I am well aware of ethnographic facts, but in our district the Indians, Chinese and Korean students generally share the same ethos about education. Don’t put words in my mouth, mamalion, I never said “cruel.” That was your word, and yours alone. If you think that word is accurate to describe them, then I am “cruel” too because my kids have done very well and my ethos is similar. The difference is that I was not raised with the idea that a child’s education needed to be supplemented outside school other than by reading or going to museums, and neither were most Americans of my generation who were not immigrants or children of immigrants. You went to school, you came home, you did your homework and studied for tests, and that was good enough to get into a good college and get a job. You didn’t go to tutors, or to Saturday classes, or to advancement classes all summer. You read, you played, you went to the beach, or you worked a menial job in the summer.
Fast forward to today where I live, a large percentage of my child’s public school peers are being raised by parents for whom the norm does entail a lot of formal education outside the walls of the public school. Obviously, this confers on them a competitive advantage over kids raised by parents who grew up like I did. For the most part, people like me have been slow to respond to the change, or perhaps unwilling to respond. As a result, their kids are being left behind academically. Is that fair? To an extent it is. We believe in hard work in this country, and they are being outworked. On the other hand, I think many parents don’t really understand what’s happening. They just assume their child is not smart enough, or too lazy to be in the top classes, or else feel that what the Indians, Chinese and Koreans do academically deprives their kids of the relaxed childhood they themselves enjoyed and want for their offspring. It’s not part of our culture yet, but that will have to change, apparently.