style, articles in magazines like the Strad and other music magazines have talked about issues with pedagogy in the Asian countries, that for a number of reasons they were teaching emphasizing the technical skills and were afraid/unable to teach the elements of musical interpretation and expression, that they felt more comfortable teaching to play in a standard manner…and there are various explanations for this…it is also why students from Korea and China and Taiwan and Japan often go to western conservatories, they realize the limitations there as well…</p>

<p>With music or anything else, I don’t think the kids get that much value from it for being forced. While I agree with OF that music and the arts and such bring a lot of wealth into someone’s life, that only happens when the person wants to do it and explore it, it rarely if ever happens when forced (some of the forced kids do end up picking up the passion for the music, though sadly, they pick up the passion, but the parent forbids them to go into music as a vocation in more then a few cases). I think a kid forced to play the violin or piano would get a lot more out of it if they could find an instrument or a form of music they liked, or another kind of art for that matter, because when you do something you enjoy it flows in. Want a good example? Colleges have core education requirements, the things they want you to take to be ‘well rounded’…from my own experience, or others I have talked to, they generally got something out of the classes they enjoyed taking, that the ones they were ‘forced’ to take simply as a requirement they forget about as soon as they leave the class. The problem with the kids forced, to play violin or piano, is that they know they have been forced, that it represents something their parent wanted them to do, and as a result they get little out of it.</p>

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<p>QuantMech, I’d be interested in knowing what that impact is. I haven’t heard about that.</p>

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<p>The number of women in major symphony orchestras has gone up, as the practice of “blind” auditioning has taken root. This is not simply due to a greater number of women in the pool of people who are auditioning for the orchestras (at least if the study mentioned below is accurate).</p>

<p>Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse wrote an article called “Orchestrating Impartiality,” in which they examined the impact of blind auditioning. The article appeared in the American Economic Review, Vol. 90, No. 4, September 2000, pages 715-741. Goldin was at Harvard at the time, in economics, and Rouse in the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton.</p>

<p>They were able to examine the effects of blind auditioning in itself. One situation that facilitated their study was the gradual adoption of blind auditioning. The Boston Symphony Orchestra instituted blind auditioning in 1952, many orchestras followed suit from the early 1970’s to the late 1980’s–over a long period of time–and the Cleveland Orchestra still did not have blind auditioning at the time of the study, in 2000. Goldin and Rouse were able to obtain access not only to the orchestra rosters but to complete audition records, including the commentary on the musicians who auditioned, successfully or not.</p>

<p>On the basis of their study, using both rosters and audition records, they concluded that about 1/3 of the increase in the proportion of women among the new hires was due to the blind auditioning process itself. Blind auditioning had a strong impact on the likelihood that a woman would make it through the initial screening process. (The increase in the number of women in the audition pool contributed separately to the increase in the proportion among orchestra members.) The starting point was fairly low: about 12% of the musicians in the orchestras studied were female, until 1980.</p>

<p>I had read about this in the New York Times when the study came out. Forgot the details, but thanks to Google, they were easy to locate.</p>

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<p>/\ Interesting. Thanks for the info. I wonder if the results remained the same when the person doing the screening was female as well.</p>

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<p>Quant Mech is right, blind auditioning has helped to try and take out issues with bias and such that had plagued orchestras, which traditionally were white male bastions. When musicians do a blind audition the performer is a number in an audition pool, they do things like the auditioner has someone talk for them, and so forth, so those doing the audition don’t know if it is a man or woman, what ethnic group they are, and so forth, and it has made a big difference. Even the Vienna Phil, the last bastion of male privilege, has started admitting women. </p>

<p>There is a downside to blind auditions, because being a good member of an orchestra goes beyond playing well in an audition (obviously, you don’t play well, you don’t belong in the orchestra). Orchestras have their own characters, and someone may do well on the audition but not fit into the orchestra well. It is why orchestras generally have probationary periods to make sure the person fits into the culture of the orchestra, that for example in an orchestra that prides itself on its open energy, like the Philadelphia, a musician who is a strong player but doesn’t fit that dynamic wouldn’t be a good fit. There obviously could be prejudice at this phase, but usually the decision on becoming a permanent member is made by the entire orchestra and the process is not a simple one from what I have been led to believe.</p>

