Kindle Notes & Highlights
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July 17 - July 20, 2018
At What Cost?, I describe how, too often, schools readily turn to outside experts for solutions to their own identified challenges. In so doing, schools deprive themselves of the opportunity to work together not only to frame the specific nature of their own school’s challenges, but also, to generate their own solutions. Moreover, by turning to outside authorities, schools deprive themselves of the opportunities to grow and develop—to adapt—into their own real and lasting changes. While there is certainly room for outside consultants to help guide schools through their own adaptive processes,
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SOlve internally
Michaela’s hyperschooling—also referred to as “the full-time job of schooling”8—seems not only developmentally inappropriate, but also completely out of sync with what Michaela wants and with what is best for her now, as a twelve-year-old child.
Hyperschooling
As the applications to selective colleges have steadily increased while the admission rates at those same colleges have steadily decreased, the students competing for those few selective places feel more and more stressed and pressured—the effects of hyperschooling. Sadly, as we saw with Michaela, these effects are not just tolerated, they have become “the new normal.”
College admission
Feeling overwhelmed, unheard, and at times disillusioned, many students act out their feelings of frustration, anger, fear, and shame in a variety of behavioral ways. Some develop persistent symptoms of anxiety and depression. Others “shut down,” refuse to do their schoolwork, and some exhibit previously nonexistent symptoms of attentional disorders—failing to play close attention to details, making careless mistakes, difficulty sustaining attention, appearing not to be listening, not following through on instructions or finishing homework12—many students turn to alcohol and marijuana for
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Students
Consequently, many students not only absorb but wholly internalize overly competitive mind-sets, distilled from their parents and teachers and from the culture at large, that manifest as internal exigencies, or as expectations they must achieve.
Students
For reasons that will become clearer in the next chapter, many educators freely admit to overscheduling their students, to assigning too much work, and to not following reasonable homework guidelines. Others admit to “rewarding achievement over effort,” to “placing too much emphasis on grades,” to “over-focusing on the college admissions process,” to “not empathizing with our students,” to “adhering to old notions of academic rigor,” and, generally, to “expecting their students to think and act like adults long before they actually have those skillsets.”
Unfairness
Once they’re admitted, we instill our students with hope, and we promise them challenging academics, close student-teacher relationships, and a nurturing and supportive environment—and we mean it. Further, with their admission, we extend a seemingly equitable opportunity for a diploma, itself an implied “passport to a better life.” This is the parents’ and students’ aspiration, and it’s the aspiration for which we, as overseers of these schools, have pledged our support and have dedicated our careers. However, when our young students actually enroll, against our best intentions but driven by
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what happens to students
One of the major effects of all this pressure is that as the college competition intensifies, our younger students compete even more with each other to the extent that, ironically, everyone starts to look alike. They all have very high SAT scores; they all have numerous AP courses or, for international school students, have completed “the full IB”; they all have very high academic averages as well as multiple extracurriculars, numerous awards, and outstanding achievements. This “across-the-board greatness”105 reflects a sense of sameness that turns out to be the very heart of the problem for
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Everyone is the same
Anyway, in the fall of junior year, we had this all-class meeting about how to start the college process. While I had been expecting that meeting, it still made me nervous. Even though we wouldn’t actually be applying to college until the next year, there was something about having the whole process kick in an entire year earlier. I think everyone was like, “Oh my god … here we go.” It was like a big anxiety shift for the whole class. I remember thinking, “Are my grades good enough? Will I do well on the SATs? Have I done enough extracurricular activities? Should I do more? Should I take
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Application meetings
As an international school teacher stated during one of my conference workshops, “Kids are under pressure to be successful all the time, in everything: they’re trying to manage adult-like demands before they’re ready.” Another educator stated, “Schools reflect the pressures of the parents; schools are businesses, after all, so they must appeal to what their clientele want.”
Pressure
Another source of pressure derives from the common belief that one must earn top grades now in order to have the best opportunities later. While many parents and students maintain a balanced perspective on this basic tenet, some take it to an extreme where it can lead to maladaptive perfectionism characterized by “flawlessness and setting excessively high performance standards, accompanied by overly critical self-evaluations and concerns regarding others’ evaluations.”177 As one educator commented, “So many of my students have no time for the present; they’re always thinking of, and preparing
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Too soon
At the present time, “executive functions can be thought of as a set of multiple cognitive capacities that act in a coordinated way … as directive capacities that are responsible for a person’s ability to engage in purposeful, organized, strategic, self-regulated, goal directed processing of perceptions, emotions, thoughts and actions.
