It is fitting that Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, the Yale law professor Amy Chua’s defence of the “Chinese” style of child-rearing, should have arrived in bookstores just as Hu Jintao, China’s president, was arriving in Washington. The US champions democratic capitalism, but Mr Hu’s more authoritarian variant has produced higher growth and left him in command of trillions of dollars of American debt. The US educational culture is built around boosting children’s self-esteem, but Ms Chua argues that “the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish, and shame the child”, as her immigrant parents did her. She once rejected a card from her own daughter reading, “I love you! Happy Birthday to the Best Mommy in the World!”, calling it “not good enough”. That daughter gets straight A’s and gave a piano concert in Carnegie Hall in her early teens. Mr Hu and Ms Chua are two faces of the same anxiety. Each argues for a system that Americans once considered repugnant, ineffective and anachronistic, but now seems to be yielding better results than their own.
耶鲁大学(Yale)法学院教授蔡美儿(Amy Chua)在《虎妈妈的战歌》(Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,中文版书名为《我在美国做妈妈:耶鲁法学院教授的育儿经》)中为中式育儿经辩护,该书刚好在manbetx3.0 国家主席胡锦涛抵达华盛顿之时上架销售,时机再恰当不过。美国推崇的是民主资本主义,但manbetx3.0 更加专制的资本主义模式创造出了更高速的manbetx20客户端下载 增长,并让胡主席掌控了数万亿美元的美国国债。美国的教育文化是围绕着如何增强孩子自尊心展开的,但蔡美儿认为“成绩不佳的解决办法就是严厉斥责和惩罚孩子,让孩子感到羞愧”,她的父母就是这么对待她的,他们都是华裔移民。有一次,她拒绝接受女儿送给自己的生日贺卡,上面写着“我爱你!祝世界上最好的妈妈生日快乐!”,说卡片“做得不够好”。也正是这个女儿,学校功课门门都拿A,而且十来岁就在卡耐基音乐厅举办了钢琴演奏会。胡锦涛和蔡美儿是同一种焦虑心理的两种面孔。他们所提倡的那种体制曾经被美国人斥为令人反感的、效率低下的、落伍的,但现在这种体制所创造的成绩似乎要比美国自己的体制更好。