In response, they'd assure me that obviously the students with the best grades should garner all the respect like it was for them in their childhoods, and that's just how the world's supposed to work.
::shakes my head::
It appears there are pockets of academic excellence in many US cities. I don't know how widespread they are though.
The things that do make it better: (1) moving to a larger, more diverse city / population center, (2) not being the only Asian kid in a class (better if you're > 5% because having only 2-3 in a class still 'others' you).
I was also in the gifted program. There are special problems with being a hypo-minority. For one thing, you're highly visible to every sociopath in the area. This is a part of what women can experience in the tech field, when they are only about 1% of the local population.
In response, they'd assure me that obviously the students with the best grades should garner all the respect like it was for them in their childhoods
From my personal experience: Some Asian parents make it all the worse, if they then insist they know better in the face of reality on the ground. When they do this, they destroy their own credibility at a time when children most need to hear advice. Furthermore, they cut themselves off from the information they need to give the best advice possible.
I think that far more worrying is the dangerous narrative pushed by people insecure about their accomplishments and aided by people jealous of others’ carefree childhoods that seeks to diminish immigrant accomplishment as lacking individualism or initiative. If it’s just strict parents and the kid is just forced to do it, then we can simultaneously criticize the parents, strip the kid of individuality and attribute any of their accomplishments to things outside of their control.
Again, just placing this here as a counterpoint because too often I see this discussion play out and get upvoted in the same way.
I've been casually called a "robot" or a "trained monkey" by well-meaning non-immigrants in the U.S. (even kids in gifted programs) out of what I perceive to be jealousy.
Relevant to the particular article, I did notice that my cousins who lived in China worked a lot, lot harder than my cousins who lived in the U.S. (and myself), even though we typically worked harder than non-immigrant children.
In my experience, this narrative was pervasive in the 70's and 80's in the white majority areas where I lived, that my humanity was substandard or lacking entirely. This is precisely why communication between parents and children on a genuine human level is all the more important. If an Asian parent just tries to pull unilateral parental authority, flying in the face of the different contextual reality around them, then they play right into that narrative of the inhuman/less-human parent.
This is not to say that parents should be permissive or that they should treat children as equals. I think that parents should be strict, and that children's status needs to be earned. Parents cannot become the friends of their children, until the children have become adults. However, parents who immigrated from a different culture can not act as if the surrounding culture is going to support them in the way their own culture supported their parents -- if they want to maintain their credibility. Parents who immigrated from a different culture have to maintain their credibility by living principles and by example. Denying reality and being unwilling to learn themselves will destroy their credibility. A six year old child is going to notice that your grammar is poor, you don't get the jokes, and that you can't tell the commercials from the TV shows. That child will notice the illogical puffery of insisting that one is always right because one is the parent. In that situation, it is better to live an ideal of always striving to become more correct, instead of insisting on being correct by fiat when you are clearly not correct about many things.
This brought up some painful memories for me because I remember thinking like this when I was younger. My mom called me out once as a kid for assuming she was less intelligent or incorrect just because of her accent. At the time I thought she was just trying to win the argument, but now with the perspective given by time and by talking to others I see that she was right.
I think you are coming from the right place but that you are trying to place blame on parents essentially for failing to “fit in” as much as for being strict. When we say that parents “play into” claims that they are being less human, I think that we are taking part in making that the unfortunate reality.
It's one thing to correct your child on that misconception -- that's correct. It's another thing to insist on using an English word incorrectly -- that's incorrect.
I think you are coming from the right place but that you are trying to place blame on parents essentially for failing to “fit in” as much as for being strict.
Again, I'm not talking about being strict. I'm talking about basic communication and maintaining your credibility. What do you think about the boss who would rather maintain face and keep his dominance, as opposed to a boss who actually listens and prioritizes learning the truth? It's the same thing.
While the US K-12 system does sucks, I don't really want to see it turn into a memorization race the way the Indian and Chinese systems seem.
And to add some anecdata of my own, in college I did not notice any race of people being less or more creative than another. If anything during office hours the people who had trouble “improvising” were remarkably well distributed corresponding to the demographics of the school.
That's not what I said (though you may be commenting on my response and not responding directly to me). I claim that the Chinese and Indian systems have a lot more memorization than the US or European systems and that they often produce students that excel at a skill that doesn't always correlate (but isn't uncorrelated either) with what I want STEM graduates to be. I freely admit the US system is bad, if not terrible, but I'd rather look to Europe for inspiration than Asia here.
While these exams still receives tons of criticism nowadays, being able to perform well on these exams still correlates highly on being able to succeed in future.
And this is true even in cases where most of the actual research is done by computers/algorithms. Being able to quickly identify impossibilities or how to solve parts of the problem, because you effectively memorized thousands of pages of maths theory is invaluable and irreplaceable.
The geeks were always B/C students.