Why do Asians/Jews/West Indians do better?

Parent Cafe
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<p>I had no idea that rice growing was so detailed until I read the book. The more level you make the ground, the more the yield increases. The more you control the height of the water that floods the paddy, the more the yield increases. The more you weed it, the more the yield increases. </p>

<p>My mother was Japanese and her parents grew rice on their farm. She always told us that we should always pick up an errant grain of rice. Now that I know how much effort it took to grow it, I can see her point!</p>

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<p>I couldn’t agree more. Implications about “superior ethnic groups” trouble me. While I can see the point in identifying qualities (behaviors) leading to success, the tendency is always there to assume the behavior as innate rather than acquired, a reaction, or a compensation.</p>

<p>Expectations in the environment are huge, and often result in instant behavioral change when the environment changes. Witness the difference (often) between children of immigrants when these children are raised here, vs. there (thus all being immigrants). Our center has a surprising number of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Indian and Filipino underperforming students, who bear little resemblance in work habits to their foreign-born-and-raised parents. (LOL, no Jews, but a sizeable portion of WASPS.)</p>

<p>Absolutely all of my underperforming students are astonishingly lazy. This is a direct acquisition of the surrounding U.S. culture. It’s also fascinating to see the differences in the parental reactions to that laziness: </p>

<p>–the Indian parents are the quickest to assume parental responsibility in changing the work habits of their sons & daughters, and in doing add’l work at home with them, academically. They are also the most shocked at the low expectations in U.S. education, and often the poor curriculum & methodology, given that the parents, in India, often rec’d a far superior education, no matter what their income level.</p>

<p>–the Koreans and Japanese are the quickest to call their children lazy, LOL, no matter what the grades. (The “A” in oldfort’s post above actually stands for the second letter of l-A-z-y. :wink: ) But seriously, when there is laziness, they are the least inclined to excuse it.</p>

<p>–the Chinese parents are the most astonished to discover that their sons (especially) are not producing at a high level – <em>when</em> this is true. They are the most in denial that their sons are not UC Berkeley or Ivy-bound (with barely B-averages, and, ahem, a 450 on an SAT Practice Test in Critical Reading – though not an ESL child). </p>

<p>–the non-immigrant (WASP) parents are the most clueless when it comes to any understanding of the need for hard work in school as an avenue to a decent-paying job with an actual future. They have the lowest standards of all: “happy” with C’s and have absolutely no idea what their S’s & D’s futures might have in store for them, regardless of the jobs the parents themselves hold. They also are not terribly interested in the quality of learning behind the grade, and have the least sense of parental responsibility when it comes to education – past, present, future. </p>

<p>LOL, it sounds as if I’m contradicting my earlier statement by engaging in stereotyping myself. I’m not! :slight_smile: These are anecdotal only, & could be accidental for all I know. The bigger point I’m making is that the one attribute that all my multi-cultural students have in common is a laziness assimilated from the surrounding soft culture – to the great dismay, shame, & frustration of some of the parents, and to only the mild reaction of other parents. I will add that the students from competitive public high schools have laziness + entitlement to overcome. My job is to provide them with a Wake-Up Call in a piercingly high pitch, which I’m only happy to do. ;)</p>

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<p>^Interesting observations.</p>

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<p>That was my observation also.</p>

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<p>Mmrph. Correction. They are expected to do well, regardless of how much work it takes. If they do not do well, then they are expected to work harder to do well (note: nothing to do with their best; if their best does not constitute “doing well”, then they are expected to do well nontheless). </p>

<p>And even among Asian parents, “do well” can differ (usually depending on which is the more unattainable). If you got 99%, you could do better (god forbid someone in class is sitting on a perfect score). If you are the top student with an 80%, you could do better. If you’re the top student with a 45%, oh, the weeping and gnashing of teeth.</p>

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<p>In my experience, they have significant social deficits in real life, too.</p>

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<p>Interesting. Sometimes I am curious how these people are like in real life.</p>

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Perhaps this is true. Perhaps it is not. I certainly don’t care because my life is pretty good. I certainly don’t think I’m that smart. Certainly not as smart as many posters in this thread who seem to have world views which are far different than mine.</p>

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<p>Someone just send me this link about IIT</p>

<ol>
<li><p>It costs only $700 for room & board & tuition :eek:</p></li>
<li><p>The President (?) of Infosys’ kid can’t get in, so he went to Cornell for CS instead. He claims students who get rejected by IIT get scholarships to MIT/Caltech :eek:</p></li>
<li><p>Kids starts preparing for the entrance exam from age 8 … :eek:</p></li>
<li><p>It supplies the brains to the world - over 90% of their graduates come to US. :)</p></li>
</ol>

