JAY AMBROSE: Hard work

Vast differences exist between American, Chinese students

An old acquaintance of mine who regularly rented out a room to students once welcomed a young Chinese man as her scholarly guest and was stunned by his work ethic.

He studied, refusing to turn his lights off more than a few hours a night because he could not study in the dark. He spoke freely of the grades he made — straight A's — as well as his attitude toward American students: Contempt. He found them lazy leisure lovers who abused the privilege of higher education, if I correctly recall a summation that came back to me when reading a recent piece in The Wall Street Journal.

It was by Amy Chua, a Yale professor who pointed to rules for her two daughters in explaining why it is that Chinese families so often include "math whizzes" and "music prodigies." She allows no sleepovers, TV, computer games or personal choice of extracurricular activities. For piano and violin, she requires three hours of daily practice.

Western parents don't operate that way, she said, noting that in surveys they worried that emphasizing academic success is too stressful on their children.

I could not escape the fleeting thought that, sure enough, China wins, a view that seemed confirmed by charts in a nearby story. They showed results of International Student Assessment tests for 15-year-olds. Shanghai, China comes in first in reading, the United States 17th. In science, Shanghai is first, the United States 23rd. Then we get to math. Shanghai is still number one, while the United States rounds the bend slowly, coming in 31st.

Too many American schools consider competition a bad thing. It's not. It motivates. Practice matters.

Our youngsters too often skip the practice but get more hours than that having their brain cells eviscerated by television shows. I believe in preachments about self-reliance, self-discipline and the importance of school.

Regimentation may be the Chinese way, it is not ours, and I also endorse the ideas of Anthony Esolen, which I found on the Internet. He is a professor of English at Providence College and has written about ways to destroy the imagination of children, such as by not getting them outdoors often enough. Creativity flows from the imagination and imagination flows from using it.

My guess is that we are more creative than the Chinese, although we may be slipping. I know we play by the rules more than they do. I don't really suppose that winning and losing per se is what life is all about, although we'll surely regret it if we turn lazy and quit striving for excellence.