Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?
1–10 of 141 posts
Re: Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?
#2Well, 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.
Re: Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?
#3The 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.
Re: Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?
#4Well, 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 chi…
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.
Re: Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?
#5The 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 peo…
> 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?
Re: Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?
#6[deleted]
Re: Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?
#7Well, 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 chi…
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.
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.
Re: Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?
#8Betteridge's law of headlines[1] says the answer is "No".
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
Re: Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?
#9HA.
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.
Re: Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?
#10I 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.