> We should celebrate the Asian focus of intellectual excellence rather than punish them.
First, I’m going to remove the “Asian” aspect of your comment, because I don’t think the phenomenon you are speaking of is uniquely Asian.
Let me frame it slightly differently.
One group, let’s call them TestPreppers, are excellent at acing tests. Yes, these types of students are common is East Asia (e.g., due to the cram school culture), but they can be found other places as well (e.g., upper middle class communities in the US NE corridor regardless of race).
The second group, let’s call them ThinkersDoers, are really good at identifying interesting problems and doing constructive work on that problem. These folks tend to be smart, creative, and hard working. They exist is all races (including, but not limited to, Asians).
In an academic setting or some professions that have domain specific hard problems to work on, the TestPreppers are largely terrible to work with. Lots of hand holding. Lots of training. Outcomes are predictable but uninspiring. They are great grinders. That said, they will almost never contribute anything positive to your work group other than a willingness to do grunt work that others don’t want to do. Note that the doing the grunt work is valued, but finding grinders is not hard. The VAR (value above replacement — a sports stats term) is basically zero.
The ThinkersDoers, however, will provide unique insights about the problem space and will advance the team in unique and valuable ways. Their VAR is very high — these folks are so difficult to find at any level. These folks are incredibly fun to work with, and you are very sad when they leave the team.
I really wish that we, regardless of race, would encourage the development more ThinkersDoers rather than focus on the relatively mundane TestPreppers. Raising a TestPrepper (to the exclusion of anything else) just seems like a wasted opportunity to develop a ThinkerDoer who has the opportunity to move the needle much more substantially in any endeavor they choose to persue.