I didn’t mean “teamwork” in school setting. School, thankfully, is only 10-15 years in someone’s life. I meant the workplace, where “teamwork” is praised on resume but in practice means that for every diligent scapegoat who does the work there are 5 “teammates” who slack and do lip service, plus a manager who takes the credit.

And that lasts many, many years longer than hateful time in class.

Also, I wasn’t contrasting mindless tyranny, in the form of a football coach “teaching” history, against enlightened leadership, in the form of an enthusiastic and knowledgeable teacher at the head of an interested class. The enthusiastic and knowledgeable teacher is a better teacher — but not because he doesn’t enforce any rules when they’re broken. In another context, say, in front of an inner-city class or a suburban special-needs class, his “superior” skills would be useless, because the kids would rather talk over him than learn “valuable” lessons about other times and places. What’s best for the gifted kids is not what’s best for everyone. In a mixed class, that enthusiastic and knowledgeable teacher might need to become a disciplinarian just to get the chance to share his enthusiasm and knowledge with the gifted and normal kids.

Lastly, I don’t think there’s a bright-line distinction between asking someone to substitute for your own short-term discipline and doing as you’re told, when we’re discussing children. It’s fuzzy enough with adults, who resent being told what to do even when they know they need it, but kids certainly lack long-term perspective, and most of us are quite glad we were forced to do some things we didn’t like at the time. Chua may have gone too far in her piano lesson contest of wills, but many of us fought doing something good for us as kids, and then grew up to be quite thankful that Mom and Dad didn’t let us quit when the going got tough.

1. You say: We’ll have agree to disagree if you sincerely feel that most teachers and parents are petty tyrants first and anything else second.

I’m actually (unsurprisingly) arguing a more radical position. On average, in the moment, most people don’t know and don’t care why they are doing something. Since status concerns dominate the monkey-brain, status concerns will also dominate most authority relations, and even more importantly, folks exercising authority will not be aware of when they are acting for status reasons.

2. You say: A classroom without an authoritative teacher is not guaranteed to settle into blissful left-anarchy. Perhaps the AP Computer Science class might, but a typical 8th-grade homeroom could easily descend into Lord of the Flies.

Most effective classroom learning I experienced did not occur in the classes of the disciplinarian football coaches who were incidentally teaching history. Rather, the more effective learnings were the ones where the teacher got excited about a topic and drew others down the road to the teacher’s excitement. Did the football coaches do better learning than the hippies? Not convinced.

3. There’s a huge difference between asking someone to substitute for your own short-term discipline and doing as you’re told.

My own archetypal memory is when my eldest daughter, then perhaps eight years old, came home with her first Maryland standardized test scores, showing that she was at the 99th percentile in reading and the 93rd percentile in math. Her mother’s first words — the very first — were “What’s wrong with the math?”

Both children turned out great and love their mother dearly.

His more serious point is that Chua’s daughters have much more than strict parenting going for them:

Maternal grandfather: EE and computer sciences professor at Berkeley, known as the father of nonlinear circuit theory and cellular neural networks.

Mother: able to get into Harvard (a much better indicator of her IQ than the magna cum laude in economics that she got there); Executive Editor of the Law Review at Harvard Law School.

Father: Summa cum laude from Princeton and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, now a chaired professor at Yale Law School.

Guess what. Amy Chua has really smart kids. They would be really smart if she had put them up for adoption at birth with the squishiest postmodern parents. They would not have turned out exactly the same under their softer tutelage, but they would probably be getting into Harvard and Princeton as well. Similarly, if Amy Chua had adopted two children at birth who turned out to have measured childhood IQs at the 20th percentile, she would have struggled to get them through high school, no matter how fiercely she battled for them.

Accepting both truths — parenting does matter, but genes constrain possibilities — seems peculiarly hard for some parents and almost every policymaker to accept.

Razib Khan makes a similar point.

I totally agree that instead of going all Chinese, Chua could have fused the strong points of both cultures to raise children who would be highly skilled and innately capable of highly adaptable teamwork. In fact, as I understand it, the actual book ends up supporting that position, but the contentious excerpt made for a better article and much more chatter. (Your point is extremely generalizable, by the way. People seem to desperately want to argue A vs. B, when they should be asking, what elements of A are good, what elements of B are good, and how can I combine them?)

Anyway, all of us here are autodidacts, but there’s a world of difference between deciding, as a self-motivated and intelligent individual, to take responsibility for one’s own education, and deciding, as an unmotivated dullard, to do “the same thing” — because in the latter case it won’t involve coming up with new software testing methodologies. It’ll involve flipping through channels or making it to the next level of Call of Duty.

Now, a school system that doesn’t recognize any other paths than Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, Pre-Calc… College! is failing most of the population, since their destinies do not lie in engineering, but taking responsibility for their own education shouldn’t mean dropping out of school and devising their own practical curriculum from scratch, either. Some people succeed wildly doing just that, but only a handful.

As for teamwork, I think it’s invaluable, but I’ve also had plenty of experiences — particularly in the artificial environment of school projects — where it devolved into one competent and devoted “A” student doing all the work, while the rest of the “team” paid lip service to shared goals. What Shannon Love was discussing though was not the artificial environment of school projects but the fairly American tendency to build ad hoc groups for anything and everything, and to immediately get to work solving the problem, without waiting for a formal definition of everyone’s role.

Part of that is the same kind of teamwork other cohesive groups demonstrate, but part of it is initiative, which Americans value tremendously. Oddly, our school system does not seem to value initiative tremendously, but we do value speaking up, offering our own opinions, etc. more than most anyone else.

A classroom without an authoritative teacher is not guaranteed to settle into blissful left-anarchy. Perhaps the AP Computer Science class might, but a typical 8th-grade homeroom could easily descend into Lord of the Flies — and the nice kids would embrace a strong leader who could restore order.

Even a fairly benign group of adults taking, say, a martial arts class will want an authority to say, practice this move and do it 20 times — and you’re not working hard enough! People who, by all reasonable measures, are mature, intelligent, and motivated can still benefit from an authority pushing them to do things they don’t, at that moment, want to do.

Most children lack an inner kung fu panda. The whole cult of turning every child into some sort of self-actualized entrepreneurial wunderkind founders on the same rocks that every libertarian scheme founders on: most people are proles who barely qualify to be even an obedient factory worker. They not only are proles but want to be proles. They will happily trade the stiff drink of liberty for the false syrupy flavor of peonage with not only enthusiasm but relief. The best you can hope for is encouraging the emergence of a kung fu panda now and then to cull the ranks of the proles.

American education at home and at work has many flaws. Favoring the production of bystanders over kung fu pandas is not one of them.