During my senior year of high school, around college admissions time, a friend of mine made possibly the weirdest confession I’d ever heard. She said that sometimes she’d get so stressed out that she would drive to Target and hide under the clothes racks where she’d watch shoppers’ feet passing by and imagine she was a kid, two feet tall. She’d smell the new clean clothes and run her hands through them. It was her way of calming down.
A couple of weeks ago, The New York Times published an article called “Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?” They reported that pressures from heavy workloads are resulting in poorer health, both physically and mentally, and stunting development among students of all ages, taking one high school in Fremont, CA, as the primary example. This particular school, which has fallen increasingly under the influence of the ‘success’-based mindset of Silicon Valley, was found to have 54 percent of its students showing symptoms of clinical depression, 80 percent with anxiety.
The deterioration of student health may well be one result of the condemning nature of various little-l laws which govern our day-to-day actions. Inherent in the average high school experience and the college admissions process are innumerable laws, e.g. Thou Shalt Play At Least One Varsity Sport To Develop A Well-Rounded Character, and Thou Shalt Crush Thine SATs. Students feel pressured to take multiple AP classes, and the never-closed Word document entitled “College Resume” grows longer every week. When I was in high school, I went to my church’s youth group once, just to put it on the list. I volunteered as a poll worker on Election Day. After school, I’d go club hopping (à la A Night at the Roxbury, but) from art club to French club to cross country practice; I could only attend five percent of the meetings for each of my three different honors societies. I joined math club. I don’t even like math. Today students may begin school at 7:30AM, and by the time they wrap up their many extracurriculars, they might not make it home till 6:30PM or 7. They’ve already had a twelve-hour day and haven’t even started homework.
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.
At this point, it might be easy to grab the nearest pitchfork and rally against the parents — but easy there. Many parents set impossible standards for their kids, standards that crush. At the same time, many parents don’t even know what AP classes are unless they’ve had an older child run the gauntlet already. My own parents never pressured me to spread myself as thin as I did. Regardless of the parents’ role, the drive for success remains; it begins early, in the narrow halls at school, and never really slows.
Yet instead of empowering them to thrive, this drive for success is eroding children’s health and undermining their potential. Modern education is actually making them sick.
Here’s where I begin to diverge. Modern education isn’t making students sick; modern education is highlighting the sickness already inside students; it’s drawing it to the surface. Students suffering from “school induced” depression are competitive, insecure, and self-justifying by nature (like all of us). Many commentaries about high school stress and the pressure of college admissions fail to view high schoolers as actual people. Even in Times article referenced here, the title is about “children,” and while the article certainly does make mention of elementary schoolers, its primary case studies involve high schoolers who, though young, are too often dwarfed by culture at large.
Given their youth, high school students may be more susceptible to buying into the illusion of a self-made man, but they are not merely swept along. My own AP classes were filled with the most cutthroat group of headstrong individuals who were already well-versed in the ways of Duck Syndrome, the devastating and infamous descriptor of a person who seems to be gliding above the water but furiously paddling beneath the surface. We can’t ignore the fact that students, while certainly victims of a dysfunctioning system, are also participating in it, giving it life. Rather than hang out after school and get satisfactory Cs and Bs, many students take the initiative of signing up for AP classes and fifty different clubs.
Currently making its way around America’s top 40, “Stressed Out” by twenty one pilots expresses how we create laws for ourselves in attempt to give our existence meaning, aka the behind-the-wheel perspective on the drive for success:
I wish I found some better sounds no one’s ever heard,
I wish I had a better voice that sang some better words,
I wish I found some chords in an order that is new,
I wish I didn’t have to rhyme every time I sang,I was told when I got older all my fears would shrink,
But now I’m insecure and I care what people think.
This song is compelling partly because it’s not blaming stress on parents or a school system; the finger of blame points ultimately toward the narrator’s own insecurity.
Yesterday The New York Times’ Frank Bruni added some thoughts to the conversation in an article entitled “Rethinking College Admissions.” He writes that colleges are “realizing that many kids admitted into top schools are emotional wrecks or slavish adherents to soulless scripts that forbid the exploration of genuine passions.” Yes. He advocates for a number of great systematic changes for college admissions, which altogether should make the experience of high school much better. On his list of changes: placing less emphasis on AP classes, making SATs optional, and limiting the number of activities a student can have on his/her resume. Unfortunately, however, limiting a student’s activity doesn’t address the reason why the student felt the need to do so much in the first place.
