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Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?

163 points by kornish 11y ago

danharaj 11y ago
Well, gee, I don't know! What part of "sit in this room for 8 hours a day until we cut the umbilical cord, then get a job and contribute to society so that you can afford to live and maybe retire one day. because otherwise you are human garbage." sounds like it supports mental health? How many people will quickly blame social media, or adults paying too much attention to children's emotional needs for ruining our children when it's our toxic social structures that are doing it? Oh, oh! I know. These kids are just too coddled these days. If they would just grow thicker skin they wouldn't be so severely depressed and constantly anxious. It's not as if what ails society hurts the most vulnerable and malleable of us first and most. The way society treats children like raw materials pushed through a factory until they can be extruded as adults is horrifying.
- askafriend 11y ago
  Very snarky comment but I think the general point you're making is a good one: that too often the blame for problems like these is placed in misguided places and pushed around but we fail to zoom out and examine the very core of societal structures.
  - danharaj 11y ago
    I think snark is appropriate. If you asked the children what they want, you would get accurate answers. If you asked the teachers what the children need, you would get accurate answers. Instead, we ask (and get answers even if we don't ask) the adults what the children want and the bureaucrats what the children need. The bureaucratic, overmanaged, underfunded education industry is not structured for education. It's structured to be controlled at successively broader levels of government and industrialized at national and international scale; optimized for inculcating into children the civil religion [1] and a receptiveness to strict organization of their time by authority figures. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_religion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_religion
    - crazy1van 11y ago
      > underfunded education I was sympathetic to your argument until this part. It varies by region, but we spend what seems like a fortune on school. DC public schools spent over $18,000 per student in 2010 [0]. That's more than my state college tuition. Where does that money go? [0]: http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/finance_insurance_real_estate/cb12-113.html http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/finance_ins...
      - danharaj 11y ago
        s/underfunded/misfunded Money that is wasted may as well never have been used.
      - germinalphrase 11y ago
        Not sure - but as a high school teacher I've been turned down to buy paperbacks (that actually have all their pages) for my classroom due to budget constraints. You're not wrong, and there is a lot of money in compulsory education (hence the push since the 80's to privatize)- but the macro view of educational budgeting doesn't necessarily speak to the direct effect of budgeting on classroom resources.
        ryandrake 11y ago
        Don't worry, there's plenty of money for sports and administration. The Assistant Vice Principal doesn't have money problems.
        aianus 11y ago
        That was the opposite of my experience in high school. My math teacher was forced by admin to buy a shipping pallet of shiny new $130 Calculus textbooks which sat in the closet unused all year because the new textbooks covered less material than the ones from the 80s we were already using (the curriculum had since been dumbed down).
- logicchains 11y ago
  >What part of "sit in this room for 8 hours a day until we cut the umbilical cord, then get a job and contribute to society so that you can afford to live and maybe retire one day. because otherwise you are human garbage." I think the expectation that "people should be good to me just because I was born" lies at the root of much distress. Reality can be harsh: if you don't have anything to offer them, most people don't care much about you. Maybe this is a terrible failing on the part of society, but from a pragmatic perspective it's much easier to change one's viewpoint than to change society. It can be surprisingly liberating to not expect anything from the world.
  - danharaj 11y ago
    > I think the expectation that "people should be good to me just because I was born" lies at the root of much distress. Reality can be harsh: if you don't have anything to offer them, most people don't care much about you. I think your first sentence is either logically vacuous or a sneaky way to disregard someone's emotions: Either you are stating that "feeling mistreated is the same as existing and feeling mistreated" or your clause "just because I was born" is putting words in this abstract person's mouth: "I feel mistreated but I am unjustified in feeling mistreated." Like, your ideas are logically consistent: If you don't feel mistreated then you don't feel mistreated. If you can just stop feeling mistreated then you will be liberated from feeling mistreated. It completely sidesteps the issue: People feel mistreated for a reason. Why not apply this logic to everything? "Just because I was born, people shouldn't saw off my leg at the knee". The gall of such entitlement! If only one adjusted to the viewpoint that their leg should be sawed off at the knee, they would have a much easier time! Does it sound absurd because I am exaggerating? I'm not really exaggerating that much: depression and anxiety can hurt so much that they drive people to kill themselves. How could such illness be anything but agonizing? You call it reality, but it is not indifferent and impersonal like disease or a storm that sweeps one's home away: We are talking about people. People are intelligible to people. People are answerable people. People interacting with people changes the way people interact with people.
    - logicchains 11y ago
      >Like, your ideas are logically consistent: If you don't feel mistreated then you don't feel mistreated. If you can just stop feeling mistreated then you will be liberated from feeling mistreated. It completely sidesteps the issue: People feel mistreated for a reason. Feeling mistreated isn't a feeling; feeling bad is a feeling. We feel bad when we perceive something we interpret as bad happening to us. If we didn't perceive that action as bad, as "mistreating", then we wouldn't feel bad about it. This is hardly a new idea; philosophical traditions like Buddhism and Stoicism are bad around the idea what what causes suffering is our perceptions of the world, and by changing how we perceive things (making fewer value judgements) we can increase our happiness with the world. >You call it reality, but it is not indifferent and impersonal like disease or a storm that sweeps one's home away: We are talking about people. People are intelligible to people. People are answerable people. People interacting with people changes the way people interact with people. It doesn't matter whether it's a natural disaster or people causing the issue: the point is that if it's not something that can easily be changed, getting emotional about changing it won't lead to a happy state of mind. >Why not apply this logic to everything? "Just because I was born, people shouldn't saw off my leg at the knee". The gall of such entitlement. If someone saws your leg off at the knee and there's nothing you can do about it, you'll have a less miserable time if you just accept it and move on than if you remain bitter about it.
fiatmoney 11y ago