<p>[CBS</a> 60 mins - A documentary on IITs](<a href=“http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8833138111563450865&ei=34v7SY2OAZqArQLnmKCxCA&q=iit+cbs]CBS”>http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8833138111563450865&ei=34v7SY2OAZqArQLnmKCxCA&q=iit+cbs)</p>

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<p>You got to be kidding about it. If these kids have socail deficit then how come they have been getting jobs and having better life. </p>

<p>[Income</a> inequality in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States]Income”>Income inequality in the United States - Wikipedia)</p>

<p>Please do not state your personal opinion, provide facts based on stats.</p>

<p>If these people will not work hard, who will be the tax payers to pay for all the exapnses politicains are proposing?</p>

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<p>I have no statistics. When I say social deficits, I’m not referring to something that can be diagnosed. I am also not from or currently in the US, so I do not know how the educational system supports or does not support students at different educational/socioeconomic levels - I can only imagine.</p>

<p>Personal background? It’s something I personally don’t like to talk about, because it’s often stigmatized, but here goes: my country used to run a seven-year gifted program, split into three (4th to 6th) and four (7th to 10th) years, with students testing in 3rd and 6th grade for the program. I reckon the program took the top 1% to 2% or so. You spend seven of your most formative years in an environment that prizes intelligence, agility of thought, verbal wit and eloquence, and where no one lags behind because everyone who gets in is capable of doing the work. If students fall behind, it’s because they’re unmotivated.</p>

<p>You leave the program, and guess what? If you grew up in an environment where trading verbal barbs and debating on your toes was a form of entertainment and of sharpening your mind - well, to you it might be a way of testing yourself. To everyone else it looks like you’re a stubborn *(@%#$& who makes it a point to talk everyone down. If your initial conversation with someone else is designed to figure out how smart the other person is - as opposed to who the other person is, what he does, what he believes - people are going to resent you, especially since according to some test, you’re smarter than them and know it. And if this is the way you grew up, this is also the way you’re going establish interactions with other people - by showing off how smart you are.</p>

<p>Some students adapt fine upon leaving the program. Others find ways to cope with social interaction, by establishing for themselves a comfort zone within which people will accept their idiosyncrasies, and avoid venturing outside of that zone. Yet others fail to adapt - and the consequences are not pretty. There can be a lot of mutual resentment - “why are you so stupid” vs “you think you’re so smart?” - leading to a constant antagonism. I think a related problem can be that these students often dabble purely in abstraction and if they don’t have concrete, kinesthetic hobbies like sports, art and craft, cooking, etc. then their brain becomes their only tool for interaction.</p>

<p>So that is my reference point. I’m aware it has little relevance to the original discussion - BUT, it’s not difficult to see that if one grows up in a household that values hard work, education and intelligence, and devotes its energies chiefly towards developing the children in those areas, the results could very well be similar. The kid sees his value in how hard he works and the results he gets, and assumes everyone else thinks so too. So that’s what he chooses to present to the world.</p>

<p>How come they have been getting jobs and having better lives - they find themselves a niche that diminishes the impact of social awkwardness, where people are willing to put up with them in exchange for the quality of the work they do. And they do work hard - sometimes it’s the only thing they have.</p>

<p>/completely personal opinion. no statistics. in my experience this has been true, but feel free to disagree anyway.</p>

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<p>“Another thing I have observed is that many of these West Indian immigrants do not even come from the cream of the crop of their native country or have any major advantage, but they just instill hard work and discipline to the kids.”</p>

<p>Immigrants have a HUGE major advantage. They aren’t randomly selected from their native countries. Sometimes they do have socioeconomic advantages, but the main advantage they have is more intangible – they have the drive, lack of risk aversion, persistence, willingness to work hard and whatever other innate personality traits that propelled them out of their familiar if unpleasant surroundings to this country, where they do not speak the language and may not know a soul.</p>

<p>Compare that to the native-born working class Americans in rust belt cities, or rural towns, or inner cities, who cannot bring themselves to move across the state or country, where the jobs are, because they don’t want to leave their friends and family. </p>

<p>There are plenty of Asians and West Indians who are lazy, under-performing, and inertial, but they aren’t on our radar screen because they aren’t typically represented in the immigrant population.</p>

