No evolutionary force acts solely on American. The world has become more demanding, and for historical, cultural economic reasons, the. is being out-educated. Relevant reading abounds, but this snippet Couple searching sex black girl sex from the NYer's Tiger Mom review summarizes a key issue: "Last month the results of the most recent Programme for International Student Assessment tests were announced. It was the first time Chinese students had participated from Shanghai ranked first in every single area.. students came in 17th in reading, 23rd in science an especially demoralizing 31st in math. “Skeptics want to argue with the results, but we consider them accurate reliable,” the. Secretaryof Educ. told the Times. “The. came in 23rd or 24th in most subjects. We can quibble or we can face the brutal truth that we’re being out-educated.” Why is this? How is it the richest country in the world can’t teach to read or multiply fractions? As a parable, Chua’s cartoonish narrative about browbeating her acquires a disquieting force. Americans have been told always to encourage their. This, the theory goes, improve self-esteem in turn, help them learn. After a generation or so of applying this theory, we have the results. Just about the only category in which. students outperform the competition is self-regard. Researchers at the Brookings Institute, in one of their frequent studies of education policy, compared student assessments of their abilities in math with their scores on a standardized test. Nearly 40% of. 8th graders agreed “a lot” with the statement “I usually do well in math,” though only 7% scored high enough to qualify as advanced. Among Singaporeans, 18% said they usually did well in math; 44% qualified as advanced the least self-confident Singaporean students, on average, outscored the most self-confident Americans. Our problems as a country cannot be reduced to our problems as educators parents. Nonetheless, there is an uncomfortable analogy. For some time, the. has, in effect, been drawing crappy smiley-face b-day cards ing them wonderful. It’s made us feel better about ourselves without improving the basic situation. As the cover of this month’s Foreign Policy sums things up: “American Decline: This Time It’s Real.”