Spellbound

The Lord of Truth tells me what I can expect from my kids someday...

When an Indian-American 13-year-old won the Scripps National Spelling Bee last week -- the fifth time in seven years in which a child from that ethnic group has won this stirringly absurd contest -- my first reaction, naturally, was to ask why such a striking pattern of success has emerged. (Indians are 0.66% of the U.S. population.)

...There are certain cultures -- particularly Asian ones -- that produce child prodigies. Relentless parents, goading their children to success at the youngest possible age, are but one explanation. These are all cultures in which, traditionally, children have begun work early, in which childhood as we know it in the West is an alien idea. Indian kids are potty-trained by two. In America, that would be regarded as precocious. Pressure is brought to bear much later on purely American children than on those kids whose parents persist in old-world child-rearing ways long after they immigrate to America.

And here, perhaps, is the last piece in the Indian-American spelling-bee jigsaw. Educationally, Indian-Americans are the cream of the crop of a fifth of humanity, thanks to U.S. immigration laws, which, for decades, let in only doctors and engineers and mathematicians. So these children are the kids of parents who themselves competed -- probably at a ferocious level -- to get into the best Indian schools, and then to get here.

I won't say a word about pushy parents -- I like to think of it as well-motivated kids. Of course, if my kids end up anything like their old man, they'll choke at the end on an easy word and win the consolation prize, which will be a book about the spelling bee or the home version of the game on CD.