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<p>I’m not sure I buy the “great expectations” theory. Just anecdotally in many cases of friends and family the expectations are high, the parents are exceedingly well educated but the kids still say, “screw you. I don’t feel like studying!”. Just because someone expects you to do something doesn’t mean you’ll just do it like a passive robot. IQ, maturity, its complicated.</p>

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<p>The more recent Chinese immigrants (post 1970) are probably some of the smartest Chinese, because most of them came to the US to study. To qualify, one must pass the junior high exam, high school exam, college exam, and finally Toefl. After passing all of those tests, one must also have the work ethic and the drive to move to a foreign country. I used to laugh when my American friends would to say to me, “Why are all Chinese so smart?” I used to think, “No, we have a lot of dumb Chinese too. You just don’t see them here.”</p>

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<p>I have a theory similar to Jared Diamond’s book, “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” but not as strong. </p>

<p>Europeans tended to kill each other off in genicidal wars, purges of the intelligentsia, wars that killed the future generations. Plaques and starvations. Institutionalize and limited access to education and arts. Small population numbers.</p>

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<p>You sure you are not simply talking about culture of the British boarding schools? </p>

<p>I have a copy of a letter written by a Canadian Rhodes scholar to a Canadian paper back in 91. He covered some of what you said, and some a lot worse. It was the most scathing attack on Oxford I have ever seen. If he did not go on to Sorbonne and Stanford (where he earned his doctorate), I would have questioned his motive a lot more.</p>

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<p>Hmm. I didn’t think of that. I don’t know anyone who went to a British public school, though I do know someone who went to a Hong Kong public school which is reportedly similar, and I did think he exhibited similar traits to what I described above.</p>

<p>I have no idea what Oxbridge is like - I have friends there, but haven’t heard anything of the sort from them. I have, however, come across descriptions of Oxford and Cambridge being completely “their own world”. Could you PM me a copy of the letter?</p>

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<p>FWIW…Our local public school system has two high schools. The val and sal in one have an Asian Indian background (one attending Yale and the other Dartmouth in the fall) and the other val (Dartmouth) has a Chinese background while the sal (Duke) Korean.</p>

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<p>^^Demographics of the town show 5.65% Asians.</p>

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<p>dke - I don’t think you are quite grasping the key concept. By “great expectations”, posters are referring not just to a state of mind but a continued commitment to put in the very hard work of parenting to keep kids on target. As many can attest here, it is a hard and relentless task, often with obstacles and immense frustrations. But the pay-offs are huge, both in terms of economics, human capital and live choices. </p>

<p>This long term commitment to “hard work” with two active and vital parents is what is missing all too often in two key minority communities (Obama makes this clear in his Audacity of Hope book). Two involved parents - by that I mean really involved, can go a long way towards overcoming so-called IQ deficiencies. The lack of two parent homes is also the huge driver in income disparity in a knowledge based economy. I wish the right could find a way to make their message less didactic and religiously based - communicating a message of good life choices and economic skills - and at the same the left would be more receptive to just how elemental two parent homes are to solving many of our challenges and that doing so would accomplish far more than any government program. </p>

<p>I am wary of any nature versus nuture arguments in any event. You do what can with the hand you’ve been dealt. IQ can help, but whatever you’ve got you 've got to make the most of it. It is the choice we universally all have.</p>

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<p>Munchkin - thanks for posting the link to the 60 minutes segment about Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). What an eye opening piece. Certainly motivational :slight_smile: I especially like the part about the mom who stayed up when her son was studying to make him whatever he needed (like a cup of tea). If course he was able to make the cup of tea by himslef, it is not a very time consuming process, but by staying up this mom showed the kid that his effort was IMPORTANT.
When love is big, much can be accomplished :slight_smile:
mam1959 - very nicely put about those great expectations :)</p>

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<p>By the way, when referring to two involved parents, I am referring also to same sex couples. </p>

<p>Friends who happen to be same sex couples will testify that they are darn glad both of them are around to help with the difficult task of parenting. And in those arrangements, each of them take on roles (although not gender based) we see with straight couples - one is invariably stricter, the other more supportive, and so on, but both doing their best to haul their kids both to and past the finish line. The value of distributive labor is immense. </p>

<p>I mention this not to be politically correct, but to make clear I am not making a religious or moral argument (although taking care of children properly is a moral imperative), but rather, a basic and empirical life skills argument. (For those that are religious fine, but in this secular society many turn a deaf ear to the message). </p>

<p>Nothing would solve our social problems in a more effective way than a consistent call to involved, two parent families.</p>