[뉴욕타임스로 논술을 잡아라]The Model Students

■ 칼럼

Why are Asian-Americans so good * at school? Or, to put it another way, why is Xuan-Trang Ho so perfect?

Trang came to the United States in 1994 as an 11-year-old Vietnamese girl who spoke no English. Her parents, neither having more than a high school education, settled in Nebraska and found jobs as manual laborers.

The youngest of eight children, Trang learned English well enough that when she graduated from high school, she was valedictorian *. Now she is a senior at Nebraska Wesleyan with a 3.99 average, a member of the USA Today All-USA College Academic Team 1) and a new Rhodes Scholar 2).

Increasingly in America, stellar * academic achievement has an Asian face. In 2005, Asian-Americans averaged a combined math-verbal SAT of 1091 3), compared with 1068 for whites, 982 for American Indians, 922 for Hispanics and 864 for blacks. Forty-four percent of Asian-American students take calculus in high school, compared with 28 percent of all students.

Among whites, 2 percent score 750 or better in either the math or verbal SAT. Among Asian-Americans, 3 percent beat 750 in verbal, and 8 percent in math. Frankly, you sometimes feel at an intellectual disadvantage if your great-grandparents weren't peasants in an Asian village.

So I asked Trang why Asian-Americans do so well in school.

“I can't speak for all Asian-Americans,” Trang told me, “but for me and my friends, it was because of the sacrifices that our parents made. ... It's so difficult to see my parents get up at 5 each morning to go to factories to earn $6.30 an hour. I see that there is so much that I can do in America that my parents couldn't.”

Of course, not all Asian-Americans are so painfully perfect - Filipinos are among the largest groups of Asian-Americans and they do very well without being stellar. Success goes particularly to those whose ancestors came from the Confucian belt from Japan through Korea and China to Vietnam.

It's not just the immigrant mentality, for Japanese-American students are mostly fourth- and fifth-generation now, and they're still excelling. Nor is it just about family background, for Chinese-Americans who trace their origins to peasant villages also graduate summa *.

One theory percolating * among some geneticists is that in societies that were among the first with occupations that depended on brains, genetic selection 4) may have raised I.Q.'s slightly - a theory suggesting that maybe Asians are just smarter. But I'm skeptical, partly because so much depends on context *.

In the U.S. for example, ethnic Koreans are academic stars. But in Japan, ethnic Koreans languish * in an underclass, often doing poorly in schools and becoming involved in the yakuza mafia. One lesson may be that if you discriminate against a minority and repeatedly shove its members off the social escalator, then you create pathologies * of self-doubt that can become self-sustaining *.

So then why do Asian-Americans really succeed in school? Aside from immigrant optimism, I see two and a half reasons:

First, as Trang suggests, is the filial piety nurtured by Confucianism for 2,500 years. Teenagers rebel all over the world, but somehow Asian-American kids often manage both to exasperate * and to finish their homework. And Asian-American families may not always be warm and fuzzy*, but they tend to be intact * and focused on their children's getting ahead *.

Second, Confucianism encourages a reverence for education. In Chinese villages, you still sometimes see a monument to a young man who centuries ago passed the jinshi 5) exam - the Ming dynasty equivalent of getting a perfect SAT. In a Confucian culture, it is intuitive that the way to achieve glory and success is by working hard and getting A's.

Then there's the half-reason: American kids typically say in polls that the students who succeed in school are the “brains *.” Asian kids typically say that the A students are those who work hard. That means no Asian-American ever has an excuse for not becoming valedictorian.

“Anybody can be smart, can do great on standardized tests,” Trang explains. “But unless you work hard, you're not going to do well.”

If I'm right, the success of Asian-Americans is mostly about culture, and there's no way to transplant a culture. But there are lessons we can absorb, and maybe the easiest is that respect for education pays dividends. That can come, for example, in the form of higher teacher salaries, or greater public efforts to honor star students. While there are no magic bullets *, we would be fools not to try to learn some Asian lessons.

■ 돋보기

CNN의 로레인 한이 인터뷰에서 박지은 선수에게 미국여자프로골프협회(LPGA) 선수 10명 가운데 6명이 한국인인데 그 이유를 뭐라고 생각하느냐고 물었습니다. 박 선수는 “어느 정도 문화와 밀접한 관련이 있다. 한국인들은 아주 집중력이 높고 훈련을 잘 받았다. 간혹 부모님들이 너무 밀어붙이기도 하지만 딸들이 옆길로 새지 않고 오직 골프에 전념할 수 있도록 도와준다”고 대답했습니다.

아시아 유교권의 학생들이 다른 나라에서 온 학생들보다 미국에서 우수한 성적을 올리는 것은 유교적 문화와 가르침이 몸에 배 공부보다 훨씬 재미난 세상의 유혹을 이겨내기 때문입니다. 인내하고 근면 성실한 태도가 그들을 성공으로 이끈다고 할 수 있습니다. 실제로 공부 잘하는 학생들은 머리가 번쩍이기보다는 밖에 놀러나가고 싶은 충동을 억누르고 공부에 몰두하는 높은 집중력을 갖춘 경우가 많습니다.

유교의 폐단으로 사농공상으로 대표되는 신분사회, 가부장 의식, 혈연적 폐쇄성과 그로 인한 분열, 여성 차별을 부른 남성 우월의식, 스승의 권위 강조로 인한 창의성 말살이 지적됩니다. 그러나 서구의 지식인들은 한국 중국 일본의 놀라운 발전의 원인을 교육과 근면 성실을 최고의 가치로 생각하는 유교적 가치관에서 찾는 경향이 있습니다.

막스 베버는 ‘프로테스탄티즘의 윤리와 자본주의 정신’에서 근대자본주의가 개인적 이득 추구에 기초하고 있는 것이 아니라 일에 대한 엄격한 책임감을 갖는 프로테스탄티즘의 종교윤리에 기반을 두고 있다고 밝혔습니다. 유교 윤리와 동아시아 3국의 경제발전도 학자들 사이에서 끊임없이 논의되고 연구되는 주제입니다.

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