The word "Asian" does not appear in the article. The subtext is that the elite is concerned that traditional selection measures like grades & test scores have become totally game-able via a combination of sheer hourly input & collusion / cheating amongst certain subpopulations. This causes their kids to be outcompeted for very limited slots at elite institutions (even more limited due to massive subsidies to push people into the higher ed system, general population growth, and a desire to limit enrolment to preserve the social capital benefits of truly elite institutions). Naturally there is pressure for those measures to be changed. Whether their characterisation of what's happening is correct is debatable, but that's where a good amount the pressure comes from.
- danharaj 11y ago
  > We think of this as a problem only of the urban and suburban elite, but in traveling the country to report on this issue, I have seen that this stress has a powerful effect on children across the socioeconomic spectrum. I didn't read your subtext in the article. I'm not convinced it accounts for very much. Also, Asian Americans make up 5% of the population. What do you think "Asian" has to do with the topic of this text?
  - fiatmoney 11y ago
    If it were explicit, it wouldn't be "sub" text. You really do need to know a bit of context about the state of high school & higher ed admissions before the phenomenon they talk about makes sense. The NYT is kind of notorious for running editorials that only make sense as far as why they would be running, and at this particular time, if you have these pieces of information. Stanford is 1/4 Asian, plus another 9% "international". UC Berkeley is about 40%, plus another 10% international. And as I said, it's about competition for the elite slots at those and similar places. Look at, eg, the student body composition at very "hardcore", high stress schools like Thomas Jefferson HS, or Gunn HS (recent subject of http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Why-are-Palo-Alto-s-kids-killing-themselves-6270854.php http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Why-are-Palo-Alto-s-ki... ). The parents of students in that kind of environment are the intended target of this editorial. It provides them with a coordination point.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
frutiger 11y ago
Betteridge's law of headlines[1] says the answer is "No". 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- cetacea 11y ago
  "Who will be the next CEO of Apple?" "No." Someone didn't think this law through...
  - swiley 11y ago
    Obviously it only works on yes or no questions.
    - cetacea 11y ago
      Yeah, so the "law" as stated in the Wikipedia article is not correct.
      - frutiger 11y ago
        > Like all similar "laws" (e.g., Murphy's Law), Betteridge's law of headlines is not always true.[3][4] From the article.
        xkcd-sucks 11y ago
        "Is Betteridge's Law Always True?"
ZoF 11y ago
HA. How could school not be stressful. Same rooms. Every Day. Same kids. Same motivations. Same tapping-of-the-foot. Same stagnation. Same restlessness. Same mockery. Same shame. 'Stupid fucking faggot retard loser fatty useless cunt.' Try living with that cacophonous litany for 8 hours daily and not coming out a little fucked. Absolutely a first world problem but I would have 100% more enjoyed an apprenticeship or something similar. I hated myself all throughout high-school. Hated. Cogitated on my own self termination regularly. Today, working on my own, I feel so much better; not having to actively think about the various groups I have to conform to or rules I have to follow... Extremely liberating. I just want to freelance, actively contribute, subsist, and die. I'm not a piece of shit for wanting that.
- baseh 11y ago
  Reminds me of : this one by George Carlin >https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0MKBdD2FGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0MKBdD2FGA
- trentmb 11y ago
  > Absolutely a first world problem I don't understand this statement. Doesn't this mean it's a problem every developing nation will eventually face? Wouldn't it be nice to have already figured out a solution by then?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - douche 11y ago
    Means it's something to gripe about when you're pretty high up on Maslov's hierarchy and not worried about war, hunger, disease, or any of the other horsemen of the apocalypse. Similar to white-girl problems
  - yathern 11y ago
    "First world problem" is a way of saying that the problem is very low stakes and would only appear in an area where people already have their more basic needs attended to. For example, if I want my coffee to have cinnamon in it and no sugar - but the cinnamon is mixed with sugar. That's a 'first world problem'.
atomicfiredoll 11y ago
I can't help but feel like this is the inevitable conclusion for a society that's obsessed with working and financial success. It could be an interesting premise to explore. When a number of employers and the government don't value ensuring a healthy work/life balance, or even employee's health, how do you keep that same behavior out of the minds of people running school systems and classrooms? How do you ensure you create a school environment where children and adolescents don't experience burn out when the working world they are prepped for embraces and/or encourages it? It seems to me that the more we ask employees to work long hours or in crunch mode, the more we're asking our children to do the same... just indirectly.
- branchless 11y ago
  The reason the system wants you to work hard is because they get a share of your labour for every part you are successful above subsistence. They get this through debt issuance, primarily via land prices. Fiat money costs absolutely zero to produce, they give it out freely and in return you pledge to give part of your labour for 30 years. If land prices were far lower we'd all be working 3 or 4 days a week. Employers wouldn't have enough workers. They'd be paying you most of the value you produce as they bid for you against other firms. And you might not work for them because you no longer have to spend most of your labour on banker tribute for the right to exist. Land value tax is the answer. It would replace income tax, removing the regressive tax on labour and punishing economic rentiers. I hope for the sake of my kids we can win this one. http://www.henrygeorge.org/pcontents.htm http://www.henrygeorge.org/pcontents.htm When people hear about LVT their immediate reaction is "another tax". Realise that it would replace income tax (or at least significantly reduce it at the lower end) and also it would reduce the massive tax via land price ramping. Right now the banks are getting our tax instead of it being ploughed back into the state, via debt issuance. And producing nothing of value for it.
  - littletimmy 11y ago
    How do you suggest we modulate land price if not via the current system? How is land tax going to make things any easier? The US already has property tax - you want to raise it?
xkcd-sucks 11y ago
Based on experiences with highschool reunions and with hard-drug dealers, I feel like children whose lives are "optimized for success" often end up pissing away their "potential," while the second-tier/nice-but-dull children end up having personally fulfilling, materially successful lives. Probably this observation reflects nothing more than a bunch of named fallacies.
- barry-cotter 11y ago
  Reversion to the mean, having to rely on one's own motivation and conscientiousness instead of an older adults, many othes.
- swiley 11y ago
  I had to become a failure in the eyes of my parents before I ever started to succeed.
sosuke 11y ago
It makes adults sick doesn't it? Why not children? I wonder what a society without that "drive for success" would look like. My first thought, maybe a little sad, is if everyone else didn't have that drive I might actually succeed.
