Education In A Form Of Madness

Diary, Reflections 4 Minutes

Education is a form of madness in the Asian community here in New Jersey. It has been this way for years, and every year it becomes a little crazier than the year before. And sometimes it seems to me that there is no limit to this craze and the intensity can just go up and up until… I don’t know. I mean it is kind of like global warming, isn’t it? I mean every year is hotter and stormier than the year before. And what will eventually happen? Will this trend go on and on indefinitely?

Well, let me come back to education and enumerate the insane facts about it here:

Housing And Schools

Each town has a public school and each public school is funded by the property tax that the residents pay to the town each year. And Edison’s property tax has been going up and up for at least the last decade. The rate of increase is much higher than the inflation. And with such a yearly increase, the town’s well-known competitive high school is getting more and more crowded. This over-crowding issue is not easy to solve since there are no budget for new buildings despite the high property tax gathered from the residents.

Many poor immigrants want to send their kids to Edison’s competitive middle school and high school even if they are not living in Edison. So some of them would fake their address in Edison. They would say their friends’ or relatives’ house are their house. The board of education of the town has a task force to examine the residents closely. I heard several stories about this. And once I went to a party in one of my friends’ house in North Edison and I noticed the general gloom among people. Later I learned that one of them was caught by the task force for faking an Edison address and her son was expelled instantly, and the mother was waiting to hear what kind of penalties she had to pay. The little boy–the expelled student–about 11 years old, was very bright and very cute. He was standing right next to his mother, holding an orange tabby cat. He was trying to comfort his mother, but not effectively. His mother was crying that her little boy was condemned to bad schools and incompetent teachers. What would happen to him? She could see no prospect for him other than poverty, joblessness, delinquency, and being looked down upon by girls she doesn’t even want him to marry. We all claimed in unison that she was worrying too much and her boy was going to grow to be a successful engineer or a businessman. But she kept on crying.

After-School Tutoring

The after-school tutoring is not only a business here, but almost an industry. There are many tutoring places that offering many different services, like music, sports, STEM subjects, English. Even those students who don’t need after-school tutoring are sent to be tutored, just to make them better in the subjects they are already good at.

The mothers have formed mom’s clubs and social media groups so that they can arrange and schedule the ride, which will chauffeur their kids to and fro from these tutoring places. Mothers living within one mile of each other prefer to group together since they can help each other to pick up and drop their kids more conveniently.

And inevitably there are unscrupulous people who want to capitalize on the education frenzy. There are self declared “gurus” who would give lectures, offer advice, publish articles, upload videos. A handful of them would become popular for inexplicable reasons. If they attend a party, they would be listened to by animated parents who want to know how to deal with cultural differences, how to deal with school teachers, how to push their kids etc. If they give a talk, they would be mobbed by the audience. Their social media account are followed by fans locally and fans overseas. And their claim to “guru” status is no other than they have a kid who got in Harvard or MIT.

And some businesses will team up with these “gurus”. It can be a direct marketing company that wants to sell people useless vitamins or dubious health products. It could be a company that wants to expand their customer base among Asian immigrants. It could be travel agencies, insurance companies, mortgage lending services. While the unsuspecting parents think they are learning parenting skills from the gurus, they end up becoming the target of overzealous marketing efforts.

Curriculum and Beyond Curriculum

I want to talk about extracurricular activities and the frantic efforts of parents who try to get their kids to do something unique. Playing piano and violin has become a cliche; painting is too prevailing; computer projects are ubiquitous. I mean a teenager has only very limited access to opportunities since he or she has to live with whatever their parents and schools can provide. Such a big pressure on the teens to produce unique activities is really a little mad, isn’t it?

I have a lot to say about this, but I think I will write a new post on this later on.

The Affirmative Action

I am really sorry to hear that the affirmative action is terminated last Thursday, and Asian people have sided with the conservative voice on this issue.

Reflecting on this, I have to say that Asian immigrant communities are so conservative (on many social issues) that it should not have surprised me that Asians take a conservative stance on this.

Still I feel very bad every time a progressive cause is thwarted. I am still thinking about this and want to write about this issue with good arguments, but at the moment, I don’t have it. So probably I will do it one of these days when I can really write a good story and discuss it with the best of my ability.