The brain
Finally, McCloskey accentuates that while all parents and educators naturally understand that students’ physical development is out of their direct control, many of the same parents and educators seem to assume that students’ brain development, especially in the form of executive function capacities, is well within their control, and that too frequently these young students’ compromised executive performances get attributed either to their unwillingness and resistance, or to their presumed disabilities.210
Executive functions
Not surprisingly, on standard intelligence tests, these admitted-but-now-referred students typically score in the high average to superior range of cognitive ability, and exhibit greater—but not pathological—difficulties in some areas of executive functioning. For example, they lack effective organizational skills, they can’t seem to manage their time efficiently, or they may struggle to balance competing academic and social demands. In some schools, these difficulties might not be so costly. However, in rigorous secondary schools, where being overscheduled and, for many, academically
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Executive functioning
For our purposes, it is essential that we remind ourselves that because of these still-developing neural structures, “much of a teenager’s response to the world is driven by emotion, not reason.”225
Emotion
Critically, this process of strengthening certain synapses and eliminating certain others is, itself, the very process of shaping and molding the brain for present and future functioning, and it is fully dependent on the environment in which each “brain” exists.
Synaptic pruning
What happens when their stress gets extreme, when the pressures build too high or too quickly and students’ initial “stress” turns to lasting anxiety? They shut down, but not necessarily all at once. Because many of these students lack the skill of expressing complicated feelings with words (many adults lack this ability, too!), they rarely just freeze or “stop dead in their tracks.” Instead, they tend to exhibit a “slow burn” characterized by more frequent expressions of frustration, disillusionment, and, too often, shame.
Slow burn
Finally, one administrator admitted, “If we actually gave in, and a developmentally reasonable schedule emerged, we might achieve a healthy balance for our students at the cost of our own distinctiveness; we fear that we might also lose our edge of excellence.”
No change
Poignantly, we can now see that these unhealthy but widespread practices at competitive schools around the world seem to serve a very important function: to protect the schools and the adults who work there. Caught in an intense predicament between the parents, on the one hand, whose demand for these schools only increases, and the selective colleges, on the other hand, that rely on these schools for high-quality applicants, we have had to develop a complex set of self-protective practices to keep our schools in business.
The reason why
All this information, from William Deresiewicz, from Lucy Hornby-Reuters, from Joyce Lau, from Ken Robinson and from a whole host of others, reinforces the reality that today’s higher education environment is frequently characterized as one big educational arms race.
Competitive entrance
I’ve learned that many of our behaviors also stem from fears; perhaps chief among them is the fear that our kids won’t be successful out in the world. Of course it’s natural for parents to want their kids to succeed, but based on research, interviews with more than a hundred people, and my own personal experiences, I’ve come to the conclusion that we define success too narrowly.
Success
We have put the educational cart before the developmental horse and, in so doing, have lost sight of key aspects of our most important responsibility: to foster our teenagers’ healthy growth and development, which includes their sound and balanced education.
Order of things
We seem to be forgetting that although many of our students look like adults, speak like adults, and even try to act like adults, they are not adults: they are early adolescents with their own developmental integrity.
Not there yet
Without a doubt, these developmentally minded changes, whether they took two months or thirty years to accomplish, are to be celebrated as the very kind of changes that competitive schools everywhere now need to make.
Changes
While many adolescents feel flattered, initially, by these grand adult expectations, they cannot sustain that adult level of functioning because they just don’t have the developmental capacity and readiness to do so. As these expectations continue, and as students keep trying to meet them, they show ever-increasing signs of stress: fatigue, anxiety, and depression, and the now-familiar cluster of behavioral manifestations including eating disorders, self-harm/cutting, substance abuse, and suicidal gestures.
Adult expectations
For many students, ironically, short-term efforts to avoid failure can actually interfere with their long-term ambition for true success. Recent advances in neuroimaging have shown, unmistakably, that avoiding struggle and failure can deprive individuals of important skill development—for any skill—including athletic skills, music skills, academic skills, and even executive functioning skills.
Importance of failure
In stark contrast to the emphasis on credentials and achievement, Coyle emphasizes “experiences where you’re forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them”332 as the ones that lead to genuine learning and success.
Value of mistakes
Essentially, by providing access to school-employed counselors, each school has indirectly said to its students, “We offer you these skilled clinicians. Make good use of them to make the changes you need to make in order to get back on track here.” Like so many other leaders who commonly err in this way,353 these educators have unwittingly made the mistake of trying to solve what you may now recognize as enormous adaptive challenges with insufficient technical solutions.
Quick fix
For example, many schools became coeducational during the 1970s; many have changed their admissions approaches, over time, thereby attracting students from different cities and countries around the world so as to admit an increasingly diverse student culture; many have adjusted their curricula to reflect various educational trends; some, as we have seen, have changed their schedules to accommodate adolescent sleep needs, and many have changed their physical features by constructing state-of-the-art athletic facilities, integrated math-science buildings, modern theaters, and spacious libraries.
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Changes