- saint_fiasco 11y ago
  Your sad thought is interesting because it suggests that children are being overworked in zero-sum games, ultimately gaining nothing, because all the other children are overworked too.
  - ryandrake 11y ago
    Similar to Prisoner's dilemma. We each can either over-work our kids or not. If nobody over-works their kids, everyone wins (nobody has an advantage, we create a better, less competitive society). If you over-work your kid and I don't, then my kid loses and your kid wins. If I over-work my kid and you don't, then my kid wins and your kid loses. Therefore, everyone chooses to over-work their kids, and everyone loses (nobody has a relative advantage, yet everyone's over-worked, over-competitive, and stressed to the limit).
    - Sacho 11y ago
      Except this is not a zero-sum game. Some of the waste created by this machine of competitiveness is our constantly improving standard of living. In fact, I'd say that this sentiment(that all your hard work and stress leads to nothing) pretty much exemplifies the middle class. The kids from poor families don't want to stay at the same relative advantage, they want to do better than you so they can lift themselves out of poverty. Perhaps what you're sensing is the pressure from a large poor class trying to improve their living conditions by competing with the middle class. C'est la vie.
      - saint_fiasco 11y ago
        I find it hard to believe that forcing kids into violin lessons because it will help them get into college has any kind of positive externalities. I think that those kind of unproductive signaling games are done more by the middle and upper classes, always running as fast as they can to stay in the same place.
littletimmy 11y ago
It is not just the drive for success; it is the entire culture in general. The system is built to reduce happiness, because a happy and content person has less impetus to contribute to the economy. This is actually very intentional; see for example Alan Greenspan's speech to Congress: when he was questioned about job insecurity among the population, he replied that it was a good thing because it made people work harder. On the other hand, the ideal person for the economy (on average, forgetting outliers like inventors) is a psychopath with a penchant for conspicuous consumption. Such a person is geographically mobile, able to dedicate his life to attaining wealth and power, and is also incapable of happiness. The normal among us, unfortunately, have to try live up to that ideal. Therefore, you see people spending very little time with their families, trying to earn more and more just to satisfy their need to consume. That is stressful! This is a form of mental sickness. YES. The system we live in is sick.
icanhackit 11y ago
Expectations surrounding education have spun out of control. On top of a seven-hour school day, our kids march through hours of nightly homework, daily sports practices and band rehearsals, and weekend-consuming assignments and tournaments. Each activity is seen as a step on the ladder to a top college, an enviable job and a successful life. Small-print: Successful life not guaranteed. Neither is happiness but we didn't specifically mention that. For me the depression stemmed from existential nihilism paired with a lack of control of what I had to participate in. It taught me, once I was fully in control of my own time and energy, to be careful with who I spent time with and what I was doing with my time. Not in the Get-Shit-Done sense, more in the Will This Shit Affect My Zen-State. Often the answer is Yes so instead I play games, drink beer, read, hang out with my partner and friends and occasionally make cool things. I won't be remembered in 200 years, few people will, but at least my time was mine.
- branchless 11y ago
  The dominant culture says you are a loser. Well done to you for having the confidence to stick to your guns. Problem is you can't opt-out fully because you have to live and for that you must pay banker tribute via rent.
  - icanhackit 11y ago
    The dominant culture says you are a loser. Paradoxically I'm doing OK by society's standards. By valuing personal space and control over it I decided to get into the property game with my partner earlier in life, enabling us to purchase an inner city property before their prices exploded. Now I'm watching my friends work their arses off to live further away in the 'burbs. Often success comes down to timing...and an aversion to bullshit social rituals can also help. Problem is you can't opt-out fully because you have to live and for that you must pay banker tribute via rent. No rent, but you point remains: gotta work to live.
    - branchless 11y ago
      Ok this isn't really representative then. You got in by entering the pyramid scheme earlier. For 20 somethings who were born too late this isn't an option. They are not suckers, they are victims. I don't think social rituals are what is breaking most people, it's economic rent and exploitation by money issuers. On that let's be clear - this is not the kids' fault.
StacyC 11y ago
Notions of "success" often include no consideration whatsoever of happiness or general contentment with life. We moved to one of the top ISDs in Texas years ago, ended up pulling our kids out and home-schooling. It was a hyper competitive, near-toxic environment. No thanks. I have found the recipe for well-being to be pretty simple: good health, work I enjoy, good relationships, community, time to be quiet. Don't need much else, imo.
dogma1138 11y ago
I wonder how this conflicts with the fact that the difficulty of studies especially in exact science in primary education has been steadily declining even math teachers have difficulties solving highschool math problems from the 70s these days.
- saint_fiasco 11y ago
  The excessive breadth comes at the expense of depth.
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    Well the use of scientific and even graphical calculators didn't help for sure. No one memorized cosin tables anymore and it's not like it was hard. Sure it allows you to give out problems to students with wierd angles but working at 15 deg incriments and giving harder problems like they did in the past is far better in my mind. I did some tutoring for high school and college students like 10 years ago, even grade a students that picked the hardest math difficulty (you can choose 3 difficulties the hardest is pretty much a requirement for math oriented degrees later in uni) didn't knew what a logarithm was beyond a key on their calculator, same goes for other basic functions like factorials. They were petty much parroting and operating a calculator rather than doing math.
ThomPete 11y ago
I wonder if this is as causal as people might think. The Scandinavian countries are known for their extremely lax culture especially when it comes to child education, yet same discussions are present there. Being poor is also making you sick. I wonder if it's more to do with our interpretation of sickness than with any actual change. I would still expect our kids to grow older than we ever where, but sure it doesn't mean they will be happy.
- dilemma 11y ago
  In Scandinavia, doing double degrees, like one in Physics and another in Economics, at the same time is something people do to get ahead. There's also the unpaid internships, like everywhere else, and the teenager who can't sleep and has physical pain due to stress from the pressure to succeed.
codingdave 11y ago
I'd take all this as less of an opportunity to complain about our own growth, and more of an opportunity for everyone who has or will choose to procreate to think deeply about raising your own children, and to do better for them than has been done for yourself.
