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Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?

nytimes.com

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Re: Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?

#91

Post by PhasmaFelis »

fiatmoney wrote: post #12
danharaj wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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% "int…

I'm not sure what you're trying to imply, speaking of subtext. Are you saying that Asians ("certain subpopulations") actually are helping each other cheat? Or just that the elites think Asians are cheating? And, in either case, the elites want to address the problem of Asian working harder than their kids by encouraging all kids, presumably including their own, to work less?

Either way, I don't see an argument against the article's main thrust, namely "working children into depression, anxiety, and burnout is bad."

Re: Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?

#92

Post by jsprogrammer »

littletimmy wrote: post #39
logicchains wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I'm with you in not expecting stuff from people, but surely as a human you have a right on earth. Who gave the ones before you the right to own the planet and the right to make you work if you want to live on it?

No one has the right to make you work. However, enough work must be done to allow you to exist.

Re: Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?

#93

Post by altonzheng »

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...

Re: Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?

#94

Post by hackercomplex »

analog31 wrote: post #68

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…

I enjoyed your rant. I think that some of it resonates with what Chomsky has written about the "disciplinarian culture".

Re: Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?

#95

Post by jonnathanson »

nradov wrote: post #81
jtcond13 wrote: post #71

"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.

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.

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.

Re: Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?

#97

Post by askafriend »

meric wrote: post #47
icanhackit wrote: post #42

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 did…

Read HN. Write code. Play games. Eat with family & friends. Repeat. Thank you, universe.

Sounds like a really chill life. What more do any of us really need?

Even the founders of Google won't be remembered in 200 years. This isn't to be negative about their accomplishments but just trying to put their massive, incredible accomplishments into perspective.

I work hard at the things I care about. I make sure I'm experiencing the things in life that I'm fascinated by. I explore. And I will die. And it will all be pretty great because on a long enough time scale, your position on the socioeconomic ladder is worthless, and at the very least unrecognized so why bother obsessing like so many seem to do? Perhaps scaling back the obsession is healthy for us as a community. We can hold it as an important value to work hard and create good things in the world that will have impact, but too often this turns into an intense obsession for some explicit outcomes.

Re: Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?

#98

Post by frutiger »

cetacea wrote: post #41
swiley wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously it only works on yes or no questions.

Yeah, so the "law" as stated in the Wikipedia article is not correct.

> Like all similar "laws" (e.g., Murphy's Law), Betteridge's law of headlines is not always true.[3][4]

From the article.

Re: Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?

#99

Post by dogma1138 »

saint_fiasco wrote: post #48
dogma1138 wrote: post #46

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.

The excessive breadth comes at the expense of depth.

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.

Re: Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?

#100

Post by aianus »

germinalphrase wrote: post #23
crazy1van wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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_ins...

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.

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).

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