RedTracker| This week’s TIME magazine puts Tiger Mom Amy Chua’s condemnation of America’s parenting styles within the larger context of America’s growing “China complex”.

Writer Annie Murphy Paul references President Obama’s acknowledgement that America has arrived at a “Sputnik moment” and the growing awareness that another country is pulling ahead in a global contests we assumed was ours permanently.

At AOC, we argue that America’s sense of being the center of God’s “divine right mission” for the world has caused us to become myopic and focused on the promise of religious ideology, rather than progress in science and new ideas.

Coupled with liberal elite parents who believe their children are flawless copies of themselves and entitled to the best of everything in life because … well because … we are hard pressed to understand how America will compete in the future.

Our problem goes far beyond jobs that are outsourced to cheaper labor countries. America’s children spend more time in front of the TV than in the classroom.

The top corporate leaders in the US tell the business media that they will be creating jobs and hiring in other countries because America’s kids can’t cut it. Why don’t we listen to these business leaders?

American Kids Aren’t Inherently More Gifted

TIME’s Paul reminds readers that much research supports Amy Chua’s argument that American parents do children no favors by praising every little dittie out of a kid’s mouth as “gifted” and “extraordinary”.

Research at Stanford by Carol Dweck says that some kids (a minority) who are complimented constantly on their intelligence will turn down tasks that require them to learn. They don’t want to expose the truth about themselves.

Hara Estroff Marano, editor-at-large for Psychology Today and author of A Nation of Wimps, counsels:

“Kids who have this well-earned sense of mastery are more optimistic and decisive; they’ve learned that they’re capable of overcoming adversity and achieving goals.” Children who have never had to test their abilities, says Marano, grow into “emotionally brittle” young adults who are more vulnerable to anxiety and depression.

Rote Learning and Creative Thinking

Research also supports Amy Chua’s insistence that rote practice is good for kids. The brain eventually changes, so that the tasks — playing the piano chords, for example — occur automatically.

Once this happens, the brain has made mental space for higher-order operations: for interpreting literary works, say, and not simply decoding their words; for exploring the emotional content of a piece of music, and not just playing the notes. Brain scans of experimental subjects who are asked to execute a sequence of movements, for example, show that as the sequence is repeated, the parts of the brain associated with motor skills become less active, allowing brain activity to shift to the areas associated with higher-level thinking and reflection.

Can Bravura and Confidence Carry America?

What is undeniable at this time in America is that educationally, we are not competing well against kids in other countries. The inevitable “don’t worry, test scores aren’t important” headline follows the next day, advising American’s not to sweat the statistics.

American kids rank #1 in confidence, say the divine-right pundits, and that counts more than anything else.

We disagree with that thinking here at AOC. I worked years in Asia and am intimately familiar with the differences in expectations of kids here and there.

Living in New York, I’ve watched Asian families arrive in the US, working around the clock in small grocery stores, sleeping in the back room, all for the sake of their children, who are expected to excel academically in return.

Hyper-Parenting

It’s not clear that the majority of American parents expect excellence from their children.

Perhaps the news stories of parents rejecting a B on their kids report cards as evidence of teacher fault, or physically attacking the coach for taking a poorly-performing kid out of a hockey game just make better reading. Perhaps American parents aren’t as out of control as the media reports suggest.

It is absolutely true that major corporations are contacting parents explaining that they cannot come with their kids to job interviews, and ‘no’ they can’t complain to human resources or file an EEOC complaint if their child isn’t hired. This trend I know to be real.

To underscore just how off balance we have become in America, a leading spokesperson for the NRA suggested this week that American kids be required to take a course in how to handle a gun, when they are in high school.

Listening to him on Parker-Spitzer, I was astonished.

In God We Trust

Our math and science scores are deplorable globally, and we’re throwing out art programs that are clearly demonstrated to improve education scores in unrelated subjects because we lack the funding. What is our solution to the crisis?

The ideology kings of America are focused on spending precious financial resources teaching our kids how to shoot straight.

Perhaps we deserve to get trounced by the Chinese or the Brazilians or the India. Perhaps America won’t become the #2 country in the world. How soon before we are #3 or #4?

Ok, ok. I know . . it can’t happen. God will prevail on behalf of the United States of America. Jesus will protect his flock from losing the top spot. Prayer is the answer.

While I agree that prayer and spirituality are an important focus in our lives, it’s doubtful that God will be riding in on his stallion, Tombstone, Arizona style, to save us from ourselves any time soon.

What if God is a bigger task master than Amy Chua? What then my fellow Americans?

More reading: