Outliers and my Chinese Education

(I suspect) I am rereading Outliers. The book argues for the need to contextualize individual achievement. Individuals and groups do not succeed on their own, but require lots of incidental, and explicit help to reach the top. I like this premise not least because my case study research strategy also relies on this contextualization of the unit of analysis. In addition, the author touches on ecological metaphor in explaining what this contextualization may entail. 

I am reading about rice paddies and Chinese people's maths ability. I agree with the author's position that the Chinese have transferred their effort rhetoric and mentality from the rice paddies to the classrooms. This curious worldview, that effort (that is, hard work and not ability, per another worldview) leads to success, is all over Hong Kong. In this place, rhetoric suggests that there are only two conditions of being in this place: hardworking; and lazy. 

I think the conditions for such rhetoric in the rice paddies and in the mathematics classrooms is reasonable.  The longer you work and the more intensely, and meticulously you work, the greater the reward. The rice agricultural system and the mathematic system reward hard work. 

Only when this worldview is transferred to other academic disciplines do I see catastrophic futility. I speak in particular about reading the English language. Without proper instruction (that is, ability), you will never be able read effectively with such speed and comprehension as each text type and context demands. Reading is a skill that you cannot simply scaffold well without some good inputs. For this reason, my university students still only know one type of reading: intensive. (Skimming and general are their weakest reading types; scanning is slightly better.) For this reason, too, my students can greatly improve their phonemic and morphemic recognition. These are not things that are easily discerned by staring at pages upon pages of letters, words and paragraphs for thousands of hours, even. Somewhere along those thousand hours, someone needs to intervene well in these people's learning. Otherwise, people are just wasting their time. In this case, the rice paddy mentality is detrimental to success. 

Alas, the author knows this too. The chapter is entitled Rice Paddies and Math Tests, and not Rice Paddies and Reading and Writing Tests. Being from a rice paddy culture and understanding the world through a single-syllable language may give you a heads up on maths, but not on reading and writing!