Over the past few years, EBI Group has been involved in teaching and recruiting both Canadian and international students. What is striking is the huge variance in motivation between Canadian students and their parents ( We assume  the Canadian experience can be extrapolated to encompass Anglo-Saxon if not Western European experience) compared with the motivation of students from what use to be called the developing world. In one sense, this is a misnomer. The Asian, African and Latin American students we deal with come from wealthy families, many of them considerably wealthier than their Canadian counterparts. But even though their wealth may be greater, their hunger for education is also much greater. The sacrifices the parents make for their children so they will succeed is quite extraordinary.

For the baby boomer,  parents always stressed the importance of education and in particular a university education. They made sacrifices so today’s parents and grandparents could go to school but these sacrifices were nothing as compared to what the Asians, in particular, are prepared to do. Parents split up for months so that one child might succeed academically and not infrequently, legally as an immigrant.

To Canadian parents who are too frequently accused of being helicopter parents, they are appalled and can’t imagine making such similar sacrifices. At the same time, even though their child might be struggling in school, the problem doesn’t lie with the child who is invariably very smart but in the way the course is taught.  In our experience as a general rule , the Asian and African parent never claims that their child is smart. On the contrary, they worry he/she is too lazy even though the child is signed up to half a dozen extracurricular activities, including language, music and sports.

Obviously, this not a new or particularly insightful as it was much discussed when Amy Chua published her “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” in 2011. Furthermore, the Asian immigrants who fled Idi Amin’s Uganda in the 1970s and settled in the UK are now the most successful immigrant group in the UK. Similarly, the Chinese who set up restaurants across Canada after World War 2 have sons and daughters who are lawyers and doctors across this country. These examples demonstrate that motivation and the hunger to succeed can and will achieve results and break the social stratification that economists such as Thomas Piketty have identified as a core problem in modern society and a suggested cause for the political turmoil evident today.