Legacy of toiling in rice paddies 360 days a year produces math whiz kids

[Guest guest]

Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers: The Story of Success, says:

" We give kids from around the world the same set of math tests, and

every time we get the same results: America is just below average,

and then at the very, very top are Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan,

South Korea, and Taiwan. It occurs again and again.

There's an ultimately unconvincing argument that this has to do with

IQ. I think what it has to do with is culture. Asian culture has a

profoundly different relationship to work. It rewards people who are

persistent.

Take a random group of 8-year-old American and Japanese kids, give

them all a really, really hard math problem, and start a stopwatch.

The American kids will give up after 30, 40 seconds. If you let the

test run for 15 minutes, the Japanese kids will not have given up.

You have to take it away.

I argue that this has to do with the kind of agriculture pursued in

the West and the East going back thousands of years. I have

ancestors who were peasant farmers in Western Europe in the Middle

Ages. They probably worked 1,000 hours a year, if that. In the

winter, they slept. They drank a lot of beer.

These Asian cultures are all wet-rice agricultural economies.

Growing rice is this extraordinarily complex, labor-intensive

activity that requires not just physical engagement but mental

engagement. So a farmer in 14th-century Japan or 14th-century China

was working 3,000 hours a year - three times longer. I know it

sounds hard to believe, but habits laid down by our ancestors

persist even after the conditions that created those habits have

gone away. "

http://money.cnn.com/2008/11/11/news/companies/secretsofsuccess_gladw

ell.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2008111212

From New York magazine at

http://www.nymag.com/arts/books/features/52014 :

And then there are the math geniuses who, as anyone can't help

noticing, are disproportionately Asian. Citing the work of an

educational researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, Gladwell

attributes this phenomenon not to some innate mathematical ability

that Asians possess but to the fact that children in Asian countries

are willing to work longer and harder than their Western

counterparts. That willingness, Gladwell continues, is due to a

cultural legacy of hard work that stems from the cultivation of

rice. Turning to a historian who studies ancient Chinese peasant

proverbs, Gladwell marvels at what Chinese rice farmers used to tell

one another: " No one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year fails

to make his family rich. " Contrast that legacy with the one derived

from Western agriculture—which holds that some fields be left fallow

rather than be cultivated 360 days a year and which, by extension,

led to the creation of an education system that allowed students to

be left fallow for periods, like summer vacation. For American

students from wealthy homes, summer vacation isn't a problem; but,

citing the research of a Johns Hopkins sociologist, Gladwell shows

that it's a profound handicap for students from poor homes, who

actually outlearn their rich counterparts during the school year but

then fall behind them when school lets out. " For its poorest

students, America doesn't have a school problem, " Gladwell

concludes. " It has a summer-vacation problem. " So how to close the

gap between rich and poor students? Get rid of summer vacation in

inner-city schools.