Jim Spiegel Struggle For Smarts Summary

The general argument made by Alix Spiegel in her work, “Struggle for Smarts? How Eastern and Western Cultures Tackle Learning”, is people from the West believe that some are just born smart, but people from the East believe that hard work and practice is what helps them achieve their goals. People from different areas have different opinions on what being smart means and how they become smart. Just because one place thinks something and a different place thinks something else does not mean that either one is wrong. It just depends on where the person is. In her article, Jim Spigler says, “We did a study many years ago with first-grade students. We decided to go out and give the students an impossible math problem to work on, and then we would measure how long they worked on it before they gave
The American students worked on it less than 30 seconds on average and then they basically looked at us and said ‘We haven’t has this.’ But the Japanese worked for the entire hour on the impossible problem.” In this passage, Spiegel is suggesting that each place has different ways of learning and solving problems. She writes, “But the kid didn’t break into tears. Stigler says the child continued to draw his cube with equanimity.” By writing this, she is saying that people from the East tend to not give up on what they are trying to do, but in the West, people rely on being taught everything and when given problems that they were not taught, they just give up. Li records a conversation between and American mother and her son and a Taiwanese mother and her children. It is easy to see the difference between the two. The American mother talks about books and how they make you smart and the Taiwanese mother tells her son after he won first place in a competition that he only won due to his dedication. In my view, Spiegel is right because depending on where a person grows up will depend on