Asian here, Indian to be precise. While I agree with you, I must point out the side effects. This obsession with grades and studies pushes lot of kids on a sort

Asian here, Indian to be precise. While I agree with you, I must point out the side effects. This obsession with grades and studies pushes lot of kids on a sort of rat race. There is immense pressure to succeed and success is typically narrowly defined like high grades and a secure job. I don't know the numbers in US, but in India this has caused a lot of rise in teenage and young adult suicides, it is not uncommon to here of suicides of kids studying for IITs due to pressure to perform. Another side-effect of this obsession with academic achievement has given rise to herd mentality where everyone is pushed to pursue similar career paths like engineering or medicine irrespective of a child's aptitude or interest. In India, especially this has led to a huge number of engineers who never wanted to be engineers. This has also meant that despite the aptitude lot of kids never got to pursue arts or pure sciences, in fact the popular perception of someone pursuing arts or pure sciences is that he or she could not make into engineering or medicine. Not to mention that this also discourages risk taking and entrepreneurship. Last thing I want to mention is that in Indian culture the idea of social perception is very strong, what will the society say tends to be a big factor in how decisions are made. This is one reason why despite sizeable population, India tends to be behind the world in pure science or in many sports. The mentality is changing a bit but not a lot and it is coming at a cost of many innocent lives.