The ANNOTICO Report
It is Not Rocket Science!!!!
1. To Repay their Parents
because of the sacrifices made. A Filial Reverence. A Debt. A Responsibility.
2. Confucianism encourages a
Reverence for Education.
3. Confucianism
teaches that to achieve success one must Work Hard. It is NOT necessary to be the
brainiest. Just be willing to work the hardest!!!!
Simply Put: Respect your
Parents, Respect Education, Work Hard !!!!!
Thanks to Professor Ben Lawton, Purdue University
THE MODEL STUDENTS
The New York Times
By Nicholas D. Kristof
OpEdColumnist
May 14, 2006
Why are
Asian-Americans so good at school? Or, to put it another way, why is Xuan-Trang Ho so perfect?
Trang came to the United
States in
1994 as an 11-year-old Vietnamese girl who spoke no English. Her parents,
neither having more than a high school education, settled in Nebraska
and found jobs as manual laborers.
The
youngest of eight children, Trang learned English
well enough that when she graduated from high school, she was valedictorian.
Now she is a senior at Nebraska Wesleyan with a 3.99 average, a member of the
USA Today All-USA College Academic Team and a new Rhodes Scholar.
Increasingly
in America,
stellar academic achievement has an Asian face. In 2005, Asian-Americans
averaged a combined math-verbal SAT of 1091, compared with 1068 for whites, 982
for American Indians, 922 for Hispanics and 864 for blacks. Forty-four percent
of Asian-American students take calculus in high school, compared with 28
percent of all students.
Among
whites, 2 percent score 750 or better in either the math or verbal SAT. Among
Asian-Americans, 3 percent beat 750 in verbal, and 8 percent in math. Frankly,
you sometimes feel at an intellectual disadvantage if your great-grandparents
weren't peasants in an Asian
village.
So
I asked Trang why Asian-Americans do so well in
school.
"I
can't speak for all
Asian-Americans," Trang told me, "but for
me and my friends, it was because of the sacrifices that our parents made. ...
It's so difficult to see my parents
get up at 5 each morning to go to factories to earn $6.30 an hour. I see that
there is so much that I can do in America
that my parents couldn't."
Of
course, not all Asian-Americans are so painfully perfect — Filipinos are
among the largest groups of Asian-Americans and they do very well without being
stellar. Success goes particularly to those whose ancestors came from the
Confucian belt from Japan
through Korea
and China
to Vietnam.
It's
not just the immigrant mentality, for Japanese-American students are mostly fourth- and fifth-generation now, and they're
still excelling. Nor is it just about family background, for Chinese-Americans
who trace their origins to peasant villages also
graduate summa.
One
theory percolating among some geneticists is that in societies that were among
the first with occupations that depended on brains, genetic selection may have
raised I.Q.'s
slightly — a theory suggesting that maybe Asians are just smarter. But I'm
skeptical, partly because so much depends on context.
In
the U.S.,
for example, ethnic Koreans are academic stars. But in Japan,
ethnic Koreans languish in an underclass, often doing poorly in schools and
becoming involved in the yakuza mafia. One lesson may be that if you
discriminate against a minority and repeatedly shove its members off the social
escalator, then you create pathologies of self-doubt that can become
self-sustaining.
So
then why do Asian-Americans really succeed in school? Aside from immigrant
optimism, I see two and a half reasons:
First,
as Trang suggests, is the filial piety nurtured by
Confucianism for 2,500 years. Teenagers rebel all over the world, but somehow
Asian-American kids often manage both to exasperate and to finish their
homework. And Asian-American families may not always be warm and fuzzy, but
they tend to be intact and focused on their children's
getting ahead.
Second,
Confucianism encourages a reverence for education. In Chinese villages, you
still sometimes see a monument to a young man who centuries ago passed the jinshi exam — the Ming dynasty equivalent of getting
a perfect SAT. In a Confucian culture, it is intuitive that the way to achieve
glory and success is by working hard and getting A's.
Then
there's the half-reason: American
kids typically say in polls that the students who succeed in school are the
"brains." Asian kids typically say that the A students are those who
work hard. That means no Asian-American ever has an excuse for not becoming
valedictorian.
"Anybody
can be smart, can do great on standardized tests," Trang
explains. "But unless you work hard, you're
not going to do well."
If
I'm right, the success of
Asian-Americans is mostly about culture, and there's
no way to transplant a culture. But there are lessons we can absorb, and maybe
the easiest is that respect for education pays dividends. That can come, for
example, in the form of higher teacher salaries, or greater public efforts to
honor star students. While there are no magic bullets, we would be fools not to
try to learn some Asian lessons.