If you’re reading this, you’re probably going through the usual American education process: middle school, high school, university, grad school. Maybe you’ve been home-schooled, or you’ve studied overseas. Maybe one or both parents are from a different culture and have different ideas about what, how, and why you should study. But you probably haven’t grown up with the original tiger mother, or graduated from Harvard while blind and deaf, or grown up in rural Idaho with parents whose self-sufficiency crossed over to paranoia.
If you’re a student now, you might be comparing yourself to your peers, or thinking that your family doesn’t understand the pressures you’re facing, or putting intense pressure on yourself, or wondering how to stand out from other applicants to the programs you’re interested in.
These books, while they feature people and situations far outside the American mainstream, show how students and families evolve, shape their stories, and highlight what truly sets them apart.
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother: The original Tiger Mom
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother caused a cultural uproar in 2011 when The Wall Street Journal published an excerpt titled “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.” Author Amy Chua (who claimed that she hadn’t chosen that headline) is a second-generation Chinese woman, married to a Jewish man; both are professors at Yale Law School. Chua decided early on that she would raise her two daughters in the Chinese style: an A- is a bad grade; each child would practice either the piano or violin for at least three hours per day; no frivolous activities like TV, video games, sleepovers, or being in school plays; and no sugarcoating any negative feedback. Sophia, the older daughter, generally went along with the program, but younger daughter Lulu, starting at the age of three, fought against her mother even as she flourished as a student and violinist.
The book was written for adults, especially parents, but I taught Battle Hymn to sixth-grade students for many years. They loved it: Lulu’s rebelliousness, the mother-daughter and sister-sister dynamics, the fun of reading about someone else’s strict parents, and the clash between the family’s values and those of American culture. Throughout the book, Chua explains why she pressured her children as she did, which for students was like hearing a fairytale from the witch’s perspective. By the end of the book, the students came to appreciate how almost everyone perceives themselves as the hero of their own story. There were also a lot fewer complaints about homework.
The Story of My Life: Blind, deaf, and a Harvard graduate
Since I didn’t know much about Helen Keller besides “Blind and deaf; the feral brat from the play The Miracle Worker,” her autobiography The Story of My Life was a lovely surprise. The Miracle Worker does Keller a disservice: it covers just a few months of her life, when she was seven years old, and The Story of My Life makes it clear that Helen was a thoughtful, adventurous, social child long before that, and led an extraordinary life afterwards. As a student with a tremendous thirst for knowledge and experience, she learned from tutors, friends, and the Perkins School for the Blind (where she caused a scandal with her inadvertent plagiarism). She went to Harvard College, which had started accepting female students only about 20 years earlier, and became the first blind and deaf person in America to receive a bachelor’s degree. At each step, she had to devise new ways to communicate, record information, learn ideas, and speak or write her thoughts. The result is a wonderful memoir, published when Keller was only 22 and just graduated from college.
Educated: From off-the-grid to a PhD
In Educated, Tara Westover describes growing up in rural Idaho with a father who was so paranoid about public schools, doctors, and the government in general that all of his seven children were (minimally) homeschooled and had very little contact with anyone outside the family. Ever so slowly, thanks to a supportive grandmother and a few hard-won experiences outside the family, Westover became curious about outside perspectives, and managed to go to Brigham Young University solely on the strength of doing well on her ACT. There she experienced not just severe culture shock, but also discovered just how little she knew about history and the world at large. (Among other things, she had never heard of the Holocaust, Martin Luther King Jr., or Napoleon.) With the help of sympathetic professors, she managed to get a fellowship to study overseas at Cambridge University – more culture shock – and eventually a PhD in history.
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