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Grade A
In light of my utter lack of productivity because of the transit strike in New York City, I'm now able to stew a bit about my general performance and guilt in a larger sense.
Slate ran an article a few days ago about the publication of Top of the Class: How Asian Parents Raise High Achievers and How You Can Too, by Dr. Soo Kim Abboud and her sister Jane Kim. The piece reports that the book contains a 17 "secrets" that committed families use to create high achieving, academically stellar children.
The Slate article points out the struggle it expects the book to have. On the one hand, everyone wants a smart successful child, and the competition to get into good schools and achieve great things is high. I didn't realize quite how crazed the whole business of New York schools was until a few friends with older children started the application process. It is unbelievable how the entire business is designed to make one feel like some sort of parental failure before one's kid can even tie his or her shoes. (Or is that perhaps yet another test of one's child's relative proficiency?) I say this knowing that one of the things that children are "tested" for at the Excessively Intense New York City nursery school / kindergarten stage is what kind of parents they have, and I don't just mean financially- the schools look for parents who themselves aren't unbearable. The flip side of this is that many parents, particularly those who don't feel they have to actively demonstrate their worth to the community, feel deeply ambivalent about the academic pressure that books like Top of the Class suggest that parents should place on their children... if they truly want them to do well.
I should say here that this dialectic can easily be couched in racial stereotypes and Slate is aware of this. Not only does Top of the Class make no bones about stereotyping "Asian" parents as being particularly driven to produce "high achievers," which is apparently intimidating to the (again stereotypical) Caucasian parents who worry about damaging their kids with excessive competition and the exclusion of extracurricular interests. This whole racial debate was interestingly raised in another book that has been reviewed all over the place lately: The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton by Jerome Karabel. (Malcom Gladwell wrote an excellent piece about it in the New Yorker back in October, and the New York Times published an extensive review a month later.) In The Chosen, the dialectic was not between Asian high achievers and a worried Caucasian majority, but between academically aggressive Jewish students and the Protestant majority.
I find these discussions reasonably interesting but as always it seems to me that the trick will be maintaining a middle ground. It is easy to recognize a theory of parenting and find it appealing, but people respond to different stimuli. Does my skepticism of the "17 secrets" make me a slacker? I never went for the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, either. This is not to say that one shouldn't work hard and encourage one's children to do the same, but that it strange to run a kid's life by a self-help book, especially one that appears to be targeted at rewarding the parent for the kid's achievements.
posted by Elise at 1:28 PM
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