EUREKA!
Why East Asians do Well in Math
By Queena Lee-Chua
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 02:55:00 02/02/2009
Filed Under: Education, Science (general), Culture (general)
Why do East Asians—the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans—excel in mathematics? Hard work, stemming from the Confucian culture that perseverance pays off in the end, is a factor. Chinese-Filipino schools hold math classes twice a day, which means double the assignments, double the exposure, double the effort.
Rice Paddies
In his book “Outliers: The Story of Success”, business and science writer Malcolm Gladwell has a fascinating theory: East Asians work so hard because they come from a rice culture. Rice has a lot to do with math.
A rice paddy is one-fifteenth of an acre, about as big as a hotel room. A typical village of 1,500 people in China lives on 450 acres of land which is the size of a family farm in the American Midwest, supporting around six people.
Western agriculture centers on wheat and corn. Mechanically-inclined, farmers replace human labor with machines and strive to use better equipment, like threshers or tractors. Thus, Western farmers get more yield and till more land with the same amount of (or even less) effort.
But in China or Japan, there is little extra land and practically no money for equipment. And rice planting is very hard work.
Rice paddies are built, not opened up like wheat fields. Clearing and plowing are not enough—fields are carved into mountainsides in terraces, or constructed from river deltas.
A complicated set of dikes is built around the paddies to ensure the right amount of water. Seedlings are planted in carefully-engineered clay layers, with proper drainage and fertilization. Too much or too little fertilizer can ruin a harvest.
Farmers need to plant the right variety, painstakingly transplant seedlings, diligently weed beds, and promptly harvest at the proper time. “Rice dictated almost every working moment of every day,” Gladwell says. “Without rice, you don’t survive.”
Unlike the machine-oriented culture of the West, Chinese agriculture is skills-oriented. “If you are willing to weed a bit more diligently, and become more adept at fertilizing, and spend a bit more time monitoring water levels and do a better job keeping the claypan absolutely level, and make use of every square inch of your paddy, you’ll harvest a bigger crop,” Gladwell says. “Throughout history, not surprisingly, the people who grow rice have always worked harder than almost any other kind of farmer.”
Western Farming
Of course Western farmers work hard, too, don’t they? Gladwell tells us to think again. In the 18th century, European peasants worked from dawn to noon 200 days a year, around 1,200 hours of work annually. During harvest or planting, they worked more, and much less in the winter.
Historian Graham Robb says 99 percent of French country life took place between late spring and early autumn. In the Pyrenees and the Alps, villages rest from the first snow in November till March or April. In short, European farm life consisted of short episodes of work followed by long periods of rest.
Of course, rest is essential. Robb says, after harvest, “these vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and eat less food. They weaken themselves deliberately. Lowering the metabolic rate prevented hunger from exhausting supplies.”
But Gladwell says Chinese farmers did not sleep through the winter. They made bamboo baskets, repaired dikes, or rebuilt mud huts. They made tofu and caught snakes for food. When spring came, they were back in the fields.
“Working in a rice field is ten or twenty times more labor-intensive than working on an equivalent-size corn or wheat field,” he says. “Some estimates put the annual workload of a wet-rice farmer in Asia at three thousand hours a year.”
This is more than double the hours of Western farmers.
Questions:
- How is East Asian wet rice farming so different from Western corn and wheat farming?
- How do you think a “wet rice farming” mindset could benefit you?
- What was my point in having you read this article? What change am I encouraging?