The big elephant in the room today is stereotyping in its purist form. Why do we attempt to categorize our world into a handful of columns on a statistical spreadsheet? There are hundreds of cultures and languages each with their own nuisances and ideologies. Yes, there are many people from Asia that are good at math, but the Greeks and the Egyptians were the founders of modern algebra and geometry. Why do the people of Greece and Africa not carry the same stereotype as the Japanese? There is an agenda. Now, I am not one of those alarmist conspiracy theorist, but I can be the devils advocate from time to time. At the time when this article claims the stereotype of Asians being great at math emerges, it is a point in our history, the eighties, when the Japanese/ Asian culture becomes infused without the pop culture. I bet you can remember the clothes, songs, and cars. It wasn’t but two generations before that the federal government and Hollywood were pumping out anti-Japanese propaganda during WWII putting down the culture and putting them in a light of ignorant, buck-toothed robots, and we dropped two nukes on their island country just for good measure. Forty years after all this transgressed, the only thing that changed was that Japan and China became economic superpowers, and we needed to make nice with positive propaganda and pandering to save the bottom line.
Our federal government, through census and convenient statistics, create scenarios of falsehood all the time that are detrimental to populations because they have a self-absorbed agenda. I think it comes down to a blame game. If the Asians as a culture are a successful group of immigrants and have been given the same opportunities as all other immigration groups, then it is not the fault of the federal government for the failure of the minority group; it is the fault of minority groups and their culture in question that is not succeeding. In other words, if your culture is not succeeding in America, it is because you need to be more American or more Asian- more like us, less like you. How confusing is that? But there are all lies with a hidden agenda.
The truth is that it is poverty that is to blame. It is hard for a kid that is economically disadvantaged to get a break in this country. Our educational system claims that you can get by alone on merit, but that is only a myth. I wish census bureaus would spend more time telling us what we have in common with one another than telling us how we are different- tearing down walls, not building new ones.
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/22_02/math222.shtml
