<p>Normally I wouldn’t enter into a debate on CC, but when people are claiming that Asians do better in schools because of genetics, something has to be said.</p>
<p>In my psychology class we read a chapter of <em>The Learning Gap</em> by Harold W. Stevenson called “Effort and Ability”, which reported the author’s findings regarding why American schools are falling behind. Here’s a summary of what stuck with me:</p>
<p>In China, kids are taught that inherent ability has very little to do with success, so high marks are attributed to hard work and poor marks to a lack of diligence (often parents are berated by teachers for their kids’ failures). As a result, everyone works harder (instead of deciding that it’s futile or that hard work is unnecessary based on IQ scores or XYZ tracking) and kids are not ashamed when teachers read off the list of scores on tests and theirs are at the bottom. They aren’t given easier tasks, either, like in the US; rather, the whole class knows that they need to work harder and because they don’t believe in low-intelligence people are more willing to help.</p>
<p>All this was hard for me, someone who was often told that his success in school was because of genetics, to agree with at first. Maybe genes do play a role, but here’s what I believe: regardless of whether this is the case, it’s better for the school system if it’s believed that effort has more to do with success than does ability.</p>
<p>(As a side note, students in China are also far more concerned about preparation for their standardized tests. I’ve heard that their parents will rent hotel rooms for them in the weeks leading up to the tests so that they can stay there with their books without distraction. With this in mind, it’s no wonder that they’re harder than ours if the test makers want to have a normal distribution of scores.)</p>
<p>Finally, to do with the topic question, I think it might be helpful to use Richard Feynman as a case study. Although he was probably one of the most brilliant people born in the past 100 years, he never let his intelligence define who he was (in his memoirs he always said that he was lucky or that he learned some trick to make something easier, never that he was inherently a genius) and so he was able to live a relatively humble and fun life.</p>