Reforms to Ease Students’ Stress Divide a New Jersey School District | Hacker News Reader

Reforms to Ease Students’ Stress Divide a New Jersey School District

nytimes.com

23 pointspavornyoh23 comments

I think it's strange to see this sort of conflict crop up as a cultural, racial division. Providing time to goof off, unwind, relax, and release tension isn't really a "dumbing down" of curriculum.

Hyper-competitive atmospheres, based on an immersion in a perpetuity of dictated, goal-oriented projects, where objectives and achievements are assigned, and not chosen, without any opportunities for... (dare I say?) "fun" won't provide for memorable experiences that last beyond childhood. This sort of thing voids the personality, in my opinion.

A childhood of constant, unrelenting cerebral challenges, and compulsory learning, is going to produce some real fuckin' jerks down the road, wouldn't you say?

Not to mention a sense of superiority and arrogance when it comes to the metrics which measure success in those challenge. I'd say it already has, particularly easy to see in our very own engineering crowd

Have you ever been stuck between a bunch of tiger moms? Chinese culture in particular for American born kids is just different.

A good friend in college was driven to the point of nervous breakdown by the constant pressure and impossible standards.

Combine that with a bunch of people affiliated with Princeton, and you get a bunch of hyper-competitive people fighting over everything from violin tutors to homework quantity.

I live maybe 5 miles from the township mentioned in the article, and my township is quite similar. I'm white, and in 2nd grade I was placed into the advanced mathematics class where most of the students were "asian-americans". I loved being able to do more advanced math, because it was interesting and the teachers were really good at making it fun to be smart. For the 10 years after that I would end up 2 years ahead of the "average" curriculum. This was normal for advanced students. We took Algebra in 7th grade, Calculus in 11th grade. I was actually probably below-average in the range of students I was classed with. It sounds like a cliche but I didn't really ever do homework, but got A's on tests, so I would end up with B's and C's and since there were no grade requirements for advancement, my teachers always recommended me for the highest next level class because they actually interacted with me and didn't just sign off on the grade percentage.

I have to imagine it was because my parents were very laid back, but I never felt pressure to do better than I was doing. Everyone goes to college where I live, so no one really worried about that. Some kids had parents that wanted them to go to Ivy League schools so they had to work harder, but it's not like the school made it difficult to succeed if that was your goal. You chose your own classes in high school and could test into almost any AP class if you went to the teacher directly. I only bring up high school because I can't remember any time before that when anyone would have stress from how much work they have to do in school.

Reading the article makes me think their school district is like ours, which I would hesitate to call "hyper competitive". Kids are still kids. Bad parents will always be bad parents. The school exists to help people learn, and if you learn faster than other people the school should support that. Maybe my experience is not common, but I'd bet almost anyone who went to my school would say they got exactly what they wanted out of it, whether that was an Ivy League college admission or just a coast through graduation.

I'm not sure where I was going with this but I just wanted to point out that being challenged intellectually from an early age doesn't make you a jerk or hyper competitive.

I know many people who graduated from this school district....

"What white middle-class parents do not always understand, she said, is how much pressure recent immigrants feel to boost their children into the middle class."

This may be a great general quote, but should not be applied to this town. Immigrants moving here are not poor, not "off the boat". West Windsor is a township with mostly upper middle class people (Median Income per 2010 census was $156,110[1]) and a very high number of people with advanced degrees per capita (41% have graduate/professional degree as of 2013[2]), most of these immigrants came here with advanced degrees. People are not moving here to get ahead, they are already well established in the upper middle class. Houses are insanely expensive in West Windsor and Plainsboro, you will find people selling 3 bedroom condos in the 600k range, this is a town with a long commute to NYC or Philadelphia.

There are plenty of people of all races on both sides, I think the author is taking some liberties to up the page view count.

There likely is a backlash from a tiger mom like segment, but this article seems like a NYT reporter just trying to get something out on the heels of the recent Atlantic article[3] on the kids in Silicon Valley being so stressed at school they committ suicide.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Windsor_Township,_New_Jer...

[2] http://www.west-windsor-plainsboro.k12.nj.us/common/pages/Di... p. 10

[3] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-sili...

One of the parents in the article complained about an anti-intellectual movement taking off. Yet he would do well to consider the scientific method: there is lots of research on cognitive development, and more could be pursued. Why don't parents, particularly in the STEM-centric Bay Area, consider the academic research results, and the scientific method? Yet the answer is clear to me: value systems.

The more interesting and powerful kind of anti-intellectualism is STEM-centrism. The same people who complain about lack of academic rigor demand that we gut the study of literature, art, music, theater, social sciences, etc. so that students can use the time to factor more equations and compute more integrals instead.

This is also down to value systems: I was raised in one that says education is meant to produce well-rounded intellectuals and good citizens, and "they" say it begins and ends with increasing the price of your labor in the marketplace.

That's a bit of a mischaracterization, my understanding of that position isn't that the arts don't have value, but that the "general Ed" requirements tack an extra year onto an undergrad degree, and have little more purpose than to enrich the university. There are many countries, without extensive general Ed requirements, where the norm is three years for a Bachelors degree.

My experience was; returning to undergrad to get a cs degree, and completing the course work for q double major in math. Then being denied the bs in math due to unsatisfied gen Ed requirements. I appealed asking to use previous courses from a previous degree as substitutes, but was denied. So I got a minor instead. The decision to not allow the subs was completely arbitrary and buracratic.

In the US, the job training program that doesn't "waste" your time with general education is an associate's degree.

Where bachelor's degrees are required, it should be because the additional requirements (like critical thinking and communication skills, command of English, breadth of knowledge outside your chosen field) are actually important. Perhaps it isn't, but it should be.

