Absolutely clueless

I have friends who still work in journalism and some of them are a little miffed at the loss of respect their profession has seen in recent years. To be certain, no one ever liked journalists but now they are despised. At times I can feel a certain sympathy, no one likes to be despised after all.

But then I read a sentence like this in Today's Globe and Mail:

Vietnamese students fare better in Montreal than they do in Vancouver, but no one knows why.

Well, we may not know but let's try guessing. A lot of Vietnamese speak French as a second language. And we might also reasonably guess that the families who already speak French are more likely to pick Montreal than Vancouver. And, this is my third guess, just maybe learning in a language and a culture you already understand fairly well gives you a huge advantage over your compatriots in Vancouver who must learn a new language and culture before you can even begin to learn your school subjects.

Those are just some wild guesses.

It's the lack of curiosity that makes this kind of journalism so irritating. (The story is online here.) It begins with the shocking revelation that East Asian immigrants are doing much better in Canadian schools than Caribbean and Hispanic students are. The editors of The Globe and Mail apparently unaware that this variance has been part of the common culture for decades. There are racist jokes that trade on the superiority of these students: for example, the remark that for university students of Canadian descent, "sixpack" means six Vodka coolers while it means three maths and three sciences for students of east Asian descent.

This isn't news.

And then there is lack of courage. For no one wants to suggest that culture just might have something to do with it. We come right up to the edge of the problem:

In most countries, having a university educated father, as Ms. Estrella does, would make her academic success very likely. In Canada, though, parental education is not as good a predictor of academic outcomes among immigrant children as ethnic origin, according to Prof. Finnie and Prof. Mueller. That’s usually because the children of immigrants go on to postsecondary education at much higher rates than the children of the Canadian-born, even when their parents aren’t university educated.

And then we get this opinion:

One of the possibilities suggested by Prof. Gaztambide-Fernández is that Latino families may lack the cultural capital of other groups, the background, connections, community links and institutional knowledge built over generations, that ease the path for their children.

It's hard to see how these two claims can be true at the same time. I'm sure you can see the problem: if having a university-educated father isn't cultural capital, then what is?

Because to admit that cultural capital might not be the problem would require us to look at culture tout court and that would be to admit another one of those things that everyone knows but comes as a surprise to journalists: When it comes to culture, it matters a whole lot which culture! Some cultures mix better with western ideas of political freedom, personal autonomy and responsibility than others do. And anyone who isn't overly worried about political correctness can list the ones that work—East Asian, Cuban, European, Jewish—as well as the ones that don't work so well—former Eastern Bloc cultures, South American, African and Islamic.

So what do we do about it? I don't think selective shopping is the solution. Let me instead remind you of another culture that mixed very well with western ideas of political freedom, personal autonomy and responsibility: protestantism! I mean the kind that came to the thirteen colonies. It didn't just mix well with these ideas, it was east-coast Protestant Christianity that brought all those ideas together in the form that everyone else in the world came to recognize as the best way of living.

Do you know what is weird about our attitudes towards that group? This: anyone who landed from Mars and read the books, magazine articles and saw the popular entertainment produced that refers to that cultural group would think they were one of the big failures in the history of humanity.

Here in Ontario, where I am an immigrant of sorts myself, people talk about the people who made the economy and political system that make this one of the safest, most orderly and prosperous places in the entire world as if their era was one of endless failure from which we were all saved by multiculturalism. But really, if you want people from cultures that don't quite get western ideas of political freedom, personal autonomy and responsibility to figure it out, you have to give them something reasonable to emulate.

No doubt that makes me worse than a Nazi but there you are.