Of Rice Paddies and Mathematics

For this week’s free write, I would like to return back to my book Outliers. Things for these past couple weeks have been quite interesting, and rather controversial.

Malcolm Gladwell discussed the reason why Asian students are so much better at math than Western students, simply due to cultural work mores. While I would argue that this problem relates to the drastic underfunding of our public schools compared to many of the developed Asian nations, Gladwell likes to believe that there is a correlation between these two cultural spheres that can be seen in our means harvesting agriculture. The Asian rice paddy, yielding crop only after a great amount of labor intensity, highlights the institutional hard work that Asian students possess. In contrast, the Western great wheat fields that brought about the invention and utilization of the great farmer plows, highlight that Western culture fosters an acceptance of the notion that we in this part of the world simply prefer to work smart and not hard. While there is some truth to this, I do believe that Gladwell is overgeneralizing, and drawing hasty generalizations, and making an excuse for the contemptible underfunding of our public school system.