Ivy League Skills?
Sigh… there’s an article in this Sunday’s NYT about “Elite Korean Schools, Forging Ivy League Skills.”
If you couldn’t guess from the headline, the article is about two schools in South Korea that send a lot of their students to Ivy League schools in the US. The article talks about how students from one of these schools score higher on the SAT than students from Phillips Exeter. And how American-educated teachers at these schools think that even their “worst students are great.” And?
The article makes it sound like a disproportionate number of students from these Korean high schools get in to Ivy League schools. What about legacy students who get in to places like Yale? What about class issues? (Both of the schools profiled are private.)
Sounds to me like one big article perpetuating the model minority myth. It makes these students sound like robots… they just study… and study.
And it’s not like youth in South Korea don’t have other skills that people should hear about… what about those 5 year old djs? or babies singing the beatles? or the youth in Planet B-Boy?
Last 5 posts by delia
- "Help! I need somebody!" - January 14th, 2010
- "I appreciate Asian beauty" - December 7th, 2009
- i am korean american - November 17th, 2009
- No thanks! - November 11th, 2009
- April is National Poetry Month!! - April 1st, 2009
so true. check out this 7-year-old korean baby b-boy whose head spins and windmills would put some contenders 3x his age to shame: http://youtube.com/watch?v=VZp-9VZX0Jo
(the b-boys in the background are from Korea’s Maximum crew) enjoy!