I am an immigrant but not from Asia. The main positive feature of the USA is that you can be an average engineer or an average programmer or even an average teacher or firefighter and have a good life. You do not have to join a gang or Communist Party or crush your “competition” to have access to the American dream. We came here so that our children would have a better life than us. I do not see a point to suck the life out of them so that they could join some rat race for bragging right. If they themselves want to compete then, sure, we can help.
With regard to competitions, I think there are many reasons kids do it and adults don’t as often. Partly, it may be a natural tendency of the young to test and display their strength. Animals do it too. There are kids that simply thrive on competition and there is no reason to hold them back. Auditioning for parts in the school play is a competition and my kids would have killed me if I tried to hold them back. They enjoy other forms of competition as well. Its fun to prepare and have a chance to “perform” with something at stake. If I display a medal or a trophy, that makes them feel proud and excited to do more. I don’t ration my love or affection based on trophies, GPA or any other awards. But, there is nothing wrong with being proud of your kids accomplishments.
By the way, how many TONY award winners thank their parents? I bet those parents would be very proud to display those trophies on the mantel. Pushing kids to compete is one thing, allowing them to is something completely different.
Most Asian American kids do not get into HYPSM, so they would be humiliating shames on their families who would be disowned by Tiger Parents. The fact that they do go to “lower” colleges like San Jose State indicates that most of their parents are more realistic than the HYPSM-or-bust Tiger Parents.
Which does not prove that Tiger Parenting works better. The general population of parents is nowhere near as educated as Asian immigrant parents who were selected for skills and education. Parental education by itself, regardless of whether one is a Tiger Parent, strongly correlates to kids’ educational attainment.
1NJParent, I don’t know about being the best at ANYTHING, which you claim is impossible, in #189, saying that “there’s always someone somewhere who is better at it.” Since the number of people on Earth is finite, I don’t actually think that is correct. It’s not like the voting paradox, where there can be no preference.
But that aside, I would like to point out that it is entirely possible for a person who is reasonably bright and works reasonably hard to become the world’s expert on a topic, and sooner than you might think. I tell my college first-year honors students that in 6 to 7 years, they are very likely to be the world’s expert on some STEM topic. Scary when you think about it. Then, as they go along, their range of expertise broadens. Of course they are exceptionally unlikely to become the world’s “best” physicist, but they might well wind up being the most knowledgeable about some particular topic in physics.
It is often said that Gauss was the last person to understand all of mathematics up to his time. Yesterday, I was reading about a significant gap in an important proof offered by Gauss, which was not closed until the early 20th century. There is a recent biography of Fermi called “The Last Man Who Knew Everything.” No one covers the whole range now.
At some point, it stops being a competition, but getting a research position in a STEM field is in fact quite competitive. The holistic judgments that go into top college admissions get tossed out the window, and there is a rather hierarchical approach to candidate evaluation at that point–although departments may be looking in a specific field, so that a great candidate outside the field does not have a chance. But within the field being searched, the candidates are very much rank ordered by the search committee. They may not agree among themselves; still eventually one applicant comes out on “top.” When I consider the personalities of my colleagues who are doing exceptionally well, the fashion for “humility” comes into question, at least somewhat. (Not with regard to everyone, but with regard to a significant subset of the group.)
I think that the Tiger Parenting style portrayed in Amy Chua’s book is detestable. Also, Chua does cast aspersions on middle-class American styles of parenting–quite harsh aspersions really.
I also think that TiggerDad is right that many Asian-Americans see top college admissions as being stacked against them, and their approach to this is “more.” Locally, for example, if Calc BC in 9th grade did not work out for top college admissions, maybe Calc BC in 8th grade will.
When I consider the local students I know who have been admitted to Harvard, spaced across a decade, the pattern for them is a bit troubling to me. There are three Asian-American students in the group. All three are total academic stand-outs. One was a Davidson Scholar and the other two were of a similar level in my view. There are two European-Americans in this group. They are fine students, and they have other qualities going for them, but I could not say that their academic profiles were equally outstanding. Right, anecdotes, not data, and I don’t allege a general pattern of Harvard admissions, but still . . . I should note that these just happen to be the students I know. There may have been other local Harvard admits in the past decade whom I do not know, who might disrupt the apparent local pattern.
Sorry for the multi-pronged (kitchen-sink level) commentary. I have opportunities to post only at certain times.
General population also not that obsessed with Ivy League education especially if you have to give away your last shirt to pay for it. I personally know at least 10 kids who declined guaranteed admission to HYP. None of them were Asian except one Filipino. I know one Hispanic family making 100K/y that declined Yale offer because they decided that 10K/year is too much to pay comparing to a free athletic ride to a top 30 private non-Ivy.
@QuantMech well, race and gender are very much in play when filling the academic positions, as well as personalities.
For me, it’s quite obvious that Harvard and other Ivies are not looking to fill their class with future professors and world experts. They send a rather strong message that yeah, some brilliant academics are great, but generally they prefer future businessmen, politicians, judges, movers and shakers, who will contribute money (significantly more than academic researchers can) and fame. And academic brilliance is not really what distinguishes these kids the most.
@QuantMech My post (#189) is about the presumptuousness of claiming to be the best by oneself or a group of people surrounding oneself. But philosophically, how is one to be judged the best? By what yardstick? Are the comparisons made both spacially AND temporally? Is there any meaning being the “best” only at an instant of time? Does the concept of being finite has any meaning in an universe of space and time?
I don’t think that high school students are aiming to be better than Gauss or Feynman. In the context of Tiger Parenting as portrayed in the book by Amy Chua, the goal is just to be better than whatever competition is presenting itself for any given “contest.”