analog31 11y ago
Many of the posts have to do with the expectations of business, society, etc. Maybe we parents have something to do with it too. I should be happy. I'm educated, have interesting and rewarding work to do, have a roof over my head, and get to play music on the side. I've got two great kids, who are both smarter than me. What's wrong with that? Why should I be neurotic about success? Why should push myself and my kids harder than I was pushed? And make no mistake, I was pushed. Because I can see that my class -- the middle class -- is vanishing, so the expectations of my generation are no longer valid. Get an OK degree in something worthwhile and work hard. Gone. I literally followed exactly the same education and career path as my father. That's gone. We don't know what the future expectations will be, so we aim as high as possible. I don't know if this is a good thing, but it seems like what's happening. Not to mention, I grew up in a family culture that held education to be one of the highest values, so we were inclined to be demanding about education even before all hell broke loose. Another thing I've noticed is that the school curriculum is more intensive and consuming, but not necessarily more advanced. My kids are ahead of where I was at the same age, in terms of simplistic milestones like Algebra. They have perfect GPA's. I sure as hell didn't. But the curriculum is more superficial and more based on drill work, worksheets, and computer busywork. They write more papers. That's good. Their papers are written to fill out a thing called a rubric, which is a glorified worksheet. That's bad. I recently found a copy of my 12th grade public school math textbook. More than half of the problems are proofs. Today there are no proofs. The proliferation of homework merely gives the illusion of a rigorous curriculum, and robs kids of the time that they could spend learning interesting things or just having fun. I learned things like programming and electronics while in high school, during the time when I was not doing homework. </rant>
- hguant 11y ago
  I nearly failed out of high school and college because I spent my time on things I found more interesting that classes - computers and journalism for the most part. The skills I learned outside of my studies have been more useful by far than anything I learned in a classroom. I feel like we've pushed people away from the kinds of self directed learning that really stick with a student towards the easily quantifiable "no student left behind" style of learning.
jtcond13 11y ago
"hours of nightly homework, daily sports practice and band rehearsal..." Maybe adults should stop telling teenagers that their performance in these things matters that much? Sports / Music are great if you enjoy them, and learning the high school curriculum is important, but outside of the top 1%, there's little reason to compete in these tournaments.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- nradov 11y ago
  The theory is that participation in sports and music will be the crucial factor that gets those teenagers admitted to elite colleges. There's some truth to that, but probably not quite as much as many parents seem to think.
  - jonnathanson 11y ago
    There is a common misconception that elite schools want "well rounded" students. In fact they want well rounded student bodies, composed of extremely lopsided students who excel in individual domains. It is far better for your child to be a world-class swimmer, for example, than for her to be a participant in swimming, tennis, student government, the school newspaper, etc. Parents urge their kids to take up as many extracurriculars as possible in the hopes of creating the impression of well-roundedness. Students resent it, but they bear the burden because they believe their parents know what they're talking about. Add to this the unfortunate reality that not everyone gets to be world-class at something. What do you do if you don't excel at any one thing? Work your ass off to create the impression of excelling at as many things as possible. It's a shitty treadmill to run. But what's the alternative? Excellent grades are a given; they are basically table stakes. So above and beyond great grades, you need some sort of extracurricular presence to burnish your college applications. But your chances of admission are basically a crapshoot at that point, so you pile on the extracurriculars in an attempt to get more darts to throw at the board.
    - pizza 11y ago
akhilcacharya 11y ago
I've been reading these sorts of articles for nearly 10 or 11 years now, and it's always been from the same people - the NBC, NPR, NYTimes reading upper-middle class LAC graduates who send their kids to top universities. These sorts of attitudes were unheard of when I was in middle and elementary school, and existed but shunned in my high school. Granted, I did not go to the most competitive high school in the state, but I do often wonder how well these sorts of articles actually translate to the vast majority of students and families who go to places like NC State, where you do not need any real extracurricular involvement to get in.
altonzheng 11y ago
Success can mean different things to different people. Nowadays, most of us just implicitly default to career as being the source of success. We should be encouraging students to practice more self-reflection on their personal values and what it means to be successful. Maybe it's rare that a high school student would have that level of self-awareness, but I think relaxing the workload is only a stop gap solution. There will always be ways for students to stress and work hard to get a leg up in the admission process. I think much of the stress is not from the workload, but from comparison with peers. Most of us are taught not to compare ourselves to others, but in todays competitive world, how can you not? I think if we help students spend genuine time in meditation and reflecting on what's meaningful to them, it would greatly help reduce social comparison and consequently stress. Of course, a course like this would be difficult to standardize...
robg 11y ago
Yes.
11thEarlOfMar 11y ago
I'm late to the discussion, but my kids go/went to Irvington. What the article does not mention, which I feel is material to the content, is that 70% of the students at Irvington are Asian, and most of those have immigrant parents. The majority of those parents work in technical fields and have advanced degrees in science and technology. This is material in my opinion, because the demographics of Irvington do not represent the demographics of the US, which readers may not realize.
JacobAppCow 11y ago
To quote Mark Twain "I would not let school interfare with my education" (pun intended)
thsealienbstrds 11y ago
I am not a doctor but I suspect that it has a lot to do with our physical limitations. I think a big impacting factor from the adjustments made to the program is the fact they created study groups. Many students are socially isolated, that is by itself something that creates anxiety and depression. Being in a competitive environment without social supports doesn't help. Human beings are social animals, we need physical touch and proximity to survive. Even just having a conversation with friends and family is something that generally relaxes people. Sure, it may not always be the case but if you ask me, human beings have evolved in a way that we have become very dependent on eachother's physical presence for our mental/physical well being.
jamery 11y ago
I'm a little late to this discussion, but i'm a senior at irvington right now, and this article is bs. No teacher gives only 20 min of homework a night, and all of my non-ap teachers have still given me homework on the weekends this year.

