Cognitive Difficulty

David Brooks comments on Amy Chua's piece about Chinese arenting, blogged about here. Excerpts, emphasis mine:

"I have the opposite problem with Chua. I believe she’s coddling her children. She’s protecting them from the most intellectually demanding activities because she doesn’t understand what’s cognitively difficult and what isn’t."

"Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group — these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale."

"Chua would do better to see the classroom as a cognitive break from the truly arduous tests of childhood. Where do they learn how to manage people? Where do they learn to construct and manipulate metaphors? Where do they learn to perceive details of a scene the way a hunter reads a landscape? Where do they learn how to detect their own shortcomings? Where do they learn how to put themselves in others’ minds and anticipate others’ reactions?"

The other day I went to a Business school session where they "taught" us how to network. Tw0 minute elevator pitches and other formalizations were emphasized. I saw students nervously trying to remember their pre-planned pitches when approaching recruiters at the career fair. What's next, teaching 12 year olds "proper" etiquette at a sleep over? So much of social interaction is spontaneous, unconscious, and the skills are only developed by doing it. A person's integrity, curiousness, and empathy are revealed through inadvertent measures; they cannot be hidden, no matter how great one's two minute pitch is.

Bottom Line: Brooks thinks by forcing her kids to practice math problems instead of having sleepovers with their friends, Amy Chua has good intentions--she is just misguided. To be sure, math problems are tremendously important, but Brooks suggests they are not as important--or as cognitively difficult--as a sleepover with 14 year old girls. If parents want their kids to be successful, they would do well to encourage their kids to do their math problems and then go to their sleepovers.