Can anyone see this sentence coming out of the New York Times for any other ethnic group? It's like studying geometry has the whiff of something suspicious to it.
Jokes aside, there are dichotomic interpretations of "studying geometry."
There is studying geometry for its own sake, otiose learning if you will, just like the ancient Greeks did.
And then there's studying it to pass an exam, the extreme version of it as portrayed and as you are no doubt first-hand familiar with in Japan, is 100% guaranteed to cripple whatever inner inclination one may have had towards geometry. Which is sad, because there's something wondrous about the nature of space, and whoever sees a glimmer whereof shouldn't have that inner eye pulverized.
It takes the likes of an Einstein adamantine to recover: "One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year."
In an age of abundance why wouldn't we rather have a million $REDACTED of $ETHNICITY origin bloom?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113236377590902105.html
Note that Monta Vista doesn't have an entrance exam - parents of students that work hard want to be around students that work at the same level.
"The two schools, put another way that parents rarely articulate so bluntly, are too Asian."
"'This may not sound good,' she confides, 'but their child may be the only Caucasian kid in the class.'"
The difference is that the NYT article emphasizes the students' working class background. In Cupertino, the families tend to be upper middle class.