We talked today about Amy Chua's piece, "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior", that ignited such a firestorm of debate when it appeared in the Wall Street Journal. While Chua tries in this piece to detach literal ethnicity from her parenting practices, she still manages to highlight some very important cultural differences in how we raise our children.
This piece touches on so many very, very sensitive issues in our ongoing debate about who we are as culture, where we're going, and with whom we compete. Some things to think about when reading this piece might be:
- The degree to which we invest our children with our own needs and goals for the future of our culture, as opposed to their own ideas;
- Our mythologies about childhood as a general concept;
- Our anxiety about the rise of powers other than the United States in the global marketplace;
- How we define achievement and success.
