These are all stories from the world that no longer exists. These “tiger” parents are preparing their children for a long-gone economy. I don’t care if they are Chinese, American, or Alpha Centauri. They are behind the times. They have already lost.
The world that currently exists requires internal motivation. The disciplinarian society is gone. We can debate if that’s good or bad but the fact is, it’s now an anachronism. These tiger moms are chasing a dead dragon.
Everything today is about inner motivation. You have to have the fire inside for whatever it is you do. There’s no demand for obedient, quiet drones. You need to have a very strong sense of self. We are in the economy of selfhood.
I spent all evening yesterday telling my kid to be done with the studying already and just go and play. She refused and at bedtime showed me a timesheet of her own design where she recorded how much time she had spent on each field of study. This is not assigned at school. I have never asked her to do this. I have never asked her to study at all. I’m not doing anything to foster it. But I do intuitively know how to raise for inner motivation. You do it by pursuing the exact opposite strategy from tiger-momming.
We live in an extremely permissive, self-indulgent society. Maybe I wish it were less so. But it won’t be. The boundary between happiness and unhappiness in such a society lies inside everybody individually. You need to build an inner caparace for your fire and police its boundaries maniacally in order not to spill like a puddle of grey misery. Everybody will have to do it for themselves or they are majorly screwed. As a parent, you need to foster inner strength, not break it.
Clarissa's Blog 
Wait wait wait.
I need to know more about those SAT scores. Have they changed the test since I took it in… 1998? Is the scoring different now? Are these overall average scores? Average scores for people applying to college?
Those numbers seem really, really low. Like, I’m not sure I know anybody who took the test *at all* who scored that low. What am I missing?
-ethyl
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The national average is in the absolute toilet. And going down for reasons we all know. There’s constant fussing with the test to make the drop less evident.
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Yeah, but that’s still an average of people who took the test which chops off the bottom of the distribution. Nobody is giving the SAT to high school dropouts, kids with Downs syndrome, or students who couldn’t pass Algebra I… are they?
1000-1200 is barely literate?
If we’re taking those scores as at least a little above average… that’s alarming.
-ethyl
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They might really not be sending their best. 😆😆
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Yeah, but….
1029 is a gamed average? Meaning, the average high school grad planning some kind of further education… probably can’t understand legal documents, meaningfully read any literature written before 1950, comprehend the terms of a lease or loan without assistance, or read and understand a scientific study?
That’s where we are? For real?
This explains so much.
But also: (despair)
-ethyl
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As a person who teaches average school grads, I’m not surprised. Based on the results, the entire system of secondary education can be scrapped today with no adverse effect.
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Its not just the national average. It’s pretty clear in SA that Trump/Putin/Xi are all morons compared to Smuts, so the question is how to deal with this era of weak politicians.
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What’s smuts?
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Jan Smuts, great Boer politician, great South Afeican, Great enviromentalist, outdoorsman, and mountaineer. Actually has a mountain named after him on the edge of Banff, near where we loved fishing and camping ;-D
https://giantsgate.com/destinations/mount-smuts/
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African ;-D
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This year is the hundredth anniversary of Smuts’s invention of the word and concept of holism.
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OK, thank you. I was reading about the Elijah Schaefer scandal and that warped by mind.
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LOL, be afraid, be very afraid ;-D
https://newrepublic.com/article/79470/1895-8th-grade-final-exam-i-couldnt-pass-it-could-you
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There have been changes in the test, but the average scores aren’t wildly different from 20 or 50 years ago.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_135.asp
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In SA, for the top source of tourists, the UK has replaced the US. Must be that end of history and new world order thing.
https://www.capetownetc.com/things-to-do-cape-town/travel/uk-beats-the-us-as-sas-largest-source-of-international-visitors-in-2025/
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The other thing is realizing that your time is over and conceding for the greater good.
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/?dm_source=masthead-logo&dm_medium=link&dm_campaign=keep
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It’s worth noting that all of this effort is directed toward one goal: college admissions. Not intellectual growth, not creativity, not real skill development. Just optimizing for acceptance letters. As college credentialism weakens and admissions gatekeeping loses its force, this mode of upbringing will do little to prepare kids for the future.
But, in the short term, it’ll still work. A Harvard degree still means something. And it’ll continue to mean something for the foreseeable future. Industries like tech will be the first to abandon credentialism, but other sectors (government, jobs in the state department, law, medicine, etc.) will continue to rely on this mechanism. CIA still hires out of Yale, not Michigan State.
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How do you raise your child to foster inner strength?
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By not breaking it. I let her win. The time to start giving agency is very early. Obviously, in little portions but always a bit more than you are comfortable with.
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She’s been dressing herself since 4. I don’t participate in that in any way. I don’t do the standard Soviet “don’t forget your hat! Put on warm pants! Where are your gloves?” She’s got to figure all this out herself. And age does. I don’t have any knowledge of her homework or grades. It’s not my area of responsibility.
I remember once a colleague told me that her 17-year-old daughter told her at 11 pm that she had promised to bring muffins to school the next day. The mother spent the whole night driving around trying to find ingredients and then baking the muffins. That behavior is exotic to me. When the daughter went off to college, I’d see the mother in the hallway every other day trying to talk her down on the phone from some fresh crisis.
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These students get to be at the front of the line for college admissions.
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This is one of the things I voted nay yesterday. Giving college credit for out of the class “experiences” to promote diversity. It passed because everybody else was in favor.
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