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The book essentializes race as the salient factor to define a particularly vicious form of authoritarian parenting. However, the book is really more about a culture of parenting known in the research literature as "music moms" than it is truly about Chinese parenting. Of course, it's a mass-market memoir and not a scholarly treatise, so I suppose readers are meant to forgive the obnoxious degree of stereotyping of Western and Chinese parenting, but since it's written by a well-published scholar who should know better than to deploy Ann Coulter-style rhetoric (of course, Ann Coulter should know better, too, but that's another story), Chua shouldn't be given a free pass to complain about "overprivileged Western children" in one chapter then spend a nearly page-long paragraph in another rattling off all of the countries she took her children to visit before they were 12. It's a very small percentage of parents - Western or non-Western - that can invest as much time, money and emotion into molding their children into prodigious classical musicians ... or that would frankly want to do so in the first place. Progressive educators and parents, know thy enemy and read this book.

2020-09-03 23:36