Why have students been playing the game of high school zombieland and high-intensity college admissions? The answer is fear—both the fear of rejection and the fear of failure. These fears fuel the unquenchable drive for success that manifests in students and parents alike—fear drives the narrative that if a person does all the right things, he or she is entitled to and will receive everything he/she needs to be satisfied in life. There’s a certain security in looking at a checklist, no matter how long, and thinking, “As long as I check these boxes, I get in.”
But no matter how many changes are made to the college admissions system (hopefully many), students will continue to be rejected from colleges. They will be told: You cannot have what you want, you cannot be who you want. You cannot wear that college sweatshirt. No amount of new rules can edit out the possibility of rejection from college, the ultimate worst-case scenario for a competitive high school student.
Unarmed love is the only way to combat fear, the only rival for a rejection letter. More than three-day weekends and homework limits, students need to be told every day that they are loved regardless of whatever logo is on their sweatshirt, because they are. They are loved with a love more generous than their GPAs can merit, more complete than their bookshelves full of awards can express. Which is something they probably tried to tell me at youth group, that one time I went.
11 comments
David Zahl says:
Jan 21, 2016
This post is so good I may have to drive out to Target myself.
Michael says:
Jan 22, 2016
This was a good read, thank you for putting in the effort. I might throw out one last conclusion: in addition to affirming and re-affirming our love for our children in spite of whatever college sweatshirt they may or may not don (excellent metaphor, by the way), perhaps we should make it a practice of warning our children that some of those college sweatshirts are a siren’s call to a life of anxiety, ladder climbing, and general toxicity to the soul. Parental love gives the child a safe place to find shelter, but let’s not forget that the ‘success’ metric of our economic society offers a different love (one that is false because it is an ever-raising performance bar) and we ought to teach our kids to discern the difference.
Jennifer says:
Jan 24, 2016
This may only be tangentially related, but as I read this I was also thinking about another issue that plagues our kids today, causing them a lot of stress: they are afraid of making final decisions. Choosing ONE thing means NOT choosing all of the other things… and after years of being told “you can do/be ANYTHING, that is a tremendous weight. I just graduated 2 recently (from high school) and I watched mine (one at least!), along with some of their most brilliant friends, become paralyzed at the thought of “making the wrong choice.”
For Christian kids, this often sounds more like the pressure to “stay in God’s will.” It made me sad, because this should have been the most exciting time of their lives. Instead there were abundant tears and anxiety attacks. Which is interesting because the parents I knew (including myself) were all scratching their heads in confusion, wondering why the kids were so stressed, trying to understand and empathize and guide. It must be a message that is pervasive and communicated in ways we don’t even realize. But our kids are reading it loud and clear.
Tracy says:
Jan 25, 2016
The constant resume building (and that can be with many different activities, or a single minded professional-level commitment to one’s “passion” — the violin or the soccer field) is driven by a somewhat more pedestrian fear as well: the fear of not having a solid place in the middle class. As those available spots shrink in number, parents and students scramble to where the possibilities seem more sure. Better colleges, better internships, more opportunities. The lack of trust that one is going to be “okay” — drives the anxiety and despair. For Christians trust may properly be placed with God (though watch how we valorize achievement ourselves) but for the rest of the world, all people can think to do is try to locate a spot near the top where the loss of a job or a serious illness will not be utterly devastating. People are acting somewhat rationally, responding to what they perceive to be the precariousness of life.
Tracy says:
Jan 25, 2016
I’d add that among the teens and young adults I know, “follow your passion” is the single most frightening thing they hear. If those of us who were older might recall, we weren’t in touch with such lofty things at 15. We were mostly trying to get our homework done, finishing our paper route and wondering about the sock hop on Friday. For plenty of people, there is no single overwhelming drive — and why should there be? Plenty of people are generalists, with a little interest in a lot of things, and a little talent in a variety of areas. Suddenly, that seems like a sin. Or a curse.
KG says:
Jan 26, 2016
All I can say is amen. Mine was (and still is) going to Target and smelling all the candles.
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