Outliers is a good book, I agree with some of his points, and disagree with others.
He talks about how birthdates influence who gets chosen in Canadian hockey. I do not know if his comments there are valid, but I do know that a child not born on the so-called optimal months could even out the disadvantage quite rapidly if his parents had started him out on hockey before the conventional age. In other words, he would have been accumulating steadily his 10,000 hours of deliberate practice if he was started out by his parents years before start of formal training. One more reason why I engage in early learning: my kids would have been steadily accumulating their hours of deliberate practice before they start formal training on anything, thus making it difficult for anyone to disqualify them because they were not born on certain months. And to be honest, I don’t really believe age equates maturity. There are so many very young bright kids who surpass older kids in knowledge, skills, and ability. Anyway, that could be because the parents of the younger kids gave them more opportunities at excellence than parents of the older kids.
In the second chapter, he then goes on about Ericsson’s 1993 research on the10,000 deliberate practice rule and the musicians ratings. Well-known stuff, especially for someone who has read and re-read Ericsson’s research papers and books. He cites Bill Gates, Bill Joy, the Beatles Band, etc., that had excelled not merely because of talent, but because they had opportunities to put in their hours of practice during early childhood /adolescence. Good to know.
And he makes a good point about ‘concerted cultivation’, the parenting style of educated and upper-class parents. A bit similar to what I read in the book ‘Meaningful differences in the lives of American Children’ - educated and wealthier parents parent their kids differently from poorer parents, generating different results in their kids’ lives. A lot to learn there. Kids thrive in supportive and stimulating families. Families that are supportive and intellectually stimulating generate more intellectual kids than those that are not. Another reason why I do early learning: to prepare my kids for life. It’s a tough world out there, and the better children are prepared by home, the greater their chances at success in life.
And in my opinion, the Asian success in math and other field of endeavours has little to do with rice fields but much to do with practice and lots of hard work in all endeavours of life. I have some very intellectual Asian friends, and they are most hardworking group of people I have ever seen. They don’t play around with their studies or work, and are very diligent.
Further, I have read several books on Asian parenting, and it’s given me a fairly good idea of why Asian kids turn out so bright. One of such is 'Top of the Class: How Asian Parents Raise Top Achievers and How You Can Too’ (Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Top-Class-Asian-Parents-Achievers--/dp/0425205614/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1337374883&sr=8-1) . Asian kids work so hard, and end up so bright.
I’ve also read ‘Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother’ by Amy Chua. While I don’t subscribe to Chua’s antics, she makes a good point about practice, practice, and practice. For example, hear what she said about the Susuki method and the practice culture she imbibed in her kids:
``That’s why I liked the Suzuki method of teaching piano. There are seven books, and everybody has to start with Book One. Each book includes ten to fifteen songs, and you have to go in order. Kids who practice hard get assigned new songs each week, whereas kids who don’t practice get stuck on the same song for weeks, even months, and sometimes just quit because they’re bored out of their minds. Anyway, the bottom line is that some kids go through the Suzuki books much faster than others. So a hardworking four-year-old can be ahead of a six-year-old, a six-year-old can be way ahead of a sixteen-year-old, and so on—which is why the Suzuki system is known for producing “child prodigies.â€
That’s what happened with Sophia. By the time she was five, we had settled in with a fabulous Suzuki teacher named Michelle, who had a big piano studio in New Haven at a place called the Neighborhood Music School. Patient and perceptive, Michelle got Sophia—appreciated her aptitude but saw beyond it—and it was Michelle who instilled the love of music in her. The Suzuki method was perfect for Sophia. She learned really quickly and could stay focused for a long time.
She also had a big cultural advantage: Most of the other students at the school had liberal Western parents, who were weak-willed and indulgent when it came to practicing. I remember a girl named Aubrey, who was required to practice one minute per day for every year of her age. She was seven. Other kids got paid for practicing, with giant ice cream sundaes or big Lego kits. And many were excused from practicing altogether on lesson days.
A key feature of the Suzuki approach is that a parent is expected to attend every music lesson and then to supervise practice sessions at home. What this meant was that every moment Sophia was at the piano, I was there with her, and I was being educated too. I had taken piano lessons as a child, but my parents didn’t have the money to hire anyone good, so I ended up studying with a neighbor, who sometimes hosted Tupperware parties during my lesson. With Sophia’s teacher, I started learning all kinds of things about music theory and music history that I’d never known before.
With me at her side, Sophia practiced at least ninety minutes every day, including weekends. On lesson days, we practiced twice as long. I made Sophia memorize everything, even if it wasn’t required, and I never paid her a penny. That’s how we blasted through those Suzuki books. Other parents aimed for one book a year. We started off with the “Twinkle, Twinkle†variations (Book One); three months later Sophia was playing Schumann (Book Two); six months after that, she was playing a sonatina by Clementi (Book Three). And I still felt we were going too slow.’’
