Amy Chua and her husband Jed Rubenfeld
I glanced at the National Post yesterday afternoon while waiting at the supermarket checkout. A large part of the issue seemed dedicated to the Chinese in Canada. I refrained from buying the paper, which touts itself as the conservative paper of Canada, but is overwhelmingly liberal. I always end up disappointed that I spent my dollars on the paper, so I decided to look for this story online.
And I did find what I was looking for.
The paper's opinion page has an article by Jonathan Kay titled:
"Canada is becoming a nation of ‘Tiger Mothers’"
Of course this was in reference to Amy Chua, the "Tiger Mom" who tried - bullied - (unsuccessfully) to make her daughters into concert musicians, and who wrote a book to tell her tale. I posted on her here: "A Sino-Draconian Mission."
Kay mentions "Tiger Moms" in his article to describe his wife's concern that their children needed more activities after she read Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mom. They sent them to piano classes, and one to after school reading classes, "even though I'm not sure she needed them" writes Kay.
Kay's article is not about music classes, but about the changing demographics of Canada's universities, and especially the University of Toronto. Here's what he writes:
According to census results released on Wednesday, Canada has the fastest-growing population of any G8 nation, with two-thirds of the growth coming from immigration. These newcomers aren’t just redrawing Canada’s population map, they’re also radically transforming our elite educational institutions.He goes on to say:
A 2010 study of Toronto District School Board students found that 72% of students from Eastern Asian immigrant families, and 50% from South Asian families, went on to university — as compared with just 42% of Canadian-born students. The city of Vancouver is about 21% East Asian. Yet roughly double that proportion of UBC students self-identify as East Asian.I have simple, intuitive questions to ask all those who praise Asian intelligence over that of Jews and whites: If Asians' intelligence is superior to that of whites and Jews, why then do they come from societies (China, Japan and Korea) which are not comparable in social, cultural, technical, scientific or artistic advances as the white societies in Europe and America, and of course the Jewish state of Israel? Will they then proceed to make these societies similar (in achievement and progress) to their countries of origin, once they have left university and started their scientific/engineering/technical careers?
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the trend is the same in competitive high schools. When I attended Selwyn House School in Montreal in the 1970s and 1980s, there were exactly three Asian students in my class. When I returned to SHS recently to give a speech at career day, 25 years later, it was, let us say, a world transformed. The same pattern is on exhibit here in Toronto, where high-achieving Asian students now account for a huge component of the incoming class at schools such as Bishop Strachan and Havergal, which once were as white as mayo on Wonder bread.
I wrote recently that Asian musicians were able to enter Western, classical orchestras because the audition system is most likely biased to their type of playing (memorization and greater ability at scale-like exercises, as I wrote in the linked post) but that orchestras with a large number of Asians are actually inferior to those with mostly white musicians. And I think that Asians are able to enter universities in higher numbers because certain aspects of university admissions tests are biased to their type of intelligence. This is a controversial opinion, and I have been gathering information to substantiate it. Here is one articles (amongst the many that I've collected so far) which seems to provide some answers to my questions:
Asian accomplishment (or lack hereof?)Other related articles in the February 11 National Post are:
Guy White recently asked why East Asians, though their average IQ is higher than European Caucasians (105 IQ to 100 IQ), are not as inventive, creative, or as historically accomplished as European Caucasians...
[I]s there a viable answer to White’s question? I think so, and it involves the difference in cognitive profiles between East Asians and Caucasians. Simply put, the answer to White’s question involves verbal IQ and its relation to creativity, inventiveness, or accomplishment...
I, therefore, propose the following hypothesis. Creative accomplishment and eminence in the humanities and sciences requires good spatial ability (though less so for the humanities), but it also requires even better verbal ability. The East Asian cognitive profile tilts toward spatial ability, and they are known to be generally weak in verbal ability. However, the European Caucasian cognitive profile is evenly balanced between verbal and spatial ability—the best of both—so they are likelier to have more in their population reaching the optimal verbal IQ required for eminence.
Our Chinalands
The home and homelands of new Canadians