In addition, where we are talking about a small place like a particular school, a winner-take-all effect can really skew how you think about this. How many of its students might actually have settled in the NY area to partake of its offerings? I simply don't know. A study which purports to connect Asian dominance to culture, but which does not account for this effect, is simply bogus. If there is something to this latter argument, then you can get huge differences in enrollment rates that have absolutely NOTHING to do with culture. The pool of applicants and the group we call immigrants are (endogenously) related. ĭo Asians dominate in conservatory admissions because of something cultural, or do the families of highly trained and potentially conservatory-bound middle and high school students in China and Korea emigrate here so that they can then partake of the music training possibilities.
There is also a huge endogeneity problem. If so, then there may be no cultural differences pertaining to investment in children, but only a taste for certain avenues over others.Īnd much of the discussion is overly laden with value judgments. It is quite possible that Asians have a taste for music and science, but not for business, history, literature and athletics.
But people are still not making the division betweenġ) Asians invest more in their children, orĢ) Asians push their children in particular directions I suspect there IS something to the cultural arguments, though as i have said I have not read the literature on the subject. The fact that many people here do not (or did not) even understand how different samples can bias the results suggests that most people have deep feelings, often motivated by personal experiences and even by simple bias, that they then rationalize as causal arguments. I can't tell you why Asian families and Asian-American families see things differently, but apparently they do.īut I can also tell you that my graduate student friends who are Asian, and are here going to school, are from a much higher socio-economic background than most Americans I know.Īll I am trying to argue is that much of what we are getting here is pop sociology devoid of any understanding of how one might try scientifically to disentangle all of the variables that affect success.
#ASIAN BOY PIANO PRODIGY PROFESSIONAL#
"Caucasian" Americans with the educational background, awareness of what it takes to excel in music, and financial means to provide an excellent teacher and high quality instrument(s), who live in the (almost universally) urban environment in which excellent teachers and other musical opportunities are found.will simply, very often, see other opportunities and have other goals for their children than being a professional musician. And all anthro grads joke (sometimes its not so funny) that an anthro degree is great for a job in which you ask, "You want fries with that?" My parents were horrified when I went to grad school for Anthropology. People who don't fit into one of these 2 categories tend to see piano as a 'life enrichment' activity but would not want their children to focus on music to the detriment of what's going to pay their bills in the future. There is still a perception that certain disciplines are only really viable for either people who are wealthy enough that they don't need the income, or people who love it enough that they are willing to live in a garret on bread and water to pursue their dream.
And, if the piano teachers in your town/area consider John Thompson book 4 to be 'advanced piano repertoire' it is impossible to imagine that *your* kid might have the talent it takes to play the stuff needed to get into a conservatory.ī)You have to believe it's worth doing. You must have some basis on which to be confident that you're not wasting your life and resources in pursuit of a ridiculous pipedream. This is one of the first things that those in urban and rural ghettos do not overcome. (speaking of which, can you imagine pushing your child from elementary school to work for hours a day to get in to law or medical school, if law or medical degrees carried the same guarantee of a job or financial rewards that a music degree does?)Ī) You must believe it is possible.
There are some things that both the parent and the child must believe, in order to pursue musical excellence.especially when you're discussing pursuing musical excellence to the point of a conservatory education and a possible career in music.
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