I discovered classical education through The Great Books Foundation long ago. It ushered in a renaissance of learning that hasn’t abated. I used to do reading challenges and reviews and created an apprenticeship for writing based on four authors. A few years ago I began working through Boxall’s 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. My lone deviation from the latter is reading the series instead of a title or two.
Asians perform better for several reasons. Excellence is embedded in their culture and they’re expected to do well and their careers are impacted. The schools are rigorous and parents support it. And we can’t ignore the presence of tiger moms which contradict our norm.
Tiger parenting is a form of strict parenting, whereby parents are highly invested in ensuring their children's success. Specifically, tiger parents push their children to attain high levels of academic achievement or success in high-status extracurricular activities such as music or sports.
I don’t believe we’d have similar results even if the standards were raised. The principle is reinforced in home, at school and in the culture. Something we’re woefully lacking in America. If you want results like that you have to send them to prep school or Switzerland. They’re training tomorrow’s leaders.
~bella
Yesterday, my daughter and I were discussing a phenomenon I had experienced in my Air Force career.
I first entered the Air Force in 1973 only three years after the service had gone to a promotion system based on standardized tests rather than the "good ol' boy" system. My black elders in the service were ecstatic over the new system because they were able to get promoted far more successfully than ever before. The test questions came out of books issued by the Air Force. All they had to do was study hard.
In the latter years of my career, I had the opportunity to write and revise some of those tests, and I was thoroughly impressed by the intense depths the Air Force went to create fair, honest, and objective tests.
But in those later years, I ran into young black troops who rejected the premise of basing promotions on standardized tests: "Standardized tests are racist! We want to be judged on our performance!"
I tried to explain to them, basically in the words my elders had given me nearly thirty years before, "Your performance is only what your supervisor says it is. The tests put your promotion into your own hands."
But I later realized something had happened in those intervening years: In the 50s and 60s, black American adults had a tremendous hope for the future. Jim Crow still existed, but after the New Deal and World War II, there was a definite feeling that change was on the horizon, and even though it might be a sunrise they'd never see, they believed their children would see it. And they were determined that we would be ready.
So, the aspect of taking tests was not daunting to us because our parents and teachers had made sure we could
read.
I think that by the late 90s, the reason testing had become so daunting to my young black troops---was because
reading had become daunting to them.