163 points by kornish 11y ago

Well, gee, I don't know! What part of "sit in this room for 8 hours a day until we cut the umbilical cord, then get a job and contribute to society so that you can afford to live and maybe retire one day. because otherwise you are human garbage." sounds like it supports mental health? How many people will quickly blame social media, or adults paying too much attention to children's emotional needs for ruining our children when it's our toxic social structures that are doing it? Oh, oh! I know. These kids are just too coddled these days. If they would just grow thicker skin they wouldn't be so severely depressed and constantly anxious. It's not as if what ails society hurts the most vulnerable and malleable of us first and most. The way society treats children like raw materials pushed through a factory until they can be extruded as adults is horrifying.

askafriend 11y ago
Very snarky comment but I think the general point you're making is a good one: that too often the blame for problems like these is placed in misguided places and pushed around but we fail to zoom out and examine the very core of societal structures.
- danharaj 11y ago
  I think snark is appropriate. If you asked the children what they want, you would get accurate answers. If you asked the teachers what the children need, you would get accurate answers. Instead, we ask (and get answers even if we don't ask) the adults what the children want and the bureaucrats what the children need. The bureaucratic, overmanaged, underfunded education industry is not structured for education. It's structured to be controlled at successively broader levels of government and industrialized at national and international scale; optimized for inculcating into children the civil religion [1] and a receptiveness to strict organization of their time by authority figures. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_religion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_religion
  - crazy1van 11y ago
    > underfunded education I was sympathetic to your argument until this part. It varies by region, but we spend what seems like a fortune on school. DC public schools spent over $18,000 per student in 2010 [0]. That's more than my state college tuition. Where does that money go? [0]: http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/finance_insurance_real_estate/cb12-113.html http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/finance_ins...
    - danharaj 11y ago
      s/underfunded/misfunded Money that is wasted may as well never have been used.
    - germinalphrase 11y ago
      Not sure - but as a high school teacher I've been turned down to buy paperbacks (that actually have all their pages) for my classroom due to budget constraints. You're not wrong, and there is a lot of money in compulsory education (hence the push since the 80's to privatize)- but the macro view of educational budgeting doesn't necessarily speak to the direct effect of budgeting on classroom resources.
      - ryandrake 11y ago
        Don't worry, there's plenty of money for sports and administration. The Assistant Vice Principal doesn't have money problems.
      - aianus 11y ago
        That was the opposite of my experience in high school. My math teacher was forced by admin to buy a shipping pallet of shiny new $130 Calculus textbooks which sat in the closet unused all year because the new textbooks covered less material than the ones from the 80s we were already using (the curriculum had since been dumbed down).
logicchains 11y ago
>What part of "sit in this room for 8 hours a day until we cut the umbilical cord, then get a job and contribute to society so that you can afford to live and maybe retire one day. because otherwise you are human garbage." I think the expectation that "people should be good to me just because I was born" lies at the root of much distress. Reality can be harsh: if you don't have anything to offer them, most people don't care much about you. Maybe this is a terrible failing on the part of society, but from a pragmatic perspective it's much easier to change one's viewpoint than to change society. It can be surprisingly liberating to not expect anything from the world.
- danharaj 11y ago
  > I think the expectation that "people should be good to me just because I was born" lies at the root of much distress. Reality can be harsh: if you don't have anything to offer them, most people don't care much about you. I think your first sentence is either logically vacuous or a sneaky way to disregard someone's emotions: Either you are stating that "feeling mistreated is the same as existing and feeling mistreated" or your clause "just because I was born" is putting words in this abstract person's mouth: "I feel mistreated but I am unjustified in feeling mistreated." Like, your ideas are logically consistent: If you don't feel mistreated then you don't feel mistreated. If you can just stop feeling mistreated then you will be liberated from feeling mistreated. It completely sidesteps the issue: People feel mistreated for a reason. Why not apply this logic to everything? "Just because I was born, people shouldn't saw off my leg at the knee". The gall of such entitlement! If only one adjusted to the viewpoint that their leg should be sawed off at the knee, they would have a much easier time! Does it sound absurd because I am exaggerating? I'm not really exaggerating that much: depression and anxiety can hurt so much that they drive people to kill themselves. How could such illness be anything but agonizing? You call it reality, but it is not indifferent and impersonal like disease or a storm that sweeps one's home away: We are talking about people. People are intelligible to people. People are answerable people. People interacting with people changes the way people interact with people.
  - logicchains 11y ago
    >Like, your ideas are logically consistent: If you don't feel mistreated then you don't feel mistreated. If you can just stop feeling mistreated then you will be liberated from feeling mistreated. It completely sidesteps the issue: People feel mistreated for a reason. Feeling mistreated isn't a feeling; feeling bad is a feeling. We feel bad when we perceive something we interpret as bad happening to us. If we didn't perceive that action as bad, as "mistreating", then we wouldn't feel bad about it. This is hardly a new idea; philosophical traditions like Buddhism and Stoicism are bad around the idea what what causes suffering is our perceptions of the world, and by changing how we perceive things (making fewer value judgements) we can increase our happiness with the world. >You call it reality, but it is not indifferent and impersonal like disease or a storm that sweeps one's home away: We are talking about people. People are intelligible to people. People are answerable people. People interacting with people changes the way people interact with people. It doesn't matter whether it's a natural disaster or people causing the issue: the point is that if it's not something that can easily be changed, getting emotional about changing it won't lead to a happy state of mind. >Why not apply this logic to everything? "Just because I was born, people shouldn't saw off my leg at the knee". The gall of such entitlement. If someone saws your leg off at the knee and there's nothing you can do about it, you'll have a less miserable time if you just accept it and move on than if you remain bitter about it.

