<p>Ghostt-</p>
<p>The woman brought it on herself when she wrote the book. When you put yourself out in public, you are going to draw criticism, and especially when the tone of the book to a certain extent, and the articles she is interviewed, makes claims about superiority, it is like a politician who denounces an opponent as immoral and then is shocked when their own pecadilos are criticized. She wrote the book and to expect no criticism is kind of illogical.</p>
<p>More importantly, people are going to criticize because they feel they have seen the negative side of what Ms. Chua claims to have done. Unless you live in a bubble, people have seen the kid with parents like Ms. Chua and have seen some of the negatives they are talking about, and a lot of this is born out by real research studies on the cost of this kind of pressure. Talk to music teachers, who will tell you of students who literally are crying in lessons because they are having a hard time with something, and begging the teacher to either switch to something else because of fear of what their parent will do if they haven’t mastered it, or tell the parent they finished it so they don’t have to work on it any more. Talk to college counselors about the downside of these kinds of crazy expectations. Talk to people who have worked with kids who were raised like this, who have an incredible problem interacting in a group, or figuring out that in the real world, ‘b eing out for #1’ makes for a hard time (want an example of this? In the music world, among the kids raised like Ms. Chua is doing who go into music, who believe everything is a competition to be #1, that only being a soloist is real and so forth, they end up in deep trouble, because music for the most part is not a competitive sport; not to mention with an attitude like that, even if they had the makings of a good soloist (most of them don’t, by a long shot, another consequence of bad notions), they have such an attitude that no one would want to work with them. Music competitive, but it isn’t war, it isn’t the kind of idiotic supremacy that Ms. Chua and her kind teach).</p>
<p>As far as cultural relativism, which is basically in the claim people shouldn’t criticize “her culture”, there is a line there. In some cultures, it is perfectly okay to hit your wife or beat your children, in many places those are not only against popular culture, but illegal. Recently, a judge got into a lot of trouble in a divorce case that involved a Muslim couple from Morocco living in the states. The judge denied one of the grounds of divorce, that the husband raped the wife, on the grounds that in Moroccan culture and law apparently a husband cannot be accused of rape (and before anyone get too smug about that, it wasn’t until the 1970’s in the US that a woman could accuse her husband of rape). An appeals court threw it out, saying that culture and custom has its bounds.</p>
<p>While I am not sure anything Ms. Chua did was legally actionable or if child services would find it to be so, that doesn’t mean criticism can be cut off by saying ‘that is her culture’. People criticize others all the time, and while it may be distasteful, there is nothing sacrosanct about cultural beliefs. In Jewish tradition circumcision is required by religious law, but there is a pretty spirited debate in some quarters whether that is religious law that should be obeyed, or barbarism (and it also is in the secular domain as well).</p>
<p>And quite frankly, by implicitly and explicitly degrading the ‘lax’ way others raise their kids, it became fair game for others to criticize her and the ‘culture’ that underlies her methods, you can’t have it both ways.</p>