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<p>musicprnt, just read your post. Thank you for that long and detailed reply couple of pages back. I do agree with many of things you said there, as I even expressed the same views in much earlier posts. What you wrote about Asian kids in music is not something I’m familiar with, but I did find it to be quite interesting.</p>

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<p>An aspect worth mentioning is that the Asians who chose to immigrate and re-start life from scratch and were able to make a living in the United States tend to be the daring, high achieving, and risk-taking bunch back in their home country. The U.S. has pretty strict immigration policies such that usually, only those who are highly educated in their home country or have special skills are allowed in, unless they have some kind of connection with a person here in the U.S. Also, I would even venture to say that most Asian immigrants here in America have had relatively high social status back in their home country and/or success in academia, so it’s unsurprising that their kids would be influenced to share the same values. </p>

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<p>Regardless of whether higher education institutions are actually meritocracies, minority groups and working class folks only gain voice and influence in society on an individual basis through self-betterment. Yes, there definitely is something paradoxical about that.</p>

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<p>Sure, but what’s more, they and their children are blessed with the opportunity to pursue certain activities and life goals that are barred to those who don’t have the same privilege. It’s easy for someone who is white and upper/middle class, for instance, to forget that just because they are confident of obtaining a stable job and living a reasonably comfortable life because that’s what they’re used to doesn’t mean someone else who is minority and working class grows up to expect the same. (Not related at all to music instrument choice, just an observation in general)</p>

<p>I think that’s part of the reason why some immigrant Asian parents push their kids to succeed academically, to attend a good college: having re-created a family from next to nothing in a new country, they themselves feel more keenly the difficulties and the uncertainties of life, and therefore feel more pressure to ensure that they leave their kids with everything they need to survive in this world. This uncertainty, coupled with the parents’ own high achieving attitude and the traditional Asian emphasis on education, might be partially what contributes to the influx of this competitive, “Tiger mom” phenomenon that seems to exist at certain parts of the country.</p>

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<p>Full disclosure: I have not yet read the book, but so far I really do not like her. And that was not the way I expected to react to her. I was simpy curious, so I saw her on Charlie Rose tonight. (I guess it’s “last night” now.) She drives me crazy. I am so glad, as flawed as my own mother was, that Amy Chua was not my mother. The woman came off as being on steroids. Geez, woman, Chill. Breathe, maybe. Her version of herself: ‘I’m perfect, or at least almost. I provided more structure, but also much more love than all you second-class parents out there.’ (Obnoxious much?) She also almost completely controlled the interview – which was also quite an insight into her parenting.</p>

<p>But here’s the part that really annoyed me: No Western person I know has half the prejudiced caricatures of Chinese parenting that Amy Chua has about Western parenting. Unreal. She has amazing stereotypes. Now, at the end of the show, she is suddenly talking about how she now knows that there are many styles of Western parenting. Well, duh, lady. The entire rest of the show we would never have known that. (Yeah, ya know, I’m just a lazy Western parent hung-up on sleep-overs. That was her mantra through most of the show: Western parents compelled to provide sleepovers. She’s got a wide circle, this woman. :rolleyes:)</p>

<p>Another full disclosure: (my) daughter #2 used to complain that “only the Asian parents” in her class were stricter than I was, so Amy Chua has never met my style of parenting, for sure. She thinks she invented? or perhaps all Chinese immigrants invented? strict parenting? Um, no.</p>

<p>The difference is, if/when my daughters ever underperformed academically (well, they almost never did (and without pressure from me, I will add), but in such rare situations, for purposes of comparisons with parenting styles, I would not say what she says she said to her daughters. Her claim is that hers is not conditional love because she didn’t pull love away. But she also didn’t comfort or release pressure. She said, to paraphrase, “I’m disappointed in you because I know you can do better, and that you’ve disappointed yourself; but don’t worry, I’m going to be in there working with you!! in the trenches with you!! working every moment with you! We are going to do this together!” (The latter is virtually a quote.)</p>

