Quote:
Originally Posted by Yeledaf
For a slightly different take, Here's a thought-provoking letter published in today's Wall Street Journal:
Treasured American Values Are Slipping Away
The fact that 83% of last year’s science competition finalists were the children of immigrants points more to the collapse of America’s education culture than the skills of immigrants’ children.
As the son of an immigrant, I am proud to see the children of immigrants do well. But the fact that 83% of last year’s science competition finalists were the children of immigrants points more to the collapse of America’s education culture than the skills of immigrants’ children. The values that Mr. Anderson says deliver outstanding results for immigrants’ children—perseverance, independence, a love of learning and interest in innovation—used to be common American values that all of our families treasured. Tragically, today we have replaced those critical values with such things as therapy puppies and “safe zones” that shield our kids from getting their feelings hurt in competition.
American excellence used to be based on the concept of everybody reaching up to grab the brass ring. Now our schools are based on bending down to the lowest common denominator to make everybody happy. The children of immigrants have the blessing of not being contaminated by this decline in our culture. Immigrant parents presumably heed Rousseau’s warning that “the surest way to make your child unhappy is to accustom him to get everything he wants.”
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I think it is less that if the children of immigrants are attending the same schools as the other children in America are.
India has a large problem with illiteracy. A larger problem than Brazil has. But poor Indians, Pakistani, and Nigerians rarely move to the United States. They come to the US from the middle-classes and upper-classes.
But I do think it is a matter of cultural differences. I kind of had a discussion with an Indian teacher of mine from India. In the conversation was a young Pakistani man that was a student like me. This conversation took place some years ago.
There is strong direction given in Indian families by the parents when they come here to the US. They just don't throw their children in school and tell them to swim and find their way. Plus, they come here to the US in a foreign land to see their children succeed.
The white middle-class of Milwaukee never had the attributes you give. They were often blue collar workers and assumed a person was either born talented in math or art or learning a second language or changing oil in a car or they were not.
Wealthy Americans typically only spoke and read in one language and when I was growing up few of them ever left the country. But the young kids in the Brazilian upper-classes in Brazil were different. They spoke and read in two languages if not three or four. They typically traveled Europe by at least their twenties. F
So, different cultures.
But in a democratic sense of education the US has a far better culture of education. By democratic sense I mean how well a nation accomplishes sending all its children and teenagers to school and graduates them. In the case of American schools you also have to ask how many of them they graduate that are literate or how well they can read if they are literate.
I really don't think Democrats or Republicans put forth the best conceptions of cultures of education. At least in terms of how to produce these overachievers in the sciences and math like the kids from Indian and Chinese families in the US. Although, I suspect kids from generations of Americans probably overachieve in the visual arts, music, poetry, film, probably even in auto shop.
Americans underestimate the propelling power of community and family environments. This is particularly true of middle-class and poor Americans. Only a tiny fraction in those groups get it. The parents of the Williams sisters got it. The father and uncles of Floyd Mayweather got it. And the children of Indian parents, the children that become science stars, were directed by parents that pushed them and put them in the hands of the best teachers, not so unlike the Williams sisters and Floyd Mayweather.
No one that becomes great even among the best only puts in five hours a week in their field. It's the American middle-class and poor that think they do. Because they are taught, have drilled in their head, people are born great. It's all in their genes.
At the college level some of these Asian families, certain ethnicities of them, have cultures in which the whole family works to support one son through college and medical school. That one son never works outside of school. His schooling, his studying outside of class is his work. His brother and sister are told by mother and father to work their blue collar jobs, give money to their brother in college whenever he needs it. And in turn that son and brother is expected to pull the rest of the family up once he becomes a doctor or successful. The whole family places great hope in him and he carried a heavy burden and sense of responsibility.
This is in total contrast to the Republican conception of college in which students should work full time jobs and school is like part time work. A culture where everyone is an individual.
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