Truth

I used to empathize too much with television shows. I found, and I was smart enough to find that there was a stock script between sitcoms in the early 1990's when I was growing up. In such a stock script, a young adult or some other character would lie just to have people like him or her. At the end of the episode, after weird consequences of the lie happened, of course the character is caught in the lie and has to say, "I just lied so that you would like me." I have, of course, no idea where this fits in except to say that it's an interesting experience.

I don't mean to sound cynical when I say that despite its flaws, Judaism is an incredible source of education. I see education as leading almost necessarily to progress. If we put a super-student characteristics list together, we might point to an Asian-American's experience in high school. We would then ask, what is it that makes him a great student?

1. Extreme parenting
2. The emphasis on individuality
3. Responsibility
4. (Perhaps) the ability to speak a different language
5. A community base to emphasize learning
6. An emphasis on argument within the community
7. The ability, even within communities, to say no to peer pressure

Malcolm Gladwell's article on Stanley Kaplan, who invented the Kaplan course, states that parenting is a uniting factor between high test scores for SAT.

Looking at other immigrant populations who came to America that I have seen, such as Russian, Bosnian, Cambodian, African, and other Europeans, I cannot help but feel that this is the case.

Alternatively, the high scorers in my high school who were not immigrants without question always had strong parenting in their households.

The cool part about all of this is that Judaism builds this sort of structure more or less naturally from culture and traditions.

Personally, I consider the limited brains that I do have to be mostly dependent on the seeding of my parents.


People talk about innate intelligence, and I think that is a fair caveat. After all, individuals who are born into orphanages grow up to be geniuses, like Isaac Newton. I think education is more important because even if we could count-predict-built the high-speed neuron functioning of finding a random genius, the rest of us still have to learn somehow.



Works Cited:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2001/12/17/011217crat_atlarge