David Brooks The Importance Of Education

Rene Guerrero
02/23/2015
Eng 101
Education is undoubtedly an essential and important tool for every single person. It plays an important role to shape and define the success of an individual. The lack of a good education will complicate a person’s efforts to move up in the world, seek a better job, and achieve a successful career and life. The importance of education is crucial and it starts at an early age. Parents give a great amount of effort to give their children the best education. Everyone has different views and argue on what is the most important way to educate children. This essay compares and contrasts different views of education offered in the articles by the New York Times columnist and radio and television political commentator
David Brooks (“Amy Chua Is A Wimp”), American lawyer, writer, and Professor of Law at Yale Law School Amy L. Chua (“Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior”), and Canadian journalist, bestselling author and speaker Malcolm Gladwell (“A Gift Or Hard Work?”), and what these writers believe is most important in education.
The role of parents is definitely important for the education of a child. Amy Chua’s parenting style has been criticized by numerous people. She follows a parenting tradition that she thinks will produce successful children. She is disguised as an evil an oppressive mother who does not care about her children’s feelings and self-esteem. She threatened to burn all of her daughter’s stuffed animals if she would not play a piece of music perfectly, she calls her daughters fat, lazy, stupid, she denied them to attend sleepovers, have a playdate, be in a school play, and even watch TV and play video games. Amy Chua uses the term “Chines mother” (mothers who apply the same Chinese parenting style as hers) and “Western parents” in order to differentiate the parenting styles. Western parents are lazy, they are excessively focused on their children’s self- esteem, and they don’t spend enough time in their children’s academic activities according to Chua. These are some of the reasons why Chinese mothers are superior according to her. She believes that in order to attain greatness and perfection you have to practice. She knows that the children will refuse to cooperate, but, with time, they will adapt to the tremendous amount of practice. She is also not afraid to crush her children’s self-esteem if she has to. She rejected a mediocre birthday card made by her daughter and she is not afraid of humiliating her daughters in front of other people. In fact, by doing this, the children will take the insult in a positive way and improve from it.
In the other hand, David Brooks argues how Amy Chua’s parenting will traumatize and destroy her children’s social and creative skills.
She is depraving her kids from the most useful skills. “Her kids can’t possibly be happy or truly creative. They’ll grow up skilled and compliant but without audacity to be great.” A lot of these skills are learned in school plays, sleepovers, and play dates since during these activities you communicate with other people. Brooks believes understanding people’s points of view, having good social skills, interacting with other people, and working adequately in groups are important factors to achieve success and happiness. “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.” He criticizes Chua for not recognizing the value of working in groups and developing social skills. This is a clear difference to Amy Chua’s argument, which affirms intensive practice and being the best at certain areas that can be mastered such as piano, math, violin, etc. will achieve
excellence. According to Malcolm Gladwell, in order to have a good education and to be successful at something, a combination of practice, desire, and luck are the main key.
Unlike Amy Chua and David Brooks, Gladwell suggests that there is a logical explanation as why some of the most brilliant and remarkable people in history, such as The Beatles, Mozart, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs, achieved their success. In order to master anything you want to accomplish, there is a combination of practice and luck. Luck plays an indispensable role according to Gladwell “We pretend that success is a matter of individual merit. That is not the whole story. Their success was not their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up.” Gladwell believes that besides the desire, study and practice, in some cases there are a series of events and certain circumstances that leads to the success of some people. He gives Bill Gates as an example. Bill Gates outshined the brilliance and ambition of thousands of the programmers at his age, but, according to Gladwell, Bill Gates gained the success he has now due to certain circumstances. Besides his brilliance and ambition, he was exposed to software development at his early age. This gave him a better chance to become one of the most influential and richest people. Gates was presented with several opportunities that helped him gain thousands of hours of computer programming practice at an early age. Gates was one of the
few teenagers to be able to use one of the most advanced computers at this time: The ASR-33 Teletype. He had spent thousands of hours programming by the time he dropped out of Harvard. Gladwell and Chua agree in some things. They both believe that a massive amount of hours and study are an essential and effective method for a good education. Malcolm Gladwell discusses how there is this magical number “10,000 hours” or 20 hours a week of practice and dedication over ten years is one of the factors to achieve the excellence of a certain task. In like manner, Amy Chua believes “Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence.”
These authors demonstrated different points of view of what they believe is important in education. After studying some of the most successful people, Malcolm Gladwell came to the conclusion that there has to be a combination of desire, practice, luck, and in some cases a series of events that have to take place in order to be successful. Amy Chua believes that in order to raise successful kids, there has to be a lot of dedication and practice. Finally, David Brooks believes that social skills are as important as doing well academically. Everyone has their own points of view on education. Chua, Gladwell, and Brooks performed an excellent job demonstrating their different views and opinions in what they believe is most important in education.