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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (88307)	1/24/2011 1:06:12 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

When the kid said: American kids have a hard time with half an hour of practise, try three hours. There is a huge difference between educating your child and forcing them to excel (for your ego needs, no less). One can see a bit of this in the Jewish culture. I love Jews, seemed I was always dating a jewish girl in college and even lived with one platoncially in grad school. I know their culture well. One day I had a car full of my Jewish friends. All Jews talking about how much they hated undergraduate school. Because of how hard they had to work to keep straigth A's. Like the Japanese they push themselves to exceed because their culture demands it. And it drives them a bit crazy, all the stress and rules. Dude, its not the Jews and the Asian Americans who are the major druggies in this country. Its the white lower and middle income classes and lower income blacks. You have all this anecdotal crap that determines how you see the world instead of looking at the facts. By all the metrics this culture measures success......Asians and Jews tend to meet or exceed those metrics. That doesn't sound like people who are ready to go bonkers. In fact, its a rarity to read about an Asian American or Jewish parent shooting up everyone in the family and then committing suicide. That seems to be the almost complete purview of white Christians. With all their privilege, it seems whites in this country have grown lazy. And now you're trying to tell me that's a good thing. I call BS. Now two things are interesting about this: 1) Israel and Japan excel because they are the most highly educated people on earth. You don't get highly educated by playing video games 24/7. 2) Once they become educated they use what they learned for the rest of their lives. Regardless of the pain acheiving said information. These kids did it because their culture demanded it, like the Tiger moms; and it was brutal. Its not brutal. Most of my friends growing up had very important requirements placed on them by their parents. One of my friend's parents owned steel plants......they were upper middle class/upper class. If my friend wanted a summer job, there was one to be had in one of his father's foundaries........working right by the open hearth....where in the summer temps were well over a 100º. Summers during college I rarely saw my friend........he was too wiped out from working in the foundary. During college, he went to RIT....a decent school. His father told him if he wanted a car......he would get a new one......a VW Passat.....only so long as he maintained a 4.0. He did keep that grade average and he got the car at the end of his junior year. My friend was a good guy......well liked......president of his and my high school frat...athletic...all around guy. His father was a hard task master but we both knew it was because he loved his son and wanted the best for him. BTW my friend was Anglo....Christian. Nothing wrong with putting demands on your kid so long as the kid is capable. But the same level of intellectual excellance can be acheived without the torture and psychological damage. Not without discipline and study. Spare the rod and spoil the child (I use that metaphorically)is an outdated idea that needs to go the way of child sweatshops. This makes no sense in terms of the current discussion. In fact, the Asian prof is saying the opposite...do not spoil the child. And no one is talking about using a rod.