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My son goes to a school that has a high number of Jewish students. Almost without exception the best students are the Jewish students. Their parents do well and they work hard. Now if you tried hard enough you could come up with a example of dumb and lazy Jewish people but they would be the exception. What is it about the Jewish expeience and culture that causes so much academic success?
ANY child that does well usually comes from a family that thinks that sort of thing is important.
If the child comes from a family where it really doesn't matter, sports are the important thing, and if you are female, you have a better chance with the boys if you pretend to be dumb, then, that child, regardless of heritage, usually doesn't make the top of the academic heap.
I believe it's a socioeconomic issue. I grew up in an area that was approximately half Jewish. There were a lot of very high achieving Jewish children and non Jewish children alike. The common thread is that the whole area was very wealthy and well educated. Well educated, dedicated parents tend to guide their kids into a similarly successful life. If I were to guess, there aren't too many examples of any dumb and lazy people in your son's school, assuming that the school draws from a high income area.
Because a higher proportion of them come from households where there is disciplined learning at home, including studying Judaism. The importance of studying is more more often enforced.
Jewish children who are raised in secular homes might be average, but a larger number of the motivated students are from homes with Jewish intellectual discipline.
My son goes to a school that has a high number of Jewish students. Almost without exception the best students are the Jewish students. Their parents do well and they work hard. Now if you tried hard enough you could come up with a example of dumb and lazy Jewish people but they would be the exception. What is it about the Jewish expeience and culture that causes so much academic success?
It's simple: they tend to come from families that actually support achievement and insist on real, disciplined effort. There's nothing magical or "gifted" about it.
A certain subsection of Jewish people are known to have some of the highest IQ's in the world. I can't help but sometimes think that it could be genetic.
Lots of high-achieving Jews and Indians in financial industry in NYC; lots of Indians and Jews who are high-achievers in tech industry in SiliconValley...yet lots of economically underachieving, intellectually weak Jews/Indians in NYC/CA...but lots of random white kids from Midwest/TX who similarly excel in SV/NYC's most competitive, most innovative industries
But neither Israel nor India (nor US' MI, OH, FL, etc) is a model of high economic/intellectual achievement
IQ/work ethic population distribution curves are complex....top <1% of certain groups may be far higher achieving than top <1% of other groups, but the bottom 99% of nearly any group tends to be underwhelming or dysfunctional
Well not to sound anti semetic...but I remember asking myself this question when BOTH Rhodes Scholars who won in NYC were Jewish back in 05'. I mean both students of the most highly selective scholarship program in the world and they were BOTH Jewish that year. Coinsidence? I don't know.
Needless to say my Jewish friend just completed his master's at Univ of Cambridge. I seriously believe it's something in the water. Add that to the fact that they are less than 1% of the world's population, but garner over 35% of the Nobel Prize winning laureates. So I don't know..
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