My comment was really to the point that it is much easier to become the world’s expert in some STEM sub-field than most people would guess. Aside from his world-changing voyage on the Beagle, Charles Darwin was an expert on barnacles; he apparently frequently retired to his study to work on barnacles, after dinner (to the point that his young son thought that all fathers worked on barnacles). If Darwin had not “claimed” barnacles at the time, someone else could have become the world’s expert on barnacles in that era. There are a gigantic number of “name” reactions in organic chemistry. There are a lot of theorems in mathematics. There are relatively little known areas of quantum mechanics.
If a STEM-oriented person picks an area that is especially well suited to his/her interests, it is possible to become the most knowledgeable person in the world in that area. Of course, it may be rather narrow. If one reads the scientific literature in a small enough field, relative expertise is not impossible to determine. Of course, there are difficulties in comparing across fields: Is a solid-state physicist better or worse than a particle physicist? In some cases, great solid-state physicist vs. dud particle physicist, it might be possible to make a comparison. But if both are at the top of their respective games, probably not.
I have posted elsewhere that a friend who worked in Harvard admissions (some time ago) remarked that Harvard was not looking for the smartest people, they were looking for the people who would be the most successful. Predicting the future success of a 17-year-old is a fraught prospect, much harder than figuring out who the world’s expert in micropaleobotany (or some sub-field thereof) is currently.
“I have posted elsewhere that a friend who worked in Harvard admissions (some time ago) remarked that Harvard was not looking for the smartest people, they were looking for the people who would be the most successful.”
This paradigmatic shift in the admissions philosophy gave birth to what is now known as “holistic” admissions. Although the “Tiger Mother” phenomenon has always existed in the Asian culture, I believe this shift to “holistic” admissions in turn gave birth to Chua’s personal rebranding and introducing the Tiger Mom phenomenon to this country and into our consciousness.
For Asian-Americans, they’re keenly aware that such “holistic” admissions policies aren’t in their favor. Such policies leave too many subjective holes, too much controlling power in the hands of mostly white adcoms at elite institutions while not enough control in the hands of the applicants with objective set of admissions criteria. The Asian-Americans have always “known” in their guts that the “holistic” admissions simply meant a license to practice underhanded racial quota, to limit their seats in the elite institutions. What was once a gut knowledge is now a factual knowledge: many Asian-Americans have been kept out of these institutions because their “personality” sucked. Now, UChicago is doing away with the test scores. If this move does set a precedent among its peer institutions, then Asian-Americans are screwed even more. Everything becomes subjective when the ONLY thing that had them going up to now, test scores, go up in smoke into thin air.
In spite of the fact that their daughters are legacy cases with Harvard (Chua) and Princeton (her husband, Rubenfeld), Chua went about molding their daughters to make sure they stand out above everyone else in this new holistic admissions game. She wasn’t going to leave anything to chance. Chua is a control freak and she wanted to ensure that no stones are unturned in covering all aspect of her daughters’ entry into the Ivy League gates, beginning with the older daughter, Sophia, reading Sartre’s “No Exit” at age 3. I tried to read Korean translated Hamlet when I was around 7, and I never understood any of it past the initial appearance of a ghost. Sartre at 3, a great intellectual training. Chua could hardly bear to wait for her daughters to quickly grow older so she can launch her maniacal smithing on her malleable objects, I mean, subjects. She absolutely needed her daughters to stand out clearly and unequivocally uber alles.
In this context, competitions are just means to one end, objective measures of standing out in the holistic admissions game. As @VickiSoCal mentioned earlier, that Chinese woman in a D20 high school would not allow her son to participate in tennis if he can’t make the varsity tennis team from the get go in his freshman year. Doesn’t matter whether he loves tennis or not. The only thing that matters is which sports that he can stand out above the pack. Expect competitions to heat up even more intensely if all elite institutions do away with the tests. Without the test scores that gave them objective assurances, the competitions would be then seen as the sole surviving objective mooring upon which to contest their cases. I love competitions both as a participant and as a spectator. I’m just going to sit back now and watch all the competitions to heat up.
Tiger Parenting is not just about HYPS admissions. I TAed gen chem at a UC. I had freshman girls in my office hours crying over B’s or C’s or worse. Always over med school admissions. A few girls that I spent time with, I would ask what else interested them other than med school if they were just not doing great in any of the pre-med classes. They said it didn’t matter, they had to go to med school.
“My comment was really to the point that it is much easier to become the world’s expert in some STEM sub-field than most people would guess.”
And not just in academia. There are plenty of opportunities to do the same in many specialisms within technology, business, law and regulation, just to take a few examples. I noted above that I set out to be “the world’s expert” in my particular field. I’d estimate the competition ranges from as few as 10-20 people to at most a couple of hundred people in the world, depending on how broadly you define it. As indicated previously, 10000 hours of effort takes you a long way.
Perhaps that’s not so relevant for a high school student. But it shouldn’t be assumed that kids are only competing because their parents push them in that direction. Some are motivated by competition and some aren’t. Many good mathematicians aren’t interested in the Math Olympiad, but some are. I doubt many kids get to the Olympics or become professional sports players without being internally motivated to be very competitive.
So let the kids who enjoy competitions do that (whether sports or academics), but don’t push the kids who don’t enjoy it in that direction. I think that’s really the crux of the concern with Tiger Parenting, when it turns into pushing kids to compete (in whatever area is chosen for them, whether in school or out of school) when they don’t actually want to.
About tiger parents, there are two kinds.
- the parents were successful standard setting tigers, and want their cubs for the same.
2, the parents were average in the forest and outside, yet want to see their children turn into tigers.
About type 1, there is not much to talk. About type 2, much to be discussed. why, how, what, what not to, why not…