Failure to Adjust by Edward Alden

Author:Edward Alden [Alden, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2016-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

6

Tiger Moms and Failing Schools

Competitive Challenges at Home

Amy Chua was a student of international economic competition before she became the infamous tiger mother. In her 2007 book Day of Empire, the Yale law professor wrote a rich historical study of how the most successful nations, from ancient Rome to the modern United States, had prospered by opening their doors to immigration and successfully assimilating the best and brightest from many countries. But she was little known until she made the issue personal. The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, her story about raising her two half-Chinese daughters, is a witty account, filled with considerable self-parody, chronicling her not always triumphant battles to cultivate uber-successful children. Following an excerpt in the Wall Street Journal under the provocative headline “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” the book touched off a national debate—with some excoriating Chua as an abusive parent, while others worried that perhaps she was actually onto something. Published in 2011, after a decade in which China’s trade advantages over the United States had continued to grow while the US economy stagnated, her arguments about the superiority of Chinese over Western parents, said Britain’s Guardian, fed into growing “insecurity about a rising China and the slide of the west.”1 Slate magazine wrote that Chua “has clearly tapped into deep-seated anxieties among American parents and educators about the country’s children increasingly slipping behind their counterparts in the rising economic giants of the East.”2 In the Washington Post, columnist Alexandra Petri wrote, “The Tiger Mother Debate has exploded nationwide not simply because it’s about parenting . . . but because it’s about competitive, cross-cultural parenting. We want our kids to compete—so long as they win.”3 She quoted former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, who was furious that a scheduled December 2010 football game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Minnesota Vikings had been called off due to snow: “We’ve become a nation of wusses,” Rendell said. “The Chinese are kicking our butt in everything. If this was in China, do you think the Chinese would have called off the game? People would have been marching down to the stadium. They would have walked, and they would have been doing calculus on the way down.” In his campaign for the presidency in 2016, real estate mogul Donald Trump lamented, “We don’t win anymore. We lose to China. We lose to Mexico, both in trade and at the border. We lose to everybody.”4

“Excellence demands competition,” President Ronald Reagan said. “Without a race there can be no champion, no records broken, no excellence—in education or any other walk of life.”5 The virtue of competition has long been a staple for presidents trying to sell the country on deeper economic ties with the rest of the world. Bill Clinton, challenging his party during the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), had insisted that the United States must “compete, not retreat” from the trade challenges it faced. Two decades later, President Barack Obama used virtually the same language to drum up congressional support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.

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