Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Caitlin Flanagan on the Tiger Mom

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1969/12/the-ivy-delusion/8397/1
The Ivy Delusion
The real reason the good mothers are so rattled by Amy Chua

I think this essay was both hilarious and insightful.

I agree - I particularly liked the close:

I'm going to disagree with many of the points in her article. She had a couple good points, but the smug tone that was obvious immediately and that ran through the whole piece set off alarm bells.

The themes in the piece reflect erroneous ideas in our society about the purpose of a college education. We've had very recent discussions questioning policies that encourage everyone to go to college. Rightly or wrongly (I think wrongly), our society sees a BA as a ticket to higher earnings. This belief encourages people to go to college for wrong reasons, and love of learning, curiosity, and a willingness to do something important and interesting (I don't put marketing or investment banking in that category) are being pushed down the list of reasons to get a degree. So we end up with indebted people who work at Starbucks.

The Ivy League fixation is just a sub-category of that same mistaken belief system: a credential from there is seen as a ticket to even higher earnings (plus access to a network of friends who are related to wealthy and powerful people and a ticket to "prestigious" positions, whatever that means)!

You must go to Harvard is simply You must go to college for members of the upper middle class who suffer from artificial-stress syndrome. And I say this as someone who has degrees from a Seven Sisters' college and one of the old European universities. So, no sour grapes here.

Worse, the author makes incorrect assumptions --- and they're the same bad ideas that are doing so much damage at the faculty level in academia right now. First and foremost, look at this one:


So, in other words, given that colleges don't require IQ tests, "the most deeply smart" is defined as "the highest achievers." These schools are selecting people who fit a mold: very high grades, worked like crazy in school, mostly do what they're told by authority figures --- for this group, fitting into a social structure is a high priority. In many ways, it's part of what allows them to be such high achievers in school and at work: these qualities endear them to superiors. Unfortunately, quirky creative people don't do well in this competition (as Flanagan notes in a subsequent paragraph).

Yet we need quirky creative people. They're the ones who challenge dogma and come up with the new discoveries and inventions that drive technological and social progress. People who prioritize fitting into a social group aren't generally going to do that. Putting high value on fitting in precludes it.

We need both types of people. The quirky creative types make the discoveries, and the high-achiever-types perfect them and implement them in ways that the quirky ones usually can't. When we exclude quirkiness too much and define "smart" too much as "high achiever," we're doing our society a disservice.

Ohhhhhh-- I like that, too.

Something that every person with multipotentiality struggles mightily with during their growing up process.

(Starting to see some signs of this with DD, who is realizing that "particle physics" may not go with "hot-shot attorney" very well as a moonlighting gig. )


There's a phrase for this:

Opportunity Cost.


I definitely think that some colleges that worry about their rating in USN&WR and the like have lost sight of what true "quality" means in students. It isn't about the students you accept. It's about the graduates that you produce-- they'd better be educated beyond the point of "job training" if you're a university, and they had better be a credit to your institution. Not all optimally intelligent, compliant authority-pleasers are going to be a credit to you-- particularly not when they need to be inventive and daring.

Higher ed needs to figure this out pretty soon.

That same April issue of The Atlantic has two more pieces about childhood and education. Both offer different perspectives.

Here's an excerpt from one of them :


Here's a quote from the other piece:

Sadly, I've seen this many, many times IRL. At least when it comes to scientists passion IS key. Those in the top of my field have a huge variety of backgrounds but what they all have in common is that they work non-stop because they love what they do. I honestly can't think of a single person who got to be a top scientist (obviously, I can't speak for every field out there, though!) who isn't really dedicated to their work.

I also know a number of brilliant people who have quit for the $$ because they weren't passionate about their work. Some started off interested but eventually found $ more enticing, others joined because it was an easier major to get into coming from abroad (vs. engineering, law or medicine which are notoriously very hard to get into), and still others were pushed into science by their families.