(To Be Continued Here)

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Image by Harish Sharma from Pixabay

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Published by haoyando

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34 thoughts on “Education In A Form Of Madness”

    1. Tell me about it. So true. So true. I feel exactly the same way. It is so overwhelmingly conservative that it is quite suffocating. And since the whole community is so conservative, I have routinely found that men are actually more progressive than women. While in less conservative communities, it should be the other way around.

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        1. So true. Women in our conservative community fight for men and fight against other women. They sacrifice themselves totally for the family and perpetually feel depleted and drained. They rarely blame men for anything but towards women, they are the strictest critics. They consider women their competitors and men their helpers, even though their men try hard to evade house chores.

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        2. To be honest, I really resent women like that when they make negative comments towards women that choose to live a less conservative life. I don’t care who chooses to live how, you can live your life as you see fit but don’t try to limit others and force them to be the same way as you. Especially when you’re miserable. Sorry for the rant lol.

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        3. Love your rant very much. LOL. Yes, a lot of women, especially older women, don’t understand how the world works and how it changes. I just read an article that says a significant percentage of young Americans don’t contact their parents anymore. I think it is because their parents are negative and toxic. And I think the real number is much higher since a lot of young people have to live with their parents and have to maintain a semblance of obedience at home.

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        4. So true, I think the real number would be higher if kids could be more independent and didn’t need to depend on their parents. A lot of the older generation doesn’t understand how the world works now and refuse to learn. I think the issue is generally not that they don’t understand that things have changed but rather that they refuse to believe it and grow/evolve.

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        5. Oh, tell me about it. Just look at the Asian immigrant community, and you can see so many historical relics (I mean their mind) that refuse to acknowledge the changing world. I have a friend who is so confused because her nieces and nephews either refuse to marry or refuse to have kids or refuse to come to America to work hard for an American dream. She is so confused that she calls them lazy, degenerate, useless and hopeless. Actually I think it is her who doesn’t understand the changing world and who is still trying to fit in with her husband’s family who bullies her for years and years.

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        6. I’ve witnessed people like her too. The truth is, kids these days know what they want and are no longer being pressured into getting married and starting a family. We’re much more firm about not wanting that. And some people just refuse to accept that even when they are miserable in their marriage.

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        7. Yes, thank goodness it has finally happened. It is about time. I hope young people can really make the world a better place since the world has not been living up to its promise and family settings have not be happy places for women.

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    1. Yes, so true. Very soon, the best expert will be AI and we probably will insert memory chips in our brain instead of doing the study. It is worrying.

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    1. I totally agree. Harvard is treat Asians like how they treated Jews many years ago. And it even gives very low character scores to Asian students, which is definitely discrimination.

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  7. It’s funny how much this sounds like Korea. In Korea it’s all about competition in education, with parents spending so much on making sure the kids go to these after school tutoring places as well as push them into activities like piano.

    I sorta feel sad about this.

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    1. So true. So true. And so unfair. In South Korea, if one can’t get in those big corporations, one is doomed. Small businesses can hardly make ends meet. It is soooo unfair. I mean at least in the U.S., one can do small business and raise a family if one is good at it. However, in Korea, no way. Small businesses can work 24-7, 365 days a year and still can hardly raise a family out of poverty.

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  8. This is interesting because I worked in education for 34 years – mostly teaching 16-18 yo pre-university students. In the early 2000s our college benefited financially from Asian attitudes to education (if one can put it that way). We had students who would arrive from mainland China – sometimes literally with £3000 in their pockets. I guess they were all from wealthy families. Quite a lot of them wanted to study my own subject (physics). I often felt a little embarrassed because I don’t think the work ethic was (or is) as strong in the British system as they would be used to in an Asian school. They maybe realised this but were still satisfied because the UK system gave them access to the top-ranking UK universities. (And they were only interested in the top-ranking ones!)

    I was lucky to work in a fairly well-funded sector but in general UK education is very poorly funded. I believe that even our head teachers are now considering strike action.

