No Tiger Mom in This Film

The Tiger Mom would be having none of this.

It was a touchy-feeling kind of introspective discussion Thursday night that broke out after a screening of the film Race to Nowhere: The Dark Side of America’s Achievement Culture at Haddonfield Memorial High School. The film looks at the stress placed on children for academic achievement, stress that can sometimes lead to dire consequences, such as suicide.

Amy Chua, a Yale law professor, recently released a memoir on parenting called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom, in which she challenges Western child-rearing habits of rewarding mediocrity. Her challenge seemed to resonate in the crowd of more than 300 who watched the film Thursday.

“I’m somewhere in between this and Tiger Mom,” said Lisa Keeley-Cain, a teacher who lives on Walnut Street in Haddonfield, as she stood next to her husband Thomas after the film. “It’s a very cultural thing. I see that with some of my children in Cherry Hill. They are very driven.”

Keeley-Cain, as an advanced placement math teacher and parent, is at the epicenter of the debate about academic achievement. She said the film has her thinking about the need for a heavy homework regiment for grade-school children. But when it comes to her class…

“My tests are hard,” she said. “They have to do a lot of critical thinking. Some of them, I’m sure are going through some of this, where they are staying up to all hours of night. But they really have to put the time in to understand it.”

Lauren Feldhake, of Warwick Road in the borough, rushed out of the screening just before it ended. Her son, Eric, stood nearby as she thought about the message of Race to Nowhere and how it might apply to her.

“Critical thinking is one of the things at work that a lot of people don’t do,” said Feldhake, 46, an executive with the PECO energy company in Philadelphia. 

Many subjects in the film believe students are focusing more on passing tests then critical or abstract thinking.

Richard Selznick, a school psychologist and author of The Shut-Down Learner: Helping Your Academically Discouraged Child, led a discussion among several dozen people after the film concluded.

But the conversations easily spilled out into the hallways, as well.

“The film was food for thought,” said Dalia Jacobowitz, 54, an editor from Haddonfield. “No homework works in countries that are doing better than us in math scores, but they are doing things there that we’re not doing here. They have longer school days and years. But this films gets people thinking about what success is. What do you want your life to look like and how can you start thinking about that now?"