This is the fourth in a series of columns to continue the dialogue between cultures.

There's an email that Asian Americans pass around titled "How To Be A Perfect Asian Kid." It says, in part: "Score a perfect 1600 on the SAT ... Go to a prestigious Ivy League university and win enough scholarship money to pay for it ... Have four hobbies: studying, studying, violin/piano and studying."

Recipients of the email find it amusing because of the truth behind it--Asian cultures place a high value on education. With the influx of Asian immigrants to this area, that value has arguably led to highly competitive atmospheres at local schools. Add to those strongly held values the cultural-American approach to education that places importance on well-rounded students, and it becomes clear how those values can clash.

Khir Johari, a teacher at Fremont High School, is of Chinese and Malay descent and grew up in Singapore. He sees great differences between the Singaporean system and the American one in which he now works. Here, he says, the emphasis is on a student's passions and not on their skills.

"In Asia, the importance of education is internalized. It's part of our cytoplasm. There," he says, "you never say that someone's not ready for the next grade. Parental pressure is not enough--there's a societal expectation to do well."

According to Cupertino Union School District board member Ben Liao, the imperial examination system in China spurred its people to value education throughout history.

The system went into full swing during the Tang Dynasty and gave people across the country the chance to earn a job as an imperial official--but only if they passed a series of exams. Only 5 percent of test-takers passed the exams and went on to a prestigious government position, giving them an elite position in society.

Liao says those who couldn't pass the test went on to one of the three lower classes--the farmer class, the merchant class and the craftsman class. "Once you pass the test, you are guaranteed for life," Liao says.

While the exact system doesn't exist today, Chinese students still pin their hopes on an exam. Today that exam is the Gao Kao, which was given in 1977 for the first time. That year, 5.7 million students took the exam, but university placement was only available for the 278,000 highest scores.

For Asians who immigrated to the United States many years ago, education was perpetuated as a way to improve their social position. In her book The Chinese in America, the late Iris Chang wrote that in the late 1800s, Chinese children in the United States "were the only racial group to be denied a state-funded education." Furthermore, until the 1920s, most Chinese children attended segregated schools.

"As they scrambled and grubbed for a living ... [the Chinese] were driven by the all-consuming dream of all immigrants: that their children, particularly their sons, would lead a better life than they had," Chang wrote. "Immigrant parents especially favored careers such as medicine and engineering, not only because they were relatively lucrative, prestigious and stable, but also because they did not require political connections, enormous outlays of capital or advanced English-language skills."

While the American back story also stems from immigration from foreign lands, the flavor is different. The United States values opportunity and individualism--the term "manifest destiny" was coined to describe the force that pushed the U.S. government to settle the as-yet-unknown West in the 1840s. Achievement has always been part of the American dream--but in ways that complement the uniqueness of each individual citizen. There is no one image of success.

In fact, though valued, education has not been considered the primary catalyst to success in American society. Bill Gates--the man who founded Microsoft--for example, is a Harvard dropout.

And while many colleges in America are selective, almost anyone with a high school education can enroll in some sort of higher education, and successful students aren't just judged by their grade point averages.

Because Americans place less value on education per se, Asians often find the American education experience at odds with their traditional values.

"The bottom line is we are what we value," Johari says. "Over here, it's about being well-rounded, participating in extracurricular activities and having a social life. In Singapore, the belief is that once the academics are good, that's a solid foundation for everything else."

Jim Blaschke started teaching at Homestead High School in 1975 and remembers seeing two Asian faces in the entire yearbook that year. Now, 40 to 50 percent of the school's population is Asian students. With the influx of Asians has come pressure from parents and the school's administration to provide more advanced placement classes, Blaschke says. He's fought against adding AP classes at Homestead because he says those classes are meant to be college courses. He points to schools in the district where he believes the addition of AP classes has added to student stress levels.

Some Asians are also beginning to believe that the expectation of high academic performance puts an unhealthy pressure on their children.

Mary Kuo is a Saratoga resident whose two daughters are now grown. Kuo, who was born just outside of China, had an American education but says, "I was amazed at how traditional I was when it came to my daughters. I just had tremendous expectations of them."

Kuo pushed her older daughter to become a physician, which she has done. "I always wanted to have a doctor in the family. [My daughter] felt that she didn't have too much choice," Kuo says. She says she now believes she should have given her children more space. She believes her attitude may have bred "unhealthy competition."

Similarly, Ben Liao says his perspective on education changed once he joined the school district's board. Liao and his wife had valued education so much that they sent their two children to high-achieving Faria Elementary School. But the more involved he became with the school and the district, the more he saw psychologically and emotionally troubled students who faced tremendous academic pressure.

"I'm focusing less and less on academics and more on the whole child," Liao says. "It's important that they have the academics, but emotionally they have to be healthy."

A number of local cultural-Americans show that same preference in their approach to parenting.

Clarissa Shetland's 7-year-old daughter attends Meyerholz Elementary School as part of the Cupertino Language Immersion Program, where she learns English and Mandarin simultaneously. Shetland is half-Japanese and half-Chinese, but she doesn't know of anyone in her family who speaks Mandarin. She and her husband, who is of European descent, simply wanted their daughter to speak a second language.

"If she does do something with it, that's great, but we really just wanted to give her a love for languages," Shetland says.

Gail Lee's children have similar experiences--after her older son, Cameron, graduated from the French-American school in Sunnyvale, the family took a year off and traveled around the world. They visited 26 countries; Lee and her husband home-schooled their two sons during that time. Lee herself is of European descent, and her husband, a second-generation Chinese-American, grew up in Cupertino.

Her children accordingly aspire to more creative professions given their upbringing. Cameron wants to be a writer. "He can't not write," Lee says. Her younger son, Joff, wants to be an "inventor/scientist/veterinarian."

"It sounds so pat, but I'd just like for them to do something that makes them happy," Lee says.

For immigrant parents like Kuo and Liao, wanting their children to be happy has been one motivational factor in urging them to succeed in the classroom.

While Kuo does acknowledge she'd do things a little differently given the chance, she says cultural Americans have much to learn from the Asian emphasis on education. For example, she says Asian students tend to have better study habits and more discipline in their lives. She thinks the American education system would be better if more of its students embraced these habits.

Blaschke adds that the Asians' participation in extracurricular activities has led to an improvement in the community overall. He says back in 1975 schools focused on sports. Now, the activities scene in schools has shifted to cultural clubs and organizations such as Interact, the teen version of Rotary International. He says, "There's an increasing sense of service to the community."