But let me also say, I'm not going to ask you any tough questions that you have not already asked yourself. I think you are very brave because you are opening the door to something that I think a lot of people talk about privately. MARTIN: Now, let me just say up front, I think this book is very brave. She's written a book about her adventures in parenting that's getting a lot of attention and some rave, very conflicted reviews.

Yale law professor Amy Chua calls it the Chinese parenting model. Today we have a very different conversation, a provocative one, that pressure is good, that demanding perfection is good, that nothing is fun until you're good at it, even if you have to take what other people say are extreme steps to get there. And a lot of critics blame No Child Left Behind for squeezing the creativity out of education, for too much emphasis on rote learning, for making school all about tests, for amping up the pressure. is falling behind on many key international indicators of academic performance. We talked about the perception that the U.S. Earlier this week, we spoke to the secretary of Education Arne Duncan about efforts to reach agreement on a new version of the Bush administration's signature education initiative, No Child Left Behind.

And now a conversation about pressure, a very different kind of pressure: the pressure to perform.

Battle hymn of the tiger mother