Competitive blogging.

During teaching days, I look forward to the week-end, when Ed and I will inevitably try to bike, camp, ski, build trails, take out a kayak, an iceboat, a canoe, plant a garden – and on those days blogging is a charmed effort...

Perhaps it was physical immaturity, but I never played the "my b/f is better/bigger than your b/f" game some of the other girls seemed to have going on in middle school either. Now today I read David Brooks of all people, giving advice to teenage girls on how to be liked.

Ah, the old "go along to get along" achievement scale.*

Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group — these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale.
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I wish she recognized that in some important ways the school cafeteria is more intellectually demanding than the library. And I hope her daughters grow up to write their own books, and maybe learn the skills to better anticipate how theirs will be received.

He misses the point. (and why am I reading an underlying dig at Paul Krugman in those last lines ... kicking a man while he's down. Perhaps David was so busy studying the girls' learning track, he missed out on the social lessons generally learned by boys?)

Trouble is, if you endorse these popularity contests instead of allowing individualism to grow for it's own sake and develop naturally, your daughter's values are only as good as the top dog in the social "group", and overconfidence can strike -- indeed, often does -- the "team" as a whole.

See American academic achievement v. the Asian countries. They're not worried about prom dates so much, or who's the alpha at the sleepover. Whose boyfriend is bigger or better (the richer scale comes later, I think.) Or more telling, scoring just one point higher than whomever currently leads the class.

Or "purging" the temporarily stored info immediately after the test.

The Asian achievement bars are raised much higher than just one-upping the girl next door. (The American adult version: having a bigger SUV, house, extra child, higher name college, latest technology etc. than others in your peer group.) That's Chua's point, being missed, it seems.

David Brooks' confidence, I believe, stems from his not seeing, or plain misreading, the true international competition we're facing. Thinking in old ways: that the game will always favor the more popular, the one least likely to rub someone the wrong way. Like how he admires President Obama's career track. (But Sarah Palin is ... a joke. Never forget.)

Except, that path -- the "go along to get along" of today, over the precise achievement scale of tomorrow, nevermind social sales skills (can you say: coding?) -- will be harder and harder for lesser educated American youth to navigate, no matter how their fathers might try to map the way. And remember, it's not just the upper middle class sons and daughters playing for Team America. You've got to factor everyone's scores in -- the girls who didn't do so well at the sleepover, as well as those excluded from the reindeer games. Kinda brings down the popular girls' average advantage because, of course, the "team" can't win -- it's disincentivized, in fact -- in this current system.

Which is why we have bigger and bigger "winners", like in the financial field, while the country's fortunes as a whole sour... (ie/ Pete Orswag. "star" player on losing teams.)

Without the American "extra credit" points earned by our forefathers reshaping the world in the immediate aftermath of World War II, it won't be as easy as Brooks makes it out to be, I think. Saying that as a realist coming up without so much his generation's taken-for-granted advantages.

I just can't believe the current NYT philosopher-king honestly thinks the answer to America's academic ills today is paying more attention to the cafeteria games, instead of recognizing it's the poor diet in our classrooms that needs to be re-imagined to maximize the economy through strong and healthy minds.