Cazenovia Curmudgeon
By Donald Krueger
Well, not a hickory switch. Not for Yale law professor Amy Chua, although from the thousands of angry and hateful responses – death threats, even – to her best-selling “Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mother,” you’d think she’d written a how-to manual on child-beating.
“Mommie Dearest” for the memoir age, said Time magazine.
“Hair-raising,” said the New York Times.
“Monster” is one of the mildest epithets hurled her way. Hardly something one would expect from a scholar-professor who has written on the rise and fall of world empires (see Jim Coufal’s column in the Feb. 23 edition of the Courier).
Poor Prof. Chua. All she’s doing is offering an alternative to American parents’ permissive, over-protective – some say obsessive – child-rearing. She is saying success depends on self-discipline, hard work, long hours.
“By disciplining me, my parents inculcated self-discipline,” Chua writes. “And by restricting my choices as a child, they gave me so many choices in my life as an adult.”
Schools take note. Her daughters say they intend to be strict parents one day, too.
Parents should expect strength in their children, not fragility. They shouldn’t be able – allowed, schools take note – to take the easy way out.
“If a child has the experience, just once, of successfully doing something she didn’t think she could do, that lesson will stick with her for the rest of her life.”
Teachers take note.
Chua’s simple lesson is that children can and do learn from failure. If they try and try again … and again, they can succeed. The F-grade can be an effective teaching tool. Yet parents demand As and Bs … and teachers give them … for what once was C and D – and F – work.
Schools proudly report the number of students and their grades in advanced placement classes … which for the most part today are at the level of junior and senior high school courses of a decade or so ago.
Dumbing down. Excusing failure. Teaching to the test, the test designed for a lowest common denominator. More than 50 percent of today’s first-year college students have to take remedial English – and math – courses. Colleges have to teach parents not to hover over their children once they’re off to college.
Thanks to child development experts, so-called, schools put “self-esteem” and “character-building” above academic achievement as measures of success. Research in psychology and cognitive science has shown that children shielded from failure do not develop what is called “mastery experience.”
So, if American parents are as angry with Ms. Chua as their responses to her book suggest, how come they are buying enough copies to keep it on the best-seller lists for weeks now? Could it be they are feeling guilty?
An American father living with his family in China, his daughter in a Chinese school, says that U.S. parents’ “obsessive concern” with their children’s self-esteem “has practically become a form of dementia.”
If, dear parent, you are feeling guilty, you should be. But don’t lay it off on the teachers; they are merely doing what they’ve been trained to do … and are told to do by school administrators.
What did you learn in school today, Tiffany? “We learned about French cooking.”
What did you do, Ashley? “We wrote letters to Santa Claus.”
Did you use a dictionary? “Is that like an iPod?”
And you, Brittany? “We sat in our homerooms doing nothing while some kids were off getting their weekly dose of religious instruction.”
Could those left behind (!) maybe study the Constitution? You know, the First Amendment?
If you want to relieve your guilt, it is the school masters – the superintendents and principals – you should be going after. They are the ones whose “obsessive concerns” have “practically become a form of dementia.”
Take them copies of “Tiger Mother.” Challenge them. Why aren’t your kids learning to think for themselves? Kids in the 1960s and ’70s did … whether the school masters liked the results or not.
If there is to be any reform in your schools, it is going to have to come from you, not from the president of the U.S., from Congress – heaven forbid! – government programs … or from school supers’ “study committees.”
What with all the concern on the part of parents and school with children’s emotional well-being, why is it so little attention is being paid to the schools’ obsession – what else to call it? – with sports? There is now more than enough research-based evidence to prove that football and ice hockey, basketball, too, are hazardous to young people’s physical and mental health, short- and long-term.
School officials, coaches, and helmet manufacturers are willfully ignoring the evidence: concussions and sub-concussions will occur on the playing fields and rinks. Concussions and sub-concussions mean brain damage … and death.
The Kansas high school football star dead on the field following a concussion. High school, college and professional players carried from the fields on stretchers, never to return. Others with long-term brain damage. The growing collection in neurologist Ann McKee’s Boston laboratory of professional football players’ diseased brains.
It now includes Super Bowl champion Dave Duerson’s, “too depressed at the end to live, but rational enough to aim the gun at his chest, rather than at his head. He wished to preserve the brain he had asked ahead of time to be studied.”
We have university conferences (the Courier, March 23, page three) for educators, counselors, parents on bullying in schools, something once left to kids and their parents. But no conference, even casual discussions, on the certain risks associated with contact – or is it combat? – sports … for which there is no protection.
Helmet-makers admit there is none, nor can there be, ever. Isn’t it time you confronted your school superintendents and board members to demand the end of these proven-to-be-dangerous sports? They know the risks. They ignore them. You should not.
The current school budget crises are enough to stifle the sure-to-come outcry from uninformed parents and from alumni and booster clubs … and coaches and kids hoping for football scholarships … and a career with the pros.
Ask your supers for an accounting of the money now spent on sports: equipment, uniforms, field maintenance, coaches’ salaries … how many teachers’ salaries does it take to fund sports programs?
Arm yourselves with research. Check the websites for Dr. Ann McKee (if she has one), the Centers for Disease Control, the National Children’s Medical Center, the Journal of Pediatrics and Julian Bailes’ at West Virginia University – he is medical director for the Pop Warner Youth Football Program; brain damage starts young. The New York Times, USA Today, Time Magazine … by the way, you might ask your doctor and your attorney what they think.
School officials? Well, “Hit’em again! Harder! Harder!”
Donald Krueger is a retired professor and active contrarian. He can be reached madnews@m3pmedia.com.
