Non-Scheduled Reading Response Notes

This week’s reading response addressed the issues of the “little Empress” model. I found many different sections of this reading particularly interesting; especially in regards to comparative study. In the article entitled, “Heavy is the Head of the ‘Little Emperor,’” the author hooked his audience with a provocative topic of suicide amongst students in China. A boy described how the suicide rates in China were due to the fact that the children were feeling overly stressed about their education and the harshness of their struggle over competition. The government tried to form a policy that would help reduce some of these stresses whilst boosting the economy in some way. While this attempt did, in fact, somewhat achieve the latter the situation of high stress amongst students still remained a problem. While I read through some of the case studies provided, which helped support some of these claims, I noticed many parallels to the American Ivy League students. One great example of this parallel is a personal situation of mine that involved a dear friend of mine from childhood. She was an American born, Indian woman who had been brought up through the traditional standards of an Asian household. All throughout her childhood we had taken many different extra curricular activities together outside of our school. Our parents would bond over new programs run by our community centers to help enhance our education. We would take Kuman (a Korean method of learning math and reading comprehension) together, dance, do community service at our temple, tennis lessons, Sylvan Learning Center, private tutoring in almost every subject, and much more. For my friend, these extra activities helped shape the person she was. She did not understand a life outside of academic success. She received straight A’s in high school, made honor role every year, graduated top of her class, and still maintained her image of a well rounded student amongst all of her other accomplishments. Needless to say, she had never been exposed to failure or the idea that she would not achieve her high dreams of becoming a future, successful Dentist. This friend had been accepted into a direct program into dentistry straight out of high school. After her third year of the program she had received her first “C” letter grade ever and had been consequently kicked out of her program/University. Her parents were devastated, but not so much as she was with herself. All of her dreams had been vanished due to one bad grade. This was the level of competition she was surrounded by. While, everyone helped her look for other alternative programs or top “notch” universities that would provide her with the same level of prestige, she was becoming more and more disappointed in herself. A few months later this friend had committed suicide. This was not a first of such stories within the Ivy League community. While, understandably, it is important to preserve certain standards of education in order to produce quality results and progress in education; I think it is worth analyzing some of the repercussions. If the standards are not maintained, would academia as a whole lower its scale of achievement? Are the small fractions of deaths and high stress cases worth changing the system? These questions could apply to both China and a few cases in the Western education system. I would also find it interesting to analyze some of the statistical data measuring suicide rates and high stress levels in American University students to see if a majority of these individuals came from Asian specific backgrounds who have similar value systems to those of their native countries. Also, what are some of the global comparisons regarding this topic?