House of Eratosthenes

All the same, even when Western parents think they’re being strict, they usually don’t come close to being Chinese mothers. For example, my Western friends who consider themselves strict make their children practice their instruments 30 minutes every day. An hour at most. For a Chinese mother, the first hour is the easy part. It’s hours two and three that get tough.

I noticed when we were watching Mean Girls last night, Tina Fey stole one of my lines. This was something of a shocka, since her way of looking at the world has been very clearly established as fundamentally different from my own way of looking at it…and it must be a line that came from the heart since she wrote the screenplay. She’s asked to address an auditorium full of poorly-behaved girls, to offer something that might restore their self-esteem or some such, and she says something like (paraphrased) “it looks just fine to me, they seem to think very highly of themselves.”

Bingo. That’s it. We confuse a sense of true accomplishment with a feeling of self worth, and make the mistake of thinking the little brats can have the latter without going through the trouble of earning the former.

I think Homer Simpson had some wisdom to dispense on this subject too. “Trying is the first step toward failure,” I recall hearing on someone’s e-mail notification sound effect or laptop boot. That captures the other side of this. An attempt…toward anything…involves an evaluation of success, and an evaluation of success might conclude toward the negative. The potential for failure exists, and the failure would damage their self esteeeeeeem…so it’s best to not even start.

I recall reading awhile back – maybe it was John Stossel or one of those other curmudgeons who seems to enjoy going against the grain – that this whole self-esteem business has been responsible for all kinds of evil in our society in the last fifty-odd years. He goes on to point out that most of the psychopaths and criminals in prison actually have very high self-esteem.

If you were to view the Bible through this lens – and observe those who most closely align their lives to its teachings – you’ll notice just the opposite. You could call it “low self esteem,” but I prefer to use the Bible’s word for it: humility. In fact, there’s one point in Paul’s letters (I’m too lazy to look it up) where he explicitly writes that we are to consider others better than ourselves.

And these people who follow that advice, are the ones who seem to go out into the world and make positive contributions to their communities, and sometimes to the entire planet. They are the ones who are working at the soup kitchens, raising money for little African kids with AIDS, helping old widows clean up their yards. Interesting, isn’t it?
- cylarz | 01/10/2011 @ 13:17
“Self-esteem” is what happens when you aren’t allowed to acknowledge achievement anymore. If you’re allowed to notice achievement, you might draw all kinds of bad conclusions. Conclusions like “kids from stable two-parent families tend to do better” and “aptitudes are unevenly distributed in populations” and “it is mathematically impossible for all children to be above average.” Far better to say that the one absolutely indispensable component of success is the one absolutely impervious to empirical verification.

Which is sad, since not so long ago things like “being a well-behaved, law-abiding, productive member of society” were seen as achievements in themselves. But since these days we can all be NBA star rocket scientist astronaut top chef grammy winners if we just believe in ourselves, it’s Hollywood or bust….
- Severian | 01/10/2011 @ 13:55
I work at an International School full of the kids of parents like the one who wrote that aricle.

I honestly feel sorry for the kids. They are unable to think independantly yet are intellectual bullies. They can tell you the answer to math problems but cannot tell you how that math applies to the world. They often appear to me to be pyschotic and have few friends. Everything is seen through the lense of having the highest percentage on whatever standarized test they are touting today. Even the piano lessions are fradulent in that the kids can only play pieces they’ve learned but have tremenious trouble playing by ear, and seldom really enjoy the music they play.

There is a fine line between enrichment and abuse and many of the Asian parents I know passed that line about 10 Kumon lessons ago.

There is also a false dicotomy hpresented in the article. Academic excellence or acheivement has absolutely nothing to do with manners, and being a well behaved child.
- Fai Mao | 01/10/2011 @ 16:59
There certainly is something to this point, Fai Mao. You’re channeling me, insofar as what I had to say over here and here. The analogy between sumo wrestling and sprinting just came to me in the moment, but it captures the problem perfectly.

