Why Chinese Mothers Raise More Academically Successful Children

I don't know Sebastian, but speaking for myself, this article did bring strongly to mind experiences in engineering school where most of the engineering students were either Chinese or Korean. No Vietnamese, no Japanese. Almost entirely Chinese and Korean, and all the products of this sort of upraising.

I am not white myself. I don't know how to say this without being accused of political incorrectness, but what happened was the asian students did well on tests but were not creative and could not design things from scratch. They were helpless to do anything that required original thinking or understanding the user. Very technical, very good at memorizing the correct answers. Terrible at design. Simply awful. They'd get good grades though. In the decades since then, in industry, same thing. Work with asian clients who can't design at all. But they can clone things very well.

The article makes it seem like training to be this way is a good thing. I don't agree myself. If I had been pushed the way she pushes her kids, I'd have burned out and hated it all. As it was, my parents let me do my own thing and I learned to excel without needing a slavemaster to push me and tell me what to do and who to be.

I wouldn't call her nutty - I am sure she is sane and well intentioned - but I did cringe throughout reading that article. What I didn't say was, "Wow if only my parents pushed an micromanaged me like that I would be successful and happy."