华裔虎妈 Tiger Moms: Is Tough Parenting Really the Answer?
2011-01-26 19:37阅读：
美国耶鲁大学的华裔教授蔡美儿，近 日
她出版了一本名叫《虎妈战歌》的书在美国引起轰动。该书介绍了她如何以中国式教育方法管教两个女儿，她骂女儿垃圾、要求每科成绩拿A、不准看电视、琴练不好就不准吃饭等。
虎妈的教育方法轰动了美国教育界，并引起美国关于中美教育方法的大讨论，如今讨论随着《时代》周刊的参与几乎达到了一个高潮。虎妈的故事登上了最新一期《时代》周刊封面。
读完感觉中国和美国人民都对自己的教育很质疑，双方的角度和文化背景都十分的不同，中美教育可以说是两个极端的教育，一个是“批评太多”，一个是“表扬太多”，而也许真正正确的应该是两者的综合体。
It was the 'Little White Donkey' incident that pushed many readers
over the edge. That's the name of the piano tune that Amy Chua,
Yale law professor and self-described 'tiger mother,' forced her
7-year-old daughter Lulu to practice for hours on end — 'right
through dinner into the night,' with no breaks for water or even
the bathroom, until at last Lulu learned to play the piece.
For other readers, it was Chua calling her older daughter Sophia
'garbage' after the girl behaved disrespectfully — the same thing
Chua had been called as a child by her strict Chinese father.
And, oh, yes, for so
me readers it was the card that young Lulu made for her mother's
birthday. 'I don't want this,' Chua announced, adding that she
expected to receive a drawing that Lulu had 'put some thought and
effort into.' Throwing the card back at her daughter, she told her,
'I deserve better than this. So I
reject this.'
Even before
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Chua's proudly
politically incorrect account of raising her children 'the Chinese
way,' arrived in bookstores Jan. 11, her parenting methods were the
incredulous, indignant talk of every playground, supermarket and
coffee shop. A prepublication excerpt in the
Wall Street
Journal (titled 'Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior') started the
ferocious buzz; the online version has been read more than 1
million times and attracted more than 7,000 comments so far. When
Chua appeared Jan. 11 on the
Today show, the usually sunny
host Meredith Vieira could hardly contain her contempt as she read
aloud a sample of viewer comments:
'She's a
monster'; 'The way she raised her kids is outrageous'; 'Where is
the love, the acceptance?'
Chua, a petite 48-year-old who carries off a short-skirted wardrobe
that could easily be worn by her daughters (now 15 and 18), gave as
good as she got.
'To be perfectly honest, I
know that a lot of Asian parents are secretly shocked and horrified
by many aspects of Western parenting,' including 'how much time
Westerners allow their kids to waste — hours on Facebook and
computer games — and in some ways, how poorly they prepare them for
the future,' she told Vieira with a toss of her long hair.
'It's a tough world out there.'
(See Nancy Gibbs' take on the challenges of
parenting.)
Chua's reports from the trenches of authoritarian parenthood are
indeed disconcerting, even shocking, in their candid admission of
maternal ruthlessness. Her book is a
Mommie Dearest for the
age of the memoir, when we tell tales on ourselves instead of our
relatives. But there's something else behind the intense reaction
to
Tiger Mother, which has shot to the top of best-seller
lists even as it's been denounced on the airwaves and the Internet.
Though Chua was born and raised in the U.S., her invocation of what
she describes as traditional 'Chinese parenting' has hit hard at a
national sore spot: our fears about losing ground to China and
other rising powers and about adequately preparing our children to
survive in the global economy. Her stories of never accepting a
grade lower than an A, of insisting on hours of math and spelling
drills and piano and violin practice each day (weekends and
vacations included), of not allowing playdates or sleepovers or
television or computer games or even school plays, for goodness'
sake, have left many readers outraged but also defensive. The tiger
mother's cubs are being raised to rule the world, the book clearly
implies, while
the offspring of
'weak-willed,' 'indulgent' Westerners are growing up ill equipped
to compete in a fierce global marketplace.
One of those permissive American parents is Chua's husband, Jed
Rubenfeld (also a professor at Yale Law School). He makes the
occasional cameo appearance in
Tiger Mother, cast as the
tenderhearted foil to Chua's merciless taskmaster. When Rubenfeld
protested Chua's harangues over 'The Little White Donkey,' for
instance, Chua informed him that his older daughter Sophia could
play the piece when she was Lulu's age. Sophia and Lulu are
different people, Rubenfeld remonstrated reasonably. 'Oh, no, not
this,' Chua shot back, adopting a mocking tone: 'Everyone is
special in their special own way. Even losers are special in their
own special way.'
With a stroke of her razor-sharp pen, Chua has set a whole nation
of parents to wondering: Are we the losers she's talking
about?
Read more:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2043313,00.html#ixzz1C8nSj0Nn
