A Grueling Admissions Test Highlights a Racial Divide
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Man. I hated those fucking test prep classes as a kid. Hated the stack of practice exam books that, if stacked upon one another, would be taller than me. Hated practicing piano and clarinet and violin. Hated Kumon. Hated the red welts across my palms inflicted by my dad's ruler when I screwed up a problem set. Hated being made to feel like scum when coming home with a B+. These are the ginormous buttocks of racial stereotype jokes and I'll laugh as loud as the next guy at 'em... now. But back then? It made my stomach churn and made me want to vomit and run away from home. If I had a choice, I would've quit a million times over because I'm a lazy idiot at heart. Luckily, I was born into a disciplined family, so I didn't have that choice to quit. And so my "reward" was getting into good schools that summarily led to better schools and good jobs and a comfortable living monetary wise. I wasn't especially smart. I definitely wasn't driven. At least not innately. What I've achieved was not through genetic intellect but rather through the sheer fear of failure and disappointment and my dad's ruler.
Those civil rights yahoos in that Times piece have good intentions, I know. They want to get more poor-but-aspirational blacks and Hispanics in. Gussy up the diversification pie chart. But it's myopic because it will be at the expense of the poor Asian kids that are getting their ass beat and their social skills severely stunted in the service of getting into a top school at any cost. I don't even want to imagine where I'd be if, after all that abuse as a kid, I got denied just because my skin's yellow and my hair's black and there's just too many of us so it's thus "unfair" even though I aced everything in sight. Objectively, subjecting kids to these grueling prep routines is probably too extreme. Even for parents, too -- some of whom work extra jobs and feed their family lean meals just to afford the most elite prep classes. But if this is how it is, there's gotta be just desserts on the other side. Otherwise it's meritocracy thrown out the window in the name of faux diversification (because let's face it, we'll self segregate into cliques anyway) and serious psychological trauma for the unlucky.
Fixing or tweaking the system ain't gonna work either, cuz Asians are masters at gaming any system you put in front of us. Okay, so it's no longer a test? You need teacher recommendations and extracurriculars? No problem. Check your mail for red envelopes, Mr. Dumbledore. Meanwhile, I'll be up at 5am to practice tennis or swimming or to volunteer at a soup kitchen. You know this is true because this is how so many of us get into the Ivys and UCs and top liberal arts. We'll even outwork you in well-roundedness.
But here's the funny thing. All this seemingly cruel and unusual punishment and demented will to beat the system yields the following: an ability to take pain for a nebulous goal, i.e. deferring instant gratification for potentially greater satisfaction down the road. That abstract concept is actually highly correlated to success -- just Google 'Stanford marshmallow experiment'. That is exactly what gets bred into kids who are consistently being forced to do something against their immediate will. We're used to thinking something like, okay, here are my choices: 1 hour of TV later if I do 100 problems now. Or sneak 1 hour of TV now, get caught, forced to do 100 problems anyway, and go to bed with a few welts to boot. Pretty much a no brainer. And the icing on the cake is all that studying collates into reams and reams of raw knowledge that blossom into unexpected usefulness during the course of adulthood.
I recognize this may be a big elaborate argument to justify my own circumstance in life and the path I was forced to travel. But anyway, the moral of this obscenely long post1 is affirmative action, specifically in education, sucks. Also, you should learn Mandarin because we're eventually taking over the world.
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1This originally started as a Facebook wall post gone amok, so please pardon any poor spelling, mixed metaphors, and sloppy structuring! (Yes, I am too lazy to revise this. See: 'lazy idiot' declaration in paragraph one.)