Xiya Shi ASA002 A03 week6

Xiya Shi

week6

After reading “Hmong Does Not Mean Free: The Miseducation of and by Hmong Americans,” the author Kaozong N. Mouavangsou gives me understandings of Hmong-American families and the miseducation of Hmong Americans. This article combines data, experiments, and analysis to demonstrate the real educational education and belief in most of the Hmong families. The authors told her self-experience to point out that in most of the Hmong cultural families, females need to learn better and work harder than males to prove girls worth as equal to that of  Hmong sons. She noticed that she had excessively needed for educational excellence was the evidence of educational achievement difference between Hmong females and males. Also, she noticed that American education misunderstood the Hmong cultural-educational system. The researchers tended to describe Hmong American students’ struggles as experiencing pressure from families and cultural failures. However, The author Kaozong N. Mouavangsou deemed that the U.S. educational system did not prepare to take in and treat other ethnics groups’ students without discrimination and miseducation. The further data and analysis ironically proved her thoughts.

In this passage, the author also mentioned a phenomenon that Hmong cultural families regard education as a path to financial stability. They think education will bring their kids a better future or a better life. From my perspective, I can understand their parents’ expectations. Their purpose of immigrating to the U.S.  was to give their next generation’s a better education environment. While looking back to their era, the unstable household income was one of the big challenges for them to survive in America. In order to provide a better life for their kids, parents might push them to study a lucrative career. Majors such as economics, computer science, and accounting were regarded as the pathway to financial stability from then till now. In sum, these concepts were the epitomes of Asian Americans’ understanding of their educational system. With fewer misunderstandings from both U.S. culture and Hmong culture to their conjunct educational system, education will be more fitted to all ethnic groups with gender equality. 

References

Valverde, K.-L. C., & Dariotis, W. M. (2020). Fight the Tower: Asian American Women Scholars' Resistance and Renewal in the Academy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press

Dennis, LaToya. “A Historian Shares Insight About The Hmong American Experience.” WUWM, www.wuwm.com/post/historian-shares-insight-about-hmong-american-experience.