You and I are of like mind with the business about “Academic excellence…has absolutely nothing to do with manners” and in my experience this has been completely accurate. “Absolutely nothing to do” — as in, non-correlative. If the kid has a fifty-fifty shot at being a rude little snot, and then you reveal that he’s a solid A+ or consistent F, after said nugget has been revealed the odds of him being a rude little snot remain 50/50. However, the same cannot be said of the two attributes, test-smarts and thinking-on-your-feet. I have personally found there is a correlation there, and it is negative. (At least, once you have winnowed the field down, stripped it clean of the all-around-underachievers who are completely in the dark about everything.) Like Sumo wrestling and sprinting. If wrestling is the mission, and the qualification has to do with a 1/4 mile sprint, of course the qualification process will then be hurting your project more than it helps it. Once you define an elite according to the ability to score well on a test, you start to find the more you demand there, the less you manage to retain in other areas…I hesitate to call this “resourcefulness…more accurate to say “think outside the box.” Here is a job you’re seeing for the very first time, here’s a box of tools you’re seeing for the very first time. In thirty minutes I want that job done. Invent the method. Good test takers struggle with this.

That sounds like whining coming from me, since I suck at tests. Maybe it is. But I know when someone’s timid about venturing off the beaten path, coloring outside the lines so to speak. It’s inarguable when it’s in front of you.

Still & all, America has been paying a price for too much convenience. Some of our tykes wouldn’t know what to do with a three hour violin practice session, or a three hour anything. I think this tends to sneak up behind American parents. Endurance. Getting wretchedly bored with something, and putting in a good performance at it anyway, enough that something special and useful is learned that day. Takes some special effort on the part of parents in a “civilized” society to get that developed. When kids don’t see the need and have no reason to see the need, it becomes something of a challenge.
- mkfreeberg | 01/10/2011 @ 18:10
Getting wretchedly bored with something, and putting in a good performance at it anyway, enough that something special and useful is learned that day.

This is why I still like youth sports. Hitting the game-winning shot is fun; spending two hours a day at the free throw line is not. Tykes need to learn that the one comes with the other.

Too much emphasis on test-taking, and you get our current media-political-bureaucratic overclass. Obama is brilliant because he went to Harvard (he claims); people who get into Harvard do well on tests (including the most crucial tests of all, the little boxes that say “race” and “sex”); kids who do well on tests are arrogant-yet-conformist little snots.

Too much freedom, on the other hand, and you get “ADHD.” Not saying ADHD is total bullshit, but if it was anywhere near as prevalent as people say it is, wouldn’t we have heard of it in the workplace by now? As in, “you can’t fire me! I’ve got ADD!” Not to mention Xbox Live would go out of business (funny: they can’t sit still for 45 minutes in a classroom but can play World of Warcraft online for twelve hours straight).

There’s gotta be a balance between the two. Sports seems as good as any.
- Severian | 01/10/2011 @ 19:05
cylarz almost had it right. There is a psychologist who is a regular guest on Dennis Prager who either did the study or wrote a book on the study about self-esteem and the finding was that the most violent, sociopathic criminals consistently had the highest level of self esteem. Running a very close second place to this group was politicians. You combine those two for the ultimate cocktail and you get Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc.

I have always been enthusiastic about abolishing all government schools, but I am also strongly in favor of home schooling over private schools. The big problem is that in order for any kind of collective educational setting to serve the long term benefit of a society, there has to be a consensus of what kind of character building is part of the education. In the last ten to fifteen years, having a degree from Harvard is virtually meaningless compared to having a degree from a respected State university, and a degree from Hillsdale College in Michigan is worth twenty degrees from any mix of ivy league colleges.

I remember years ago that the comic Doonesbury was making fun of the fact that Harvard was handing out A’s to keep parents from complaining. Nobody was earning real grades any more. In the State of Georgia, after they came up with the “Hope Scholarship” program, grade inflation in the high schools went through the roof. But then the 1st year dropout rate in the Georgia State university system also skyrocketed, then they had huge demand for remedial classes in math and English, but it still wasn’t enough.

People who can “earn” a four year degree in elementary education at any given college in America today couldn’t score 50% on a 10th grade basic skills test from the 1950s. More importantly, where is the character and morals?
- Moshe Ben-David | 01/11/2011 @ 06:21

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Why Chinese Mothers Are SuperiorMonday, January 10th, 2011

Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior
Monday, January 10th, 2011