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by Rodel Rodis
January 31, 2011
The Filipino Channel’s Balitang America recently featured Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother Chinay author Amy Chua in a news segment that included street interviews of Filipinos who were asked their reaction to Chua’s parental directive that her two daughters not watch TV or play video games during school days and that they spend at least 4 hours a day studying their books and practicing their piano and violin. And that they never get less than an A for any of their subjects.
All the Filipinos who were interviewed uniformly thrashed Chua’s parenting methods and asserted that, in contrast to Chua’s strict parenting regimen, their children’s happiness was more important to them than their grades.
The interviewees should also have been asked if they were personally involved in the education of their children.
According to a study conducted by the San Francisco Unified School District about the participation of parents in parent-teacher school conferences, only 17% of Filipino parents cared enough about their children to talk to their teachers at the Bessie Carmichael Elementary School which has a 58% Filipino student population.
Filipino American educator Dr. Anthony Ogilvie studied the statistics of the California Standardized Test Scores for10 urban areas (including San Francisco public school students) and found that Filipinos in the 6th, 7th and 8th grades have the highest percentage of students below ‘Basic’ among Asian groups and Whites in both English-language Arts and Math, ranging from 19 percent to 37 percent. In the 9th – 11th grades, 42 percent of Filipino students fell in the ‘Basic’ and ‘Below Basic’ levels on the Star Math Test.
Perhaps the low test scores can be excused by the belief of many Filipino parents that it is the teachers’ responsibility to teach, not theirs. Their job is to put food on the table and provide a comfortable shelter for their children and they will do so even if it means taking on two jobs just to make ends meet. This leaves them with little or no time to help their children with their school work.
When these Filipino parents get home, they are often too bushed to help their kids with their homework and so they just plop on their sofas and watch their favorite Tagalog soap operas on ABS-CBN and GMA-TV.
If these Filipino parents were channel surfing TV Tuesday night, January 25, they may have chanced upon President Barack Obama delivering his State of the Nation address and heard him talk about the need for American students to acquire a college education to compete for jobs in the global economy.
They would have heard Pres. Obama say: “Over the next ten years, nearly half of all new jobs will require education that goes beyond a high school degree. And yet, as many as a quarter of our students aren’t even finishing high school. The quality of our math and science education lags behind many other nations. America has fallen to 9th in the proportion of young people with a college degree. And so the question is whether all of us – as citizens, and as parents – are willing to do what’s necessary to give every child a chance to succeed.”
If they believe it is only the teachers’ responsibility to teach their children, they would have heard Pres. Obama refute that notion and declare that “responsibility begins not in our classrooms, but in our homes and communities. It’s family that first instills the love of learning in a child. Only parents can make sure the TV is turned off and homework gets done. We need to teach our kids that it’s not just the winner of the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated, but the winner of the science fair; that success is not a function of fame or PR, but of hard work and discipline.”
When Filipinos are considered “Asian Americans” and lumped together with Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and Indians, the educational statistics are remarkable. For example, despite comprising less than 5 percent of the US population, Asian Americans make up 17% of incoming Harvard freshmen and 29% of students at Harvard medical school. Despite being less than 15% of the California population, Asian Americans make up 45% of incoming UC Berkeley freshmen.
However, when Filipinos are considered independent from other Asians, the statistics are starkly different. After Proposition 209 banning affirmative action in schools was passed by California voters in 1996, the numbers of Filipino freshmen at UC Berkeley dropped from 400 students in one year to just 56 the following year, a tiny fraction of the Asian American population.
Filipinos have to reassess our almost universal objection to the Tiger Mother approach to parenting and remove our smug reliance on the “Western” style of parenting that makes consideration of the children’s happiness paramount.
For the most part, the laissez-faire approach is simply not working and Filipino students are failing. Filipino parents have to be more involved in their children’s education and must be willing to spend hours daily (forego the telenovellas) to help them with their homework and regularly attend parent-teacher conferences at school. Filipinos must accept the challenge to be Tiger parents because their children’s happiness is paramount.
In an open letter to her mother that was published in the New York Post on January 18, Amy Chua’s 18-year old daughter, Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld, wrote that many readers may “assume Lulu and I are oppressed by our evil mother. That is so not true. Every other Thursday, you take off our chains and let us play math games in the basement.”
“But for real, it’s not their fault. No outsider can know what our family is really like. They don’t hear us cracking up over each other’s jokes. They don’t see us eating our hamburgers with fried rice. They don’t know how much fun we have when the six of us, dogs included, squeeze into one bed and argue about what movies to download from Netflix.”
“I think the desire to live a meaningful life is universal. To some people, it’s working toward a goal… It’s about knowing that you’ve pushed yourself, body and mind, to the limits of your own potential. You feel it when you’re sprinting, and when the piano piece you’ve practiced for hours finally comes to life beneath your fingertips. You feel it when you encounter a life-changing idea, and when you do something on your own that you never thought you could. If I died tomorrow, I would die feeling I’ve lived my whole life at 110 percent. And for that, Tiger Mom, thank you.”
(Send comments to Rodel50@aol.com or mail them to the Law Offices of Rodel Rodis at 2429 Ocean Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94127 or call 415.334.7800).