Another excellent missive by my favorite columnist:
America outspends China on defense by a margin of more than six to one, the Pentagon estimates. [1] In another strategic dimension, though, China already holds a six-to-one advantage over the United States. Thirty-six million Chinese children study piano today, compared to only 6 million in the United States.[2] The numbers understate the difference, for musical study in China is more demanding.
It must be a conspiracy. Chinese parents are selling plasma-screen TVs to America, and saving their wages to buy their kids pianos - making American kids stupider and Chinese kids smarter. Watch out, Americans - a generation from now, your kid is going to fetch coffee for a Chinese boss. That is a bit of an exaggeration, of course - some of the bosses will be Indian.
While I would agree that kids get more out of a musical education than playing baseball, I would make one comment in disagreement. The kid who spends eight hours a day playing piano will have a top-rate mind but may have some severe social deficits.
One thing working at a big law firm (or any big company, I suspect) teaches you is that smart people are fairly easy to find. Lots of them out there, some smarter than others, that can do most jobs very well. To succeed in a service industry, however, the thing that separates the smart guys into "successful" and "unsuccessful" are social skills. The guy who played on a baseball team might be very good at socializing with clients, while the piano-playing kid might want to take up appellate work (ask a litigator if you don’t get the reference).
I’m not denigrating musical training or glorifying sports. Truth be told, I sucked at both when I was a kid. Exposure to both was a good idea, however, painful as it was. Unfair or not, those skills you learn on the golf course or at college frat parties can come in handy when you are in marketing mode.
While we shouldn’t necessarily accept these stereotypes, one could say that with respect to international business, Americans currently have a social edge on their Chinese counterparts. I expect that this gap is being narrowed quickly, but it wouldn’t hurt some parents over here to limit the kid to 6 hours a day on the piano and reserve two hours for basketball. They will profit from it some day.