My 2 cents' worth: I have been teaching in Beijing
for almost eight months. I can say without hesitation
that it's a deeply ingrained part of the culture here
that parents push their children to study hard. I
think it's a cultural demand - not just in families.
All children are expected to study hard and to WANT to
go to college, though only a small percentage are
actually accepted. To be one of the chosen ones is
not only an honor to a family; it also assures a young
person of a better future than their parents had.
Those Chinese who have the opportunity to go to
another country to study have the same cultural
background as the students I teach. I have done no
research on this, but my anecdotal comment is that it
is probably the strongest imperative in a Chinese
family, and that it is imposed throughout the culture.
Edryce
--- Ken Friedman <
ken.friedman@bi.no> wrote:
> Dear Colleagues,
>
> Dick Dailey offers a widely recognized operational
> mechanism that
> accounts for academic success in specific families.
> Li and Nuttall's
> study attempted to explain academic success among
> members of a large
> cultural group. The question the authors asked is a
> variation on such
> questions as, "Why do Chinese-Americans do so well
> in school and at
> university?" "Why are Chinese-Americans represented
> at top
> universities in far greater numbers than their
> percentage of the
> general population?" Individual family behavior
> cannot explain this.
>
> Individual family behavior is important to the
> success of individual
> students, but it doesn't explain why great absolute
> numbers of high
> achievers come from one cultural group rather than
> another, or why
> that group has greater percentages of high achievers
> relative to
> total population than another group.
>
> Whatever family-level operational behaviors are at
> work, they seem to
> be present more often in Chinese-American families
> than in families
> from other groups in the population. Understanding
> why this is so for
> one culture rather than another requires a different
> level of
> analysis than behavior within the individual
> family..
>
> Ken
>
> Ken Friedman, Ph.D.
> Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic
> Design
> Department of Technology and Knowledge Management
> Norwegian School of Management
>
> Visiting Professor
> Advanced Research Institute
> School of Art and Design
> Staffordshire University
>
>
> --
>
> Dear Colleagues,
> Ken presents an interesting viewpoint which does
> indeed simplify the
> finding noted in the study. However, I can simplify
> it even further.
> After the family has finished dinner and the dishes
> have been cleared
> away, everyone sits down together and does their
> homework. The older
> siblings help the younger ones with the parents
> monitoring the
> process. This also applies to other Asian cultures.
> Dick
> Richard T. Dailey, PhD
> Professor of Management
> Fulbright Scholar
> Belarus State University and
> Belarus State Economic University
> Fall Semester 2001
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