Did you see that – the culture of practice, practice, and practice? And there was another book I read once ‘Every Street Is Paved With Gold’ by a former Daewoo director. As I went through the book, I was impressed that someone could work so so hard. And if you’ve read the thread PokerDad started on ‘We can Do’ by Moshe Kai, you’ll realise that most of those top math prodigies are Asians. For example, Moshe Kai is Asian, David Levy is half-Chinese (his mother is Chinese, his father, American), and his father mentioned in his review and comments on ‘Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother’ that he and his Chinese wife had decided to raise their son with traditional values of hard work, and that those values enabled the boy graduate with 2 degrees at age 16. Further, the youngest siblings to get A* grades at British A level maths, the Ahmeds, are Asians; the child prodigy who formerly held that record in Britain before the Ahmeds took over, was Asian. They practiced longer, hence ended up brighter. For example, according to their father, the Ahmed brothers practiced math about 3 hours a day. After reading ‘Top of the Class’, I understood. Even Robert Levy said the same thing – his son practiced Saxon Math for about 3 hours a day. Any surprise why he’s ended up so bright?
Hence after my reading /research on Asian Americans, the whole thing has become very, very clear. Asians are successful because they have a very solid culture of hard work and believe so much in practice. I love that and I’m trying to bring up my kids with the Asian values of hard work.
Below I quote excerpts on this matter from the book: Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves but Can Read, Write or Add’ by Charles Sykes (http://www.amazon.com/Dumbing-Down-Our-Kids-Themselves/dp/0312148232):
On page 18/19, he says:
If television cannot account for low achievement, neither does the prevalence of working mothers in American homes. In the international comparisons cited above, researchers identified the family background of the test takers. They found that while 35 percent of the mothers of Minneapolis students were working mothers, so were 30 percent of the Japanese mothers, 33 percent of the mothers in Taipei, and 97 percent of the mothers in Beijing. Stevenson also notes that Americans comfort themselves with stereotypes in which Asian children are pictured as being under great stress from early ages; that Asian children are somehow "easier" to teach than American kids because they are more docile; that there is little to emulate in Asian teaching methods because they stress rote learning and rely on endless, mindless drill of basic skills. While these false stereotypes "allow us to maintain a view of ourselves as relaxed, successful, effective individualists who are creative, innovative, and independent," Stevenson wrote, they are "largely inaccurate."
Asian students may work hard, but researchers have found no evidence that they “suffer greater psychological distress or a greater incidence of suicide than exists in Western children.” Nor is there much support for theories that attribute higher levels of Asian achievement to genetically superior intelligences.
If demographics, television, IQ, and money do not account for the differences, attitudes certainly do. Americans have very different assumptions than do their Asian counterparts about the appropriate role parents should play in the education of their children. Asians, according to Stevenson, expect schools to develop academic skills, while they believe it is up to the home to support the schools and to provide a “healthy emotional environment.” In contrast, Americans expect more of their schools and ¬ less of themselves. Stevenson says that many Americans “seem to expect that schools will take on responsibility for many more aspects of the child’s life,” including family roles, sex, drugs, minority relations, illnesses, nutrition, and fire prevention.
And on page 296 he says:
[b]In his cross-cultural studies of schools in the United States, Japan, and China, researcher Harold Stevenson attributed significant differences in achievement levels not simply to differing approaches to schooling, but also to the very different approaches to their children's education by Asian and American parents. "Chinese and Japanese children know that they will have free time only after they have completed the day's schoolwork," he found. "In American families, leisure activities and schoolwork compete for the child's time." American parents do not like what they regard as excessive homework and frequently express distaste for schoolwork if it interferes with other activities they think should be given equal or even greater value.’’[/b]
Sykes goes on and on about the matter, and it makes a whole lot of sense to me.
So Gladwell saying Asians do better in math because of hard work on rice fields is an untruth. They do very well in other endeavours of life too: academics, music, sports etc. Further, all his other reasons (like comparing number systems of the Chinese with that of Americans and trying to make it seem like number systems is what has given the Chinese an advantage) are untrue. I bet if the Chinese had a more difficult number structure, they would still come out tops. Why? Because they work so hard. With hard work, you can leverage your disadvantages. Okay, how would he explain the fact that even Asian-Americans and Asian-British (like Moshe Kai and the Ahmed brothers) who use the English number system still come out tops? Asians do well simply because they are willing to put in their several thousand hours of deliberate practice, which according to Anders Ericsson, is what makes for expertise.
:mad: