Academic

TIGER MOTHERS: Thoughts on Amy Chua, from Tom Smith. ?So why all the piano? I think it must be th?

By Glenn Reynolds

TIGER MOTHERS: Thoughts on Amy Chua, from Tom Smith. “So why all the piano? I think it must be that it happens to be something you can get prizes for. . . . It seems like an urban upper middle class version of the kiddie beauty contests satirized in Little Miss Sunshine. Yes, parents can do this to kids, but the question is, why would they want to? . . . Imagine, looking back, if you had an IQ of 150 and two Ivy League professors as parents, with the resources of a great university at your fingertips, with all of human culture laid out like a banquet ready for you — would you want to spend three hours a day playing the piano? And never be allowed to talk to other children about the books you were reading, the places you had traveled, your first try at a real poem, learning to ice skate, to sing, dance, fly a kite, make a pizza, shoot a bow and arrow, serve a ball, ski, paint? That’s a helluva expensive piano trophy. . . . Many of us would agree that all this precious over-regard for the self-esteem of children is utter rubbish. Kids’ self-esteem will survive being told to turn off the damn XBox and go do their homework. But this Tiger Mother stuff strikes me as being about as appealing as foot-binding.”

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on January 15, 2011 (boomark / email).