I don't doubt a Tiger mom of a reasonably intelligent child could get their kid into an Ivy by pushing like crazy. However, if you destroy that child's interests in the process what does that give you? Then again, if what you really want for your child is a high earning job and you don't care if they enjoy that job or not, you can *probably* achieve that goal. I've seen that first hand in my immediate family and let's just say while the guy got the right job the end results were not pretty!

She should have at least adopted another two daughters, each from a pair of twins separated at birth so we could know once and for all nature from nurture. But isn't LAW anecdotal? She was a law professor. She could have proved her point if a couple stories concurred with her, but with both daughters being blood relatives we can't be sure it was her superior mothering or her own and dh's good genetics.

"the choice between two good things, as we grasp for one, we lose the other forever..."
(sigh) what beautiful primordial poetry is this ((<MelTz., into purple puddlez

After reading this article, it was astounding how blissfully ignorant I was. My parents were not remotely involved or interested in my education. My mom and dad had limited educations. We were not rich. I even dropped out of high school. I was a white kid from a farming lineage, yet easily convinced a Seven Sisters school for undergrad and then Harvard for graduate school to admit me.

I was one of those quirky, creative types who did not follow the beaten path, but my written applications, published creative writing, test scores, and over the top teacher recommendations opened doors. I did get straight A's in college, but it wasn't from compliance. I argued with professors, showed up late and didn't take notes, came up with offbeat theories etc. I guess I was a little bit of spice thrown into the often well behaved "perfect" students that sometimes surrounded me. Reading this, I am glad I avoided a whip-cracking mom, stress of admissions, hours of keeping neat notes, and rejection, but it would have been nice to have parents who were a tiny bit involved. They didn't even attend either graduation (long story there).

Yet, I worry that I might become the mom that expects her children to go to top schools and get top grades and will say or do things that a good mother shouldn't to compensate for my lack of doing anything that earthshattering with my "talent" and degrees. I am stay at home mom now. I feel enormous guilt and as though I didn't live up to expectations. My parents never expected anything of me, but I had more than one teacher say I was one of the most talented student they had encountered in thirty years or more of teaching (I never believed it or felt it and felt those statements were a burden) and they expected me to be famous for my creative writing or SOMETHING, yet I'm a stay at home mom whose energy is consumed with caring for two intense kids and all those accolades seem to belong to someone else. Truth is, I am trying to pass the torch on to my daughters, but trying not to give up on myself.

Sorry for turing this into therapy, not theory. It just hit close to home for me.

That depends on the number of smart kids with Tiger moms compared to the number of Ivy League slots available.

According to the "2010 College-Bound Seniors Total Group
Profile Report" http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/2010-total-group-profile-report-cbs.pdf on SAT scores, there were 71,160 students who earned scores of 700 and above on the SAT Critical Reading section and 104,334 who did so in Mathematics.

If there are about 20,000 spots in the freshman classes of the Ivies, lots of "reasonably intelligent" children are not getting in.

I think graduates of selective colleges are more successful on average than those of non-selective ones because of their intelligence and drive, rather than differences in the quality of education they receive at college, so the stakes in selective college admissions are lower than people think.

I guess my answer to that would be find something you do want to do separate from your kids. It could be something as simple as gifted advocacy locally, volunteering, or seeing if it is possible to write for a local paper. It doesn�t mean you have to give up the whole SAHM gig but I�m a firm believer that it�s important for moms to have something of their own whatever that may be. I felt very lost the first year or so after DD was born but once I started going back to work even if it was part-time (or doing stuff at night when she went to bed) it made a world of difference to me. I�m not saying work is the answer but having something of your own is extremely important.

FWIW, I also went through the lack of expectations. They were always supportive of what I did but to the point that it drove me nuts. I wanted them to push me more, push the school etc. But then again I would�ve been really upset if they told me exactly what to do. I�m sure I was a fun teenager