fiatmoney 11y ago

The word "Asian" does not appear in the article. The subtext is that the elite is concerned that traditional selection measures like grades & test scores have become totally game-able via a combination of sheer hourly input & collusion / cheating amongst certain subpopulations. This causes their kids to be outcompeted for very limited slots at elite institutions (even more limited due to massive subsidies to push people into the higher ed system, general population growth, and a desire to limit enrolment to preserve the social capital benefits of truly elite institutions). Naturally there is pressure for those measures to be changed. Whether their characterisation of what's happening is correct is debatable, but that's where a good amount the pressure comes from.

danharaj 11y ago
> We think of this as a problem only of the urban and suburban elite, but in traveling the country to report on this issue, I have seen that this stress has a powerful effect on children across the socioeconomic spectrum. I didn't read your subtext in the article. I'm not convinced it accounts for very much. Also, Asian Americans make up 5% of the population. What do you think "Asian" has to do with the topic of this text?
- fiatmoney 11y ago
  If it were explicit, it wouldn't be "sub" text. You really do need to know a bit of context about the state of high school & higher ed admissions before the phenomenon they talk about makes sense. The NYT is kind of notorious for running editorials that only make sense as far as why they would be running, and at this particular time, if you have these pieces of information. Stanford is 1/4 Asian, plus another 9% "international". UC Berkeley is about 40%, plus another 10% international. And as I said, it's about competition for the elite slots at those and similar places. Look at, eg, the student body composition at very "hardcore", high stress schools like Thomas Jefferson HS, or Gunn HS (recent subject of http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Why-are-Palo-Alto-s-kids-killing-themselves-6270854.php http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Why-are-Palo-Alto-s-ki... ). The parents of students in that kind of environment are the intended target of this editorial. It provides them with a coordination point.

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frutiger 11y ago

Betteridge's law of headlines[1] says the answer is "No". 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

cetacea 11y ago
"Who will be the next CEO of Apple?" "No." Someone didn't think this law through...
- swiley 11y ago
  Obviously it only works on yes or no questions.
  - cetacea 11y ago
    Yeah, so the "law" as stated in the Wikipedia article is not correct.
    - frutiger 11y ago
      > Like all similar "laws" (e.g., Murphy's Law), Betteridge's law of headlines is not always true.[3][4] From the article.
      - xkcd-sucks 11y ago
        "Is Betteridge's Law Always True?"

ZoF 11y ago

HA. How could school not be stressful. Same rooms. Every Day. Same kids. Same motivations. Same tapping-of-the-foot. Same stagnation. Same restlessness. Same mockery. Same shame. 'Stupid fucking faggot retard loser fatty useless cunt.' Try living with that cacophonous litany for 8 hours daily and not coming out a little fucked. Absolutely a first world problem but I would have 100% more enjoyed an apprenticeship or something similar. I hated myself all throughout high-school. Hated. Cogitated on my own self termination regularly. Today, working on my own, I feel so much better; not having to actively think about the various groups I have to conform to or rules I have to follow... Extremely liberating. I just want to freelance, actively contribute, subsist, and die. I'm not a piece of shit for wanting that.

baseh 11y ago
Reminds me of : this one by George Carlin >https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0MKBdD2FGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0MKBdD2FGA
trentmb 11y ago
> Absolutely a first world problem I don't understand this statement. Doesn't this mean it's a problem every developing nation will eventually face? Wouldn't it be nice to have already figured out a solution by then?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- douche 11y ago
  Means it's something to gripe about when you're pretty high up on Maslov's hierarchy and not worried about war, hunger, disease, or any of the other horsemen of the apocalypse. Similar to white-girl problems
- yathern 11y ago
  "First world problem" is a way of saying that the problem is very low stakes and would only appear in an area where people already have their more basic needs attended to. For example, if I want my coffee to have cinnamon in it and no sugar - but the cinnamon is mixed with sugar. That's a 'first world problem'.

atomicfiredoll 11y ago

I can't help but feel like this is the inevitable conclusion for a society that's obsessed with working and financial success. It could be an interesting premise to explore. When a number of employers and the government don't value ensuring a healthy work/life balance, or even employee's health, how do you keep that same behavior out of the minds of people running school systems and classrooms? How do you ensure you create a school environment where children and adolescents don't experience burn out when the working world they are prepped for embraces and/or encourages it? It seems to me that the more we ask employees to work long hours or in crunch mode, the more we're asking our children to do the same... just indirectly.

branchless 11y ago
The reason the system wants you to work hard is because they get a share of your labour for every part you are successful above subsistence. They get this through debt issuance, primarily via land prices. Fiat money costs absolutely zero to produce, they give it out freely and in return you pledge to give part of your labour for 30 years. If land prices were far lower we'd all be working 3 or 4 days a week. Employers wouldn't have enough workers. They'd be paying you most of the value you produce as they bid for you against other firms. And you might not work for them because you no longer have to spend most of your labour on banker tribute for the right to exist. Land value tax is the answer. It would replace income tax, removing the regressive tax on labour and punishing economic rentiers. I hope for the sake of my kids we can win this one. http://www.henrygeorge.org/pcontents.htm http://www.henrygeorge.org/pcontents.htm When people hear about LVT their immediate reaction is "another tax". Realise that it would replace income tax (or at least significantly reduce it at the lower end) and also it would reduce the massive tax via land price ramping. Right now the banks are getting our tax instead of it being ploughed back into the state, via debt issuance. And producing nothing of value for it.
- littletimmy 11y ago
  How do you suggest we modulate land price if not via the current system? How is land tax going to make things any easier? The US already has property tax - you want to raise it?

xkcd-sucks 11y ago

Based on experiences with highschool reunions and with hard-drug dealers, I feel like children whose lives are "optimized for success" often end up pissing away their "potential," while the second-tier/nice-but-dull children end up having personally fulfilling, materially successful lives. Probably this observation reflects nothing more than a bunch of named fallacies.

barry-cotter 11y ago
Reversion to the mean, having to rely on one's own motivation and conscientiousness instead of an older adults, many othes.
swiley 11y ago
I had to become a failure in the eyes of my parents before I ever started to succeed.

sosuke 11y ago

It makes adults sick doesn't it? Why not children? I wonder what a society without that "drive for success" would look like. My first thought, maybe a little sad, is if everyone else didn't have that drive I might actually succeed.