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    1. “Asian attitudes to education” is a funny sounding phrasing but, personally, I don’t think a wrong one.
      Kids in western Europe whose parents don’t have the financial resources and(/partially-or) aforementioned attitudes are left behind by those whose parents do. Especially now after the main pandemic years it has become painfully clear in grades and more-so in knowledge and capabilities. (One knows it is critical when too many of equivalents of A-graders don’t properly know multiplications, let alone fractions…)

      When I was the first time in Japan it was a homestay at a very lovely family with two kids. The girls were about two years apart and visited (late) primary and middle schools respectively. However, since it was a regular family in Japan – or, rather, a “family that had to conform to the regular norms and standards in Japan no matter how open-minded and forward-thinking they are” – the girls went to afternoon classes of private(-ish) after-school-schools to be able to keep up with all the other kids that “were went” to those or better schools, which ended at a time even a late-sleeper like me can only call late evening at best. They came back at around eight and nine o’clock in the evening and then still had piano lessons, of course (– since their mother is a (pretty good, to be fair) piano teacher, for better or for worse). Never minding the parents that came back around that time, too, and still ate dinner after all of that (unless the Nomikai took its toll on the father’s time). And then there’s the extracurricular activities they had to get to at times, too… (Though I wish we’ve had clubs or similar structures here, too.)

      I too “was learned” Piano from a young age and h̶a̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶visited private coaches for subjects I wasn’t good as well as those I was rather decent in during later school years. Same as when working as an intermittent private coach myself now, I got a few kids that did not really need any tutoring, at least not in the subjects I support with (and trying to tell the parents that merely beared them switching tutors since obviously that can’t be right; amusing ambivalence between “my child’s the brightest” and “it can’t be so good as not to need paid tutoring”..).

      Is that a matter of helicoptering too much then in general? Or not enough?

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      1. It was interesting to see how the Chinese students fared in the UK. Most worked hard as though their parents were present in spirit, though they lived thousands of miles away. A minority, however, went to pieces and did not work at since at all, since they were away from parental control. We teachers were told that we had to be more direct and commanding with them, otherwise they wouldn’t take us seriously. It was not good saying “you might want to do x” in a typically English way while shuffling from foot to foot!

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        1. It is very true. I have to say it took me a long time to get used to the English speaking people’s style, which seemed to be communicating (at least to me) a direct message in an unwilling way. Also there seem to be irony in everything. I am more accustomed to our own directness or bluntness. LOL. I personally know a rich girl who came to America to attend college. She bought a new car, smashed the new car, stopped going to classes, went out clubbing, failed her classes, got on probation, botched the probation, and had to apply to schools in a different continent. It’s a kind of delayed teenage rebellion.

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        2. Yes – that’s a good way of putting it – a delayed teenage rebellion (in some cases). One of our Chinese students just stayed home all day in his lodgings in Brighton, playing computer games – so nothing as dramatic as smashing up a car!

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        3. That’s exactly like the stories I’ve heard. I know an exchange student who lived with a host family. She never came downstairs unless it was for dinner and never participated in the family interaction. They tried to persuade her, but to no avail. The host family was shocked since they thought Asian girls were obedient and docile. Surprise, surprise.

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      2. So true. I totally agree with you that extracurricular activities have gone totally out of hand. I know parents who want to go far to get their kids over-trained on all kinds of things. I don’t know. I kind of feel that it is more due to the inequality of the world, insecurity of the future, and the limited good opportunities for middle or lower middle class families. Education seems to be the only way to a better life for a limited number of people. The competition is cut throat. I mean Japan is an example and South Korea is about the same and many countries are similarly affected in the same kind of rat race.

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    2. I mean 16-18 is the most difficult to manage. And teachers should definitely be paid more since teachers work are so important and so exhausting. Now there is a big teacher shortage here. People told me that some of their kids’ teachers are just not teaching since they don’t think they are paid enough and they don’t want to work more than what they are paid for.
      Yes, I think physics is a very popular subject among Asian students, right after math and English. However I had a very bad physics teacher in the first year of my physics class in 7th grade. She was not really teaching, but just read out from the textbook. Consequently I have never been able to get over that. I liked math a lot, but can’t do physics much. This is just to show how important teachers are in our life. It can make you or break you as far as a specific field is concerned.

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      1. To be fair to the British system, we did try to make the subject interesting and relevant by doing lots of demonstrations and practical work – and linking it to real-life applications. I found it difficult to get some of the Chinese students to participate in the practical work – I sensed they thought it was a waste of time. But others did appreciate it. In a way I could see both sides because British students are accustomed to a rather relaxed style and pace. We don’t really push them that much!

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        1. Yes, many students treat learning as a chore, which is only meaningful when working on test preparations. Everything else is a waste of time. I’ve witnessed many around me, after going through the hellish test prep style education, would not pick up a book unless it is absolutely necessary. This will continue until they are hit by mid-life crisis, which would force some to read books on psychology or philosophy or religion.

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