In my personal example, the requirements were 4 auditorium style humanities electives. Where is the value to the student or anyone BUT the university in those?

I'm pretty sure honors grads from England or Australia would be offended by your equating they're degrees to AS degrees.

Indeed, auditorium lectures are a terrible way to teach humanities, that's why expensive and highly selective private schools have a claim to providing a higher quality education. Those classes are taught in discussions of 18 kids and a professor around a conference table. This is expensive, but there's no reason it should be restricted to the wealth or intellectual top-10% as it currently is. Just public opposition, driven in large part by the STEM crowd.

Germany at least has a 13th grade. I expect the burden of general education is simply shifted to high schools. You can make a C average and graduate high school in the US while barely literate; I expect that's not the same in England and Australia. I know that in Germany, smart kids fail Gymnasium classes routinely: like college, to pass you have to have actually learned something. In my experience at a very good public high school in the US you had to be brain dead or not trying to make less than a C+ in most things.

One of the possible side effects of a focus on success above all else is a crippling fear of failure; reports of stress and mental illness in grade school are mirroring reports of total breakdowns in college, often over things that aren't significant at all. The problem is that we're telling these people that failure is not an option, that if you fail now it ruins you. The more we say it, the more true it is, as students race for the A+. It is, after all, an arms race. However, we miss an important lesson, that failure is inevitable and even important. Some venture capitalists will not fund someone who hasn't failed 3 times before, because they know that failure is a function of both effort and environment, and a failure followed by more effort shows that when the environment lines up the entrepreneur in question will still be putting in effort.

This is a correct and under-appreciated point, but it's going to be very tough to convince people of this when they continue to hear stories about how certain "top" companies only want people from certain schools(https://hbr.org/2015/10/firms-are-wasting-millions-recruitin...) and are actually looking at college / SAT / ACT grades(http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/31/jobs/31gpa.html?pagewanted...) in their hiring decisions.

The thing is, it's not "dumbing down". You can become a brilliant mathematician, or chemist, or musician; but if you are entirely lacking of everything else (communication skills, resiliency, maturity, independence, happiness) you'll miss out on a lot of opportunities in life, and it'll cost you dearly.

Children need to be encouraged to learn; but with the carrot, not the stick. Otherwise you're just creating broken humans for the salvation of your own ego or ideals of "success".

Both groups are acting rationally, but their behaviors are based on different premises. The "relax" group values reducing the risk of suicide, burnout, and future psychological problems. The "push harder" group is responding to the (completely real) pressures to compete that get more serious all the time, pressures that tell them their children will become part of the precarious segment of society if they don't. The former group "should" be listened to on a health basis, but their ideas suffer from a collective action problem, so the latter group is probably going to win out one way or another (even if things like homework or whatever gets banned, they can always step up things like tutoring or extracurriculars outside school.)

The latter is willing to chance suicide or psychological problems in exchange for the reduced likelihood of future career failure. I think the way to deal with a Gordian knot like this is to convince everyone that it's actually pro-career success to have people step back, pursue creative activities, etc. Convince them that:

- Napping is a productivity booster (recent article on HN talked about this one.)

- Many jobs in the future will require creativity, not just memorization or technical skills (personal chefs, gardeners, high-end nannies, pilots, publicists/marketers, artists, entrepreneurs, and tutors as Tyler Cowen and others have suggested.)

- Lack of exposure to "play" ideas will limit possible inputs that could help with everything from game and UI design to business strategies. We're in a highly specialized society, but cross-disciplinarity is becoming more important every day.

- Many jobs of the future will require both technical and social skills (http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-best-jobs-now-requir...)

The single minded focus on pure academics is missing the bigger picture. The "push harders" need to learn that.

> What white middle-class parents do not always understand, she said, is how much pressure recent immigrants feel to boost their children into the middle class.

The professions are not middle class. A very large proportion of the parents of these pressured kids would be disappointed if their children only reached the middle class.

> “They don’t have the same chances to get their children internships or jobs at law firms,” Professor Lee said. “So what they believe is that their children must excel beyond their white peers in academic settings so they have the same chances to excel later.”

The parents of these kids are also well aware that they need to be better than an equivalent white kid to get into an equivalent college, or into an equivalent professional programme.

I thought America believes in meritocracy.

Also, every student should have the opportunity to participate in the music and arts programs. Art is for everyone, not just the few who were forced by their parents to play from birth.

Anyone who claims that not having the most stressful, rigorous environment around for children is going to lead to a "dumbing down" needs to take a serious look at themselves, and what they want to subject their children to. Maybe CPS should take a look as well.

CPS = child protective services?

If yes, why?

Pushing your kids to achieve and holding them to high expectations is a good thing. It's not child abuse assuming that's what you meant by CPS.

If some kids can't hang, that's life. We don't need to regulate that away.

I realize that hard work and grit and the grind are out of favor today but making schools less rigorous is foolish.

Disclaimer: son of immigrants

It's great to see rote grade-grinding (in HS, no less) mistaken for achievement, and rampant credential-grubbing seen as the path to material success & respectability. It's exactly that kind of mindset that for 300 years has made the USA the place it is today.

Disclaimer: actual American

I wasn't around for all of the last 300 years of US history as you were it seems, but I suspect the current aversion to doing work and things that seem hard would make many prior generations of Americans cry or potentially laugh at us.

I was born here in the 70s and even I see a massive attitude shift. I wonder what folks a generation ahead of me think.

Actual American. Ha ha. That's rich.

No. There's a huge difference between pushing them and creating a unhealthy environment. And this "survival of the fittest" in grade school bullshit needs to stop.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com