<p>What’s the “we” about? I’ve never said such a thing to my daughters. Their schoolwork has never been “our” work, but theirs. I’ve been a resource person and mentor when needed, but never a co-worker. </p>

<p>For those of you who have read the book, did you get it that it was supposedly extremely funny, and it was supposed to be so very light and funny? Because that’s what she claims now.</p>

<p>However, at the moment I have no desire to read the book, because since every objection or challenge or slight doubt Charlie Rose raised, she put up an intense defense for (“Oh yes, yes, but I’m also this and this”), I sense that the book will similarly be her Ode to Self.</p>

<p>Truly, life is too short to put up with more narcissists than we already have to endure in public life.</p>

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<p>I do not agree with Chua and have not defended her in this forum, though I do identify with the value of discipline and high expectations in parenting. However, having experienced criticism of my parenting over the years, and having been criticized rudely just just week too, I’m beginning to wonder if some of Chua’s current demeanor comes from the frustration of years of having to explain and justify herself. After all, there are plenty of people who think they have a right to tell others how to parent. And those types would definitely target her! So she must have had to convince herself she was right and become really dogmatic in order to survive the onslaught of unsolicited advice, and most likely nasty attacks from jealous parents whose kids kept getting beaten out for #1 by her daughters.</p>

<p>I’m nearing the end of the road on parenting, as my youngest is in middle school. Frankly, I’ve had to become a bit of a tiger for no other reason than that everyone has an opinion on the “right” way to parent and are rude enough to tell me that my way isn’t “right.” This happens much more often when your child is publicly successful or publicly unsuccessful. Parents of high-achieving children always get accused of pushing (in a negative sense) their children whether they actually do or not, and parents of successful kids think they could have done better with your pathetic loser kid. On the same day recently, I was told by one person that I push my child too much, and another told me he thinks I don’t believe enough in her potential. After a while, you just get this attitude of “Look, this is the way I think is best for MY child, and what works best for our family, and I don’t care if you approve or not.” I’m not trying to be arrogant, but I can’t live my life trying to please other people, nor adjusting my parenting style based on what opinionated person I happen to be near at the moment.</p>

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No, it was not funny, extremely or otherwise. There were moments of wit. This lady is no Erma Bombeck (though I’m sure she would shudder at the thought), who could write about parent-child conflicts from a much more human perspective. Erma was no intellectual, of course, but she recognized that humorous means funny.</p>

<p>Amazing to think Chua’s still doing the talk show circuit - was last night’s Charlie Rose a rerun?</p>

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<p>TheG-</p>

<p>I don’t think anyone is coming at Chua from the view that you don’t need discipline and high expectations to succeed, I know of very few parents who don’t believe you need both, myself included. As the parent of a serious music student, I can tell you that without discipline and hard work, very little happens there, the whole myth of someone getting by on ‘natural talent’ just doesn’t work. Malcolm Gladwell talks about it in his book outliers, that most of the ‘overnight’ successes and such weren’t, that there was a trail of real work there. I had the pleasure for a couple of years being around talented fiddlers, and despite what some would say about them, they work at their craft, and they are probably more demanding then the chief music critic of the NY Times when looking at others…and this is true of most things, as Gladwell points out.</p>

<p>And yes, I know what you mean about people judging other parenting styles, I have experienced that myself for the choices we have made, and it is very easy to get defensive (though frankly I never did, because often the people criticizing us didn’t exactly have kids doing much…). We homeschool to allow our child to focus on music, and we have the doomsday chorus about how our S will be lacking, that he won’t be socialized, won’t have all the wonderful benefits of going to school, that music may not work out…(which is crap, but that belongs on the homeschool forum)…then we had those, when our S showed talent when he was younger, would play at school functions, say snotty crap like “What did you do, force an instrument in his hands when he was 1 and beat him if he didn’t practice”…</p>

