If both parents/cultures have strong influences on the children, then I’d strongly agree with your assessment. I think this advantageous synthesis goes far beyond kids who are literally mixed-race though; consider the explosion of interest in Asian cultures among young whites, the increasing cultural exposure due to mutual interest in video games etc.

The progressive movement at this same time demanded that most children stop working, except for farms and small family businesses, and go to schools designed in the 19th century factory style, which we still have today.

It is clear that this philosophy, and this school design, has run its course, and is now more detrimental than positive in its effects.

Educational philosophies and trends has seesawed back and forth betweem less rigorous and more structured, between open and relaxed to disciplined and uniformed, and recently, again, between coed and single sex.

The current educational system is in chronic and persistent crisis not, as the ed professionals relentlessly insist, because of lack of money, but because of the collapse of most all of the vaunted educatinal innovations and philosophies that were supposed to make up for any differences in culture or family or ecoomic status.

Instead, what the past several decades have actually proven to any not in thrall to the ideology of the educational elite is that it is family and culture which are fundamentally crucial to school success, and, furthermore, that the current system is both badly designed in its structure, and obselete in its inability to accomodate the realities many of its students face both in their homes and society at large.

Education, like so many other ares of life, must be reclaimed from the experts, who have in many ways caused more damage than positive effects, and turned back to families and communities who are intimately involcved and concerned with the students as individuals. That community, by the way, includes classroom teachers, for whom I have the greatest respect and admiration, but excludes administrative/academic educational bureaucrats, who are all too often more concerned with ideology than children.

It will not be possible for those already heavily invested in a failed educational model to provide the innovative leadership required to solve the many definciencies curently plaguing our schools.

Well, that certainly sounds familiar to some of us regular commenters. And, by encouragement, I think you mean,”you sit there and do your homework until you are finished, no, quit whining, why do you think we came to this country?”

I kid, I kid, because I love….

American culture is wonderfully independent and creative, though, and street smarts are certainly part of that wonderfulness. It’s tough to beat street smarts. The best is if you can try and take advantage of the, well, best of both cultures.

Stalin, Hitler, Mao all were street-smart. They also wrote books that were praised by book-smart people (which proves that some book-smart people got street-smarts).

I think teachers invented IQ tests to justify being bad teachers. “Of course that school is better. The kids have high IQs”.

Any one who has watched street-smart kids settle the check at a cafe among 10 kids knows these low IQ kids can do math even though they be flunking math in school.