Amy Chua's memoir about Chinese parenting styles, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, has American parents in a tizzy. I teach History at Saint Ann's in Brooklyn, a K-12 school in which we neither grade nor punish our students. Instead, we let the students' individual interests serve as their guides. I'm therefore among the first to ask: are we all too soft on our kids?
But I also spent three years teaching in China. There, parents have questions of their own. Many Chinese educators and social commentators have recently engaged in some genuine soul searching, wondering if the costs of their high-stress, test-centered system are too high. Suicide has become the number one cause of death among young people in China, and gruesome tales of woe--from murder to self-mutilation--have become all-too common for Chinese students. These stories are especially prevalent around the time of the gaokao, or college entrance exam, a two day test akin to an SAT on steroids.
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