<p>However, I don’t think that explains Chua, she doesn’t come off as defensive in that way, she comes off quite frankly as someone who feels she is the superior mother, that her ways are better then those ‘lazy’ western ways, and she is upset that people criticize her methods or whatever, that she expects them to bow down and say “wow, you are the best” or whatever. There are people like this in the world, whose worldview is they are the best and are shocked when others don’t acknowledge that, there is a yiddish term for people like this, makke, that comes close to what I read in Chua.</p>

<p>My biggest problem with Chua and those who view anything but her kind of parenting as ‘lazy and weak’ is that very same parenting styles they thus characterize have been around a long time (or rather styles, people on here complain about stereotypes being used against Chua and “asian” parenting styles, yet happily use the opposite to describe ‘western’ parenting styles). As someone said, the proof is in the pudding, and if these various parenting styles called ‘western’ were so bad, how come the US created a standard of wealth and systems that other countries are busy copying and have been for a long time? How is it that the US, with its myriad of styles, has created people who literally changed the world? Yes, there are bad parents, and frankly there always have been, but the knock on kids in this country bothers me, because I see the kids whose parents do care, kids who achieve, kids who will go on to do good things, and they aren’t being raised by ‘tiger mothers’ or "panda fathers’ or whatever drivel is out there. </p>

<p>The reality of ‘western parenting’ is that it isn’t monolithic, that there are a variety of styles, and one of the reasons for the success of the US IMO is that there are a variety of styles, there isn’t the monolithic, ‘this is the way’ you do thing culture that exists in many places, in part because the US is not a monolithic culture. Chua style parenting does achieve success, but if everyone were raised by that method the holes would be pretty apparent, that the narrow focus of the Chua like parenting achieves success in specific areas that they deem important, but would leave terrible holes in other parts. Put it this way, if Chua like parenting were the norm, we would have kids wiping out the international tests, getting 2400 on the SAT’s, 4.0 GPA’s, playing violin and piano…and going into investment banking or finance or medicine or law, and so forth…but where would everything else be? Where would be the dreamers, the people who go out and create even if they don’t score a 2400? The beauty of western parenting is that it encompasses styles like Chua’s and others, it encompasses parents who see success by becoming an investment banker, living in a million dollar house and driving MB’s, and it encompasses parents who want their kids to fight for others, to be poets, to be whatever they want to be and don’t see $$$ as success, and all of that kind of comes together to create a society. I am not saying we don’t have issues with parenting and education in this country, that there aren’t problems with discipline and focus and such, with parents who for whatever reasons are not parenting, but that doesn’t mean you need Attila the parent either. I see the incredible cult of ignorance out there, the idea that to be educated it to be ‘elitist’, the dumbing down of things, but that doesn’t mean that those are the result of ‘western parenting’ or laziness, I think a lot of those things would be happening even if the Chua’s were running things…</p>

<p>Having grown up in the cold war, there were people who admired the kind of ‘discipline’ that dictatorships like the USSR and China could bring to things, that they for example could force people to become doctors or whatever they needed, that they could marshal armies of engineers and scientists, or create super athletes and there was plenty of fear that these systems were going to ‘bury us’…once they fell or changed, it became pretty apparent that the dictator approach, while it had its benefits, also had major league shortcomings that in the end helped destroy them (Russia, for example, had legions of trained scientists, but because of the rigid government control on things, left them in the dust on much of what was going on in science). In certain things the dictatorships create amazing things but in other ways they stultify things. By having a system where kids come from different backgrounds and approaches, they can achieve success in a number of ways, not the ways that the Chua like parents think important only.</p>

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<p>I frankly think it surprised C.R. also that the book was “funny” and maybe even “hilarious” according to Chua, although he was too diplomatic to challenge this on air. My response: Chua, don’t quit your day job as Yale law prof. Because, even if I were to read your book and acknowledge moments of humor, you were decidedly unfunny and filled with stereotypical prejudices last night.</p>

<p>frazzled, I don’t know if it was a rerun.</p>