Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother has set off a frenzied national debate that shows little sign of letting up. The Yale law professor’s memoir of her no-nonsense approach to parenting has been lauded and (mostly) lambasted, landing her on the cover of Time and the set of the Today show.
The most extreme elements of the Chua manifesto for raising successful children are now familiar: no sleepovers, no play dates, no TV; no grades tolerated other than A’s, no instruments to be played other than piano and violin, and no excuses for being anything other than first at most anything. When one of her daughters finished second in a math competition, Chua made her do 2,000 math problems a night to get back on track.
Chua says what some may regard as extreme parenting is the secret behind the disproportionately high achievement of Chinese children – here and in China. The attention she’s getting seems due in part to the angst she has stirred up among Americans who fear she is right. Critics, meanwhile, have called her a monster, and say her approach borders on child abuse.
The monster mother label does not seem entirely unearned (the 2,000 math problems are only the tip of the Tiger Mother iceberg), and it’s hard to imagine Chua is the exact role model for anything other than raising children who hate you. But there are nonetheless plenty of truths in her tale, and some of the furor the book has unleashed seems to have less to do with Chua’s extreme parenting than with the education reform debates that her book unwittingly taps into.
Under the headline “Amy Chau is a wimp,” David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, wrote recently that the Tiger Mother’s tough ways don’t bother him. “I have just the opposite problem with Chua,” he wrote. “I believe she’s coddling her children.”
Brooks says mastering a piece of music may require “focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group – these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or class at Yale.”
Though Brooks is clearly taking some literary license to make a point – and he says explicitly that “this skill set is not taught formally” – versions of this critique are exactly what one hears from those arguing for a greater emphasis in formal schooling on critical thinking skills, mastering group dynamics, and other skills. This movement, operating under the banner of a national coalition called the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, says we must complement the traditional “three Rs” with the “four Cs” of critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity and innovation if our children are to succeed in a global, innovation-based economy.
All the talk of layering critical thinking on top of continued attention to basic skills seems well intentioned. But it has also become something of a Trojan horse for those who would like to roll back the reform tide that has insisted on high standards, high-stakes graduation tests, and other measures designed to ensure all US students gain proficiency in basic academic subjects. The new rage in these circles is “Race to Nowhere,” a documentary that portrays US students as overworked, anxiety-ridden basket cases, worn down by a school culture of constant testing and a myopic obsession with achievement and competition.
While we’re whipsawed by competing views of the virtues and the horrors of the “Chinese mother” approach – a term that Chua says applies equally to parents of any background who place high expectations on their children – whatever happened to the more iconic Chinese cultural idea of yin and yang?
If Chua goes overboard in her quest to equip her children for success in life, her detractors are surely as guilty of writing off the cultural qualities of sacrifice, hard work, and determination, without which little of any consequence in life can be accomplished. Some of the confusion in the debate – and one of the shortcomings of the 21st century skills movement – seems to come from conflating the sorts of skills that are necessary at different stages of development and education.
Critical thinking and other less tangible skills surely are vital to success in our innovation economy. But those we are counting on to drive this innovation are coming out of the country’s higher education institutions, which are universally regarded as the best in the world. The idea that we need a major shift to focus on such skills in the K-12 system implies that we need high school graduates who have mastered these skills, or that it will be impossible to gain such mastery in college without a wholesale remaking of the K-12 curriculum.
She may not be the best ambassador for this view, but what Chua represents is the idea that there is a hierarchy of skill building that makes for success in today’s world, and that mastery of basic skills in subjects like math, reading, and writing is the necessary foundation for success at higher-level pursuits involving critical thinking and other less tangible skills. We need command of a body of knowledge upon which to think critically and creatively. The limits her own parents put on her and the self-discipline they instilled in her, Chua tells Time, “gave me so many choices in my life as an adult. Because of what they did then, I get to do the work I now love.”
The Time profile suggests there’s research support for many aspects of Chua’s approach, even if not for her methods. Children who are challenged to take on difficult tasks tend to be “more optimistic and decisive,” says the article. And there’s a place for repetitive drilling, too. “If you repeat the same task again and again, it will eventually become automatic,” Daniel Willingham, a University of Virginia psychology professor, tells Time. Once this happens, says the story, brain activity shifts to “the areas associated with higher-level thinking and reflection.”
Perhaps there’s a case to be made for easing up off the gas pedal a little in the case of overstressed kids in wealthy suburbs who can decode reading passages effortlessly and breeze through algebra. But for millions of American kids, backing off the emphasis on developing foundational academic skills would amount to the true race to nowhere. In Massachusetts, proficiency rates on the math portion of the MCAS in the state’s larger urban districts hover between 25 and 45 percent – and they were even lower a decade ago, before the MCAS graduation requirement took effect.
High expectations for all students is the message coming from President Obama, who spoke in his State of the Union address of that being integral to our ability to “win the future.” And he has, on more than one occasion, said that, along with an aggressive school reform agenda, that also means parents turning off the TV.
Chua may be the wrong symbol for doing the right thing, but leaving her book’s excesses aside, more tiger mothering, not less, is what lots of kids need.
