Success And The Tiger Mother

by Gautam Adhikari,


WASHINGTON: Win the future. With that stirring call in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, US President Barack Obama urged America to shape up for competition with China and India, which were thundering ahead in growth and development.

Well, thanks. We Indians are mighty pleased that you consider us to be a future competitor but, as things stand, um, you Americans needn't worry too much. True, we are growing impressively but when it comes to competitiveness, or offering an enabling environment for business, we are still way down in global charts. That's because we have a serious 'governance deficit', as Azim Premji, Keshub Mahindra, Bimal Jalan and other leading citizens rued in a recent letter to the government.

With China, however, America probably has a more pressing problem. China's foreign exchange reserves are close to $3 trillion, they hold around a trillion dollars worth of US government bonds; they are investing hugely in highways and new energy sources and smart railways, boosting their infrastructure in general; and they are expanding research, often with the help of young people trained in the US.

Training people with a renewed emphasis on education at all levels and intensifying research must be America's way forward to meet future challenges from emerging nations."This is our generation's Sputnik moment," said the president, referring to the late 1950s when a Soviet satellite by that name spurred America on to a furious race in science and technology. Yes, but training doesn't begin or end with school, does it? Isn't how children are raised at home equally important for training minds?

A minor firestorm has been generated in the media here with the publication of Amy Chua's book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. She says the Americans have it all wrong by bringing up their children indulgently. The Chinese tiger mother, on the other hand, insists on a strict, sometimes harsh, upbringing for her child because all work and no play unless monitored for performance, will make Jack successful.

While raising her own children as a tiger mother, Chua frequently had to argue with her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, the son of a psychotherapist, who like the Chinese-American Chua is a law professor at Yale but holds different views on child-rearing. He would plead with her not to insult, humiliate or frighten the children into submission. But she would yell at her little daughters during piano practice: "If the next time's not perfect, i'm going to take all your stuffed animals and burn them!"

Their two daughters performed excellently in school and in music. But when the younger one was asked what title she would like to give her mother's book, she suggested: "The Perfect Child and the Flesh-Eating Devil".

I can see several ambitious parents in India's cities nodding their heads in approval of the tiger mother. Kids need discipline. But are children raised in a near-perfect style essential to the success of a society or nation? Or are free minds and self-confidence more effective in producing persons who can make society competitive?

The jury is still out on the matter. Point to note: China, with its millions of tiger mothers, has done well of late and shows some potential of becoming the leading nation of the world one day. America, however, has been the world's leading power since the middle of the 20th century despite its supposedly lax style of child-rearing.

In the field of knowledge, the US lead may have declined slightly but is still massive. Shanghai's Jiao Tong University made a ranking of the world's leading universities: out of the top 20, as many as 17 are American. Nobel prize winners in science are mostly American, with Germans and the British coming a distant second and third.

The same picture comes up when we look at new inventions and innovative ideas. Just in the last couple of decades, the internet, email, Facebook, Twitter and the iPad all came from America, not China or India. Tiger mothers did not raise those who introduced such innovations, like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg.

An absolute decline of America may well be nigh. But they are not quite there yet.

source;Times of India