saint_fiasco 11y ago
Your sad thought is interesting because it suggests that children are being overworked in zero-sum games, ultimately gaining nothing, because all the other children are overworked too.
- ryandrake 11y ago
  Similar to Prisoner's dilemma. We each can either over-work our kids or not. If nobody over-works their kids, everyone wins (nobody has an advantage, we create a better, less competitive society). If you over-work your kid and I don't, then my kid loses and your kid wins. If I over-work my kid and you don't, then my kid wins and your kid loses. Therefore, everyone chooses to over-work their kids, and everyone loses (nobody has a relative advantage, yet everyone's over-worked, over-competitive, and stressed to the limit).
  - Sacho 11y ago
    Except this is not a zero-sum game. Some of the waste created by this machine of competitiveness is our constantly improving standard of living. In fact, I'd say that this sentiment(that all your hard work and stress leads to nothing) pretty much exemplifies the middle class. The kids from poor families don't want to stay at the same relative advantage, they want to do better than you so they can lift themselves out of poverty. Perhaps what you're sensing is the pressure from a large poor class trying to improve their living conditions by competing with the middle class. C'est la vie.
    - saint_fiasco 11y ago
      I find it hard to believe that forcing kids into violin lessons because it will help them get into college has any kind of positive externalities. I think that those kind of unproductive signaling games are done more by the middle and upper classes, always running as fast as they can to stay in the same place.

littletimmy 11y ago

It is not just the drive for success; it is the entire culture in general. The system is built to reduce happiness, because a happy and content person has less impetus to contribute to the economy. This is actually very intentional; see for example Alan Greenspan's speech to Congress: when he was questioned about job insecurity among the population, he replied that it was a good thing because it made people work harder. On the other hand, the ideal person for the economy (on average, forgetting outliers like inventors) is a psychopath with a penchant for conspicuous consumption. Such a person is geographically mobile, able to dedicate his life to attaining wealth and power, and is also incapable of happiness. The normal among us, unfortunately, have to try live up to that ideal. Therefore, you see people spending very little time with their families, trying to earn more and more just to satisfy their need to consume. That is stressful! This is a form of mental sickness. YES. The system we live in is sick.

icanhackit 11y ago

Expectations surrounding education have spun out of control. On top of a seven-hour school day, our kids march through hours of nightly homework, daily sports practices and band rehearsals, and weekend-consuming assignments and tournaments. Each activity is seen as a step on the ladder to a top college, an enviable job and a successful life. Small-print: Successful life not guaranteed. Neither is happiness but we didn't specifically mention that. For me the depression stemmed from existential nihilism paired with a lack of control of what I had to participate in. It taught me, once I was fully in control of my own time and energy, to be careful with who I spent time with and what I was doing with my time. Not in the Get-Shit-Done sense, more in the Will This Shit Affect My Zen-State. Often the answer is Yes so instead I play games, drink beer, read, hang out with my partner and friends and occasionally make cool things. I won't be remembered in 200 years, few people will, but at least my time was mine.

branchless 11y ago
The dominant culture says you are a loser. Well done to you for having the confidence to stick to your guns. Problem is you can't opt-out fully because you have to live and for that you must pay banker tribute via rent.
- icanhackit 11y ago
  The dominant culture says you are a loser. Paradoxically I'm doing OK by society's standards. By valuing personal space and control over it I decided to get into the property game with my partner earlier in life, enabling us to purchase an inner city property before their prices exploded. Now I'm watching my friends work their arses off to live further away in the 'burbs. Often success comes down to timing...and an aversion to bullshit social rituals can also help. Problem is you can't opt-out fully because you have to live and for that you must pay banker tribute via rent. No rent, but you point remains: gotta work to live.
  - branchless 11y ago
    Ok this isn't really representative then. You got in by entering the pyramid scheme earlier. For 20 somethings who were born too late this isn't an option. They are not suckers, they are victims. I don't think social rituals are what is breaking most people, it's economic rent and exploitation by money issuers. On that let's be clear - this is not the kids' fault.

StacyC 11y ago

Notions of "success" often include no consideration whatsoever of happiness or general contentment with life. We moved to one of the top ISDs in Texas years ago, ended up pulling our kids out and home-schooling. It was a hyper competitive, near-toxic environment. No thanks. I have found the recipe for well-being to be pretty simple: good health, work I enjoy, good relationships, community, time to be quiet. Don't need much else, imo.

dogma1138 11y ago

I wonder how this conflicts with the fact that the difficulty of studies especially in exact science in primary education has been steadily declining even math teachers have difficulties solving highschool math problems from the 70s these days.

saint_fiasco 11y ago
The excessive breadth comes at the expense of depth.
- dogma1138 11y ago
  Well the use of scientific and even graphical calculators didn't help for sure. No one memorized cosin tables anymore and it's not like it was hard. Sure it allows you to give out problems to students with wierd angles but working at 15 deg incriments and giving harder problems like they did in the past is far better in my mind. I did some tutoring for high school and college students like 10 years ago, even grade a students that picked the hardest math difficulty (you can choose 3 difficulties the hardest is pretty much a requirement for math oriented degrees later in uni) didn't knew what a logarithm was beyond a key on their calculator, same goes for other basic functions like factorials. They were petty much parroting and operating a calculator rather than doing math.

