Dealing with pressure for high academic expectations: when cultures cross borders

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Stephanie Hagen

During our recent class on trends in comparative education policy, one of the students’ team school improvement presentations focused on the South Korean education system, the extremely heavy pressure it places on students to succeed academically, and approaches to reduce it. 
Following the presentation, the class had a lively discussion about how an education system may be able to mitigate this pressure when high expectations are already embedded so deeply in the society or culture.  
This reminded me of my own academic experience in the United States since I attended a school district in an extremely multi-cultural community. A majority of the students are of Asian descent and many of them are children of immigrants who have arrived from China, South Korea and India. As the demographics of the community have shifted, so has the school district's approach towards education. 
Many of these parents are demanding that the school board provide greater and more rigorous academic challenges for their children while traditional extracurricular such as sports teams may not be able to survive much longer due to lack of participation. The school board is pushing back, fearing that an extreme, singular focus on academics may prove to be emotionally too much for the children.  
This has caused quite a bit of tension between Asian-American parents and other parents as to how to best educate their children and the current situation was recently described in-depth in a New York Times article from last December. 
What is clear is that in this community, and in many increasingly multi-cultural communities across the country, finding a middle-ground in which students will be encouraged to succeed academically but not so much that they are pushed to their limits emotionally will be a challenge.  

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