ThomPete 11y ago

I wonder if this is as causal as people might think. The Scandinavian countries are known for their extremely lax culture especially when it comes to child education, yet same discussions are present there. Being poor is also making you sick. I wonder if it's more to do with our interpretation of sickness than with any actual change. I would still expect our kids to grow older than we ever where, but sure it doesn't mean they will be happy.

dilemma 11y ago
In Scandinavia, doing double degrees, like one in Physics and another in Economics, at the same time is something people do to get ahead. There's also the unpaid internships, like everywhere else, and the teenager who can't sleep and has physical pain due to stress from the pressure to succeed.

codingdave 11y ago

I'd take all this as less of an opportunity to complain about our own growth, and more of an opportunity for everyone who has or will choose to procreate to think deeply about raising your own children, and to do better for them than has been done for yourself.

analog31 11y ago

Many of the posts have to do with the expectations of business, society, etc. Maybe we parents have something to do with it too. I should be happy. I'm educated, have interesting and rewarding work to do, have a roof over my head, and get to play music on the side. I've got two great kids, who are both smarter than me. What's wrong with that? Why should I be neurotic about success? Why should push myself and my kids harder than I was pushed? And make no mistake, I was pushed. Because I can see that my class -- the middle class -- is vanishing, so the expectations of my generation are no longer valid. Get an OK degree in something worthwhile and work hard. Gone. I literally followed exactly the same education and career path as my father. That's gone. We don't know what the future expectations will be, so we aim as high as possible. I don't know if this is a good thing, but it seems like what's happening. Not to mention, I grew up in a family culture that held education to be one of the highest values, so we were inclined to be demanding about education even before all hell broke loose. Another thing I've noticed is that the school curriculum is more intensive and consuming, but not necessarily more advanced. My kids are ahead of where I was at the same age, in terms of simplistic milestones like Algebra. They have perfect GPA's. I sure as hell didn't. But the curriculum is more superficial and more based on drill work, worksheets, and computer busywork. They write more papers. That's good. Their papers are written to fill out a thing called a rubric, which is a glorified worksheet. That's bad. I recently found a copy of my 12th grade public school math textbook. More than half of the problems are proofs. Today there are no proofs. The proliferation of homework merely gives the illusion of a rigorous curriculum, and robs kids of the time that they could spend learning interesting things or just having fun. I learned things like programming and electronics while in high school, during the time when I was not doing homework. </rant>

hguant 11y ago
I nearly failed out of high school and college because I spent my time on things I found more interesting that classes - computers and journalism for the most part. The skills I learned outside of my studies have been more useful by far than anything I learned in a classroom. I feel like we've pushed people away from the kinds of self directed learning that really stick with a student towards the easily quantifiable "no student left behind" style of learning.

jtcond13 11y ago

"hours of nightly homework, daily sports practice and band rehearsal..." Maybe adults should stop telling teenagers that their performance in these things matters that much? Sports / Music are great if you enjoy them, and learning the high school curriculum is important, but outside of the top 1%, there's little reason to compete in these tournaments.

deleted 11y ago
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nradov 11y ago
The theory is that participation in sports and music will be the crucial factor that gets those teenagers admitted to elite colleges. There's some truth to that, but probably not quite as much as many parents seem to think.
- jonnathanson 11y ago
  There is a common misconception that elite schools want "well rounded" students. In fact they want well rounded student bodies, composed of extremely lopsided students who excel in individual domains. It is far better for your child to be a world-class swimmer, for example, than for her to be a participant in swimming, tennis, student government, the school newspaper, etc. Parents urge their kids to take up as many extracurriculars as possible in the hopes of creating the impression of well-roundedness. Students resent it, but they bear the burden because they believe their parents know what they're talking about. Add to this the unfortunate reality that not everyone gets to be world-class at something. What do you do if you don't excel at any one thing? Work your ass off to create the impression of excelling at as many things as possible. It's a shitty treadmill to run. But what's the alternative? Excellent grades are a given; they are basically table stakes. So above and beyond great grades, you need some sort of extracurricular presence to burnish your college applications. But your chances of admission are basically a crapshoot at that point, so you pile on the extracurriculars in an attempt to get more darts to throw at the board.
  - pizza 11y ago

akhilcacharya 11y ago

I've been reading these sorts of articles for nearly 10 or 11 years now, and it's always been from the same people - the NBC, NPR, NYTimes reading upper-middle class LAC graduates who send their kids to top universities. These sorts of attitudes were unheard of when I was in middle and elementary school, and existed but shunned in my high school. Granted, I did not go to the most competitive high school in the state, but I do often wonder how well these sorts of articles actually translate to the vast majority of students and families who go to places like NC State, where you do not need any real extracurricular involvement to get in.

altonzheng 11y ago

Success can mean different things to different people. Nowadays, most of us just implicitly default to career as being the source of success. We should be encouraging students to practice more self-reflection on their personal values and what it means to be successful. Maybe it's rare that a high school student would have that level of self-awareness, but I think relaxing the workload is only a stop gap solution. There will always be ways for students to stress and work hard to get a leg up in the admission process. I think much of the stress is not from the workload, but from comparison with peers. Most of us are taught not to compare ourselves to others, but in todays competitive world, how can you not? I think if we help students spend genuine time in meditation and reflecting on what's meaningful to them, it would greatly help reduce social comparison and consequently stress. Of course, a course like this would be difficult to standardize...

robg 11y ago

Yes.

11thEarlOfMar 11y ago

I'm late to the discussion, but my kids go/went to Irvington. What the article does not mention, which I feel is material to the content, is that 70% of the students at Irvington are Asian, and most of those have immigrant parents. The majority of those parents work in technical fields and have advanced degrees in science and technology. This is material in my opinion, because the demographics of Irvington do not represent the demographics of the US, which readers may not realize.

JacobAppCow 11y ago

To quote Mark Twain "I would not let school interfare with my education" (pun intended)

thsealienbstrds 11y ago

I am not a doctor but I suspect that it has a lot to do with our physical limitations. I think a big impacting factor from the adjustments made to the program is the fact they created study groups. Many students are socially isolated, that is by itself something that creates anxiety and depression. Being in a competitive environment without social supports doesn't help. Human beings are social animals, we need physical touch and proximity to survive. Even just having a conversation with friends and family is something that generally relaxes people. Sure, it may not always be the case but if you ask me, human beings have evolved in a way that we have become very dependent on eachother's physical presence for our mental/physical well being.

jamery 11y ago

I'm a little late to this discussion, but i'm a senior at irvington right now, and this article is bs. No teacher gives only 20 min of homework a night, and all of my non-ap teachers have still given me homework on the weekends this year.