Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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 harder than I was pushed? And make no mistake, I was pushed.
Because I can see that my class -- the middle class -- is vanishing, so the expectations of my generation are no longer valid. Get an OK degree in something worthwhile and work hard. Gone. I literally followed exactly the same education and career path as my father. That's gone.
We don't know what the future expectations will be, so we aim as high as possible. I don't know if this is a good thing, but it seems like what's happening. Not to mention, I grew up in a family culture that held education to be one of the highest values, so we were inclined to be demanding about education even before all hell broke loose.
Another thing I've noticed is that the school curriculum is more intensive and consuming, but not necessarily more advanced. My kids are ahead of where I was at the same age, in terms of simplistic milestones like Algebra. They have perfect GPA's. I sure as hell didn't. But the curriculum is more superficial and more based on drill work, worksheets, and computer busywork. They write more papers. That's good. Their papers are written to fill out a thing called a rubric, which is a glorified worksheet. That's bad. I recently found a copy of my 12th grade public school math textbook. More than half of the problems are proofs. Today there are no proofs. The proliferation of homework merely gives the illusion of a rigorous curriculum, and robs kids of the time that they could spend learning interesting things or just having fun. I learned things like programming and electronics while in high school, during the time when I was not doing homework.
</rant>
(Apologies for the late response)
This was a big issue for me when I entered college. We did proofs freshman year of high school as part of geometry, but they were so simplistic that I didn't know how to write a good, real proof. Then, when I got to college math, I struggled for a long while figuring out what I needed to do to properly prove something rigorously.
After the initial frustration with learning how to write a proper proof, everything got better.
At the same time, if we feel our kids are smarter they should be able to figure out their way out if they have good basic skills ( leadership, teamwork, co-ordination, communication, passion etc).. So we as society should focus on such skills and not expect every kid to make multi billion company out of college room..
This attitude (which I hear all the time, not just from you) reminds me of what's been going on in East Asia for decades now: the ultra pressure cooker life-defining once-a-year college entrance exam system and the accompanying high pressure studying environment preceding it (and much like in SV, students do kill themselves from stress). Students in these countries (Japan, Korea, and Taiwan in particular from what I can tell -- not so sure about China) are pushed so hard because frankly it is correct that the college you go to largely defines your QoL for the rest of your life (more so if you are in the humanities vs engineering).
You often work at a corporation for life, and they take the vast majority of employees as new grads. The best corporations often have cutoffs based on the school you attend. Online registration sites for recruiting info sessions will show up as full if you say you attend a mediocre college, but will show up as having seats open if you say you attend the University of Tokyo.
Whether this perception of what I call the "scarcity of success" for students is real or not in the States, I frankly do not know. But I like to say that perception is the reality by which you live. If this is the perception that parents have, then their behavior in response to this perception is logical. They behave this way because they truly want the best for their children (Tiger mom behavior and Asian immigrant parents driving their children towards stable high paying professions like medicine is a direct result of their own struggles as immigrants and lack of clarity into their future financial stability).
Also,
From article: "Many college students struggle with critical thinking, a fact that hasn’t escaped their professors"
From parent: "Another thing I've noticed is that the school curriculum is more intensive and consuming, but not necessarily more advanced.
I used to be quite creative in elementary school. Loved to draw, tinker with electronics, make stuff, etc. But then I "woke up" in middle school and for the first time in my life learned to study, extremely hard. I went to a private school in Silicon Valley that (according to a recent thread in my alma mater's mailing list) was described by one parent as "[being] somewhat notorious for pushing the kids too hard." I had 6 hours of homework every day (100% of it was rote drills as parent says), after 2-3 hours of sports and extra curriculars, every day. I did this for 6 years, 7th through 12th grade. I graduated near the top of my class and was accepted into one of the best colleges in the country. I largely continued this behavior in college.
At one moment of clarity in my mid 20's, I realized that I had lost the creativity that I once possessed. I excel at figuring out how to optimize and perform in a defined system. I am now quite terrible at thinking outside of predefined problems. Looking back now, I realize that I would have made quite a good banker or management consultant (which is where most of my peers ended up after college).
I think this is related to the article saying:
Many college students struggle with critical thinking, a fact that hasn’t escaped their professors
I recently moved to Southeast Asia from America. There's a stark contrast between the two places in terms of economic development and quality of goods. People here aren't any less happy. If anything, they feel happier in the poorer or lower tech places I visit.
I feel like my American education and citizenship grant me so many opportunities compared to most that I meet here. Still, I don't believe we differ in the maximum happiness that we can experience.
This isn't to say wealth and education are unnecessary or bad. I'm just adding my observations to challenge the assumptions that more wealth or education will lead to more happiness, justifying "short" term sacrifices in happiness for a few years.
I don't know what it would be like to move my family to Southeast Asia. How do they treat women? I suspect that it varies from country to country. Are their education systems better? I've heard that Korea is everything bad that we've been talking about in this thread, and a friend of mine from Singapore said: "I prefer the American schools. There are fewer beatings."
My problem is that I actually like education as an end unto itself. That's my culture. I just don't want it to kill people, or burn them out.
It seems like some societies are willing to teach people to be unhappy to achieve economic success. Singapore and South Korea are good examples of this. I question in which direction America is headed.
Small-print: Successful life not guaranteed. Neither is happiness but we didn't specifically mention that.
For me the depression stemmed from existential nihilism paired with a lack of control of what I had to participate in. It taught me, once I was fully in control of my own time and energy, to be careful with who I spent time with and what I was doing with my time. Not in the Get-Shit-Done sense, more in the Will This Shit Affect My Zen-State. Often the answer is Yes so instead I play games, drink beer, read, hang out with my partner and friends and occasionally make cool things.
I won't be remembered in 200 years, few people will, but at least my time was mine.
Problem is you can't opt-out fully because you have to live and for that you must pay banker tribute via rent.
Paradoxically I'm doing OK by society's standards. By valuing personal space and control over it I decided to get into the property game with my partner earlier in life, enabling us to purchase an inner city property before their prices exploded. Now I'm watching my friends work their arses off to live further away in the 'burbs. Often success comes down to timing...and an aversion to bullshit social rituals can also help.
Problem is you can't opt-out fully because you have to live and for that you must pay banker tribute via rent.
No rent, but you point remains: gotta work to live.
I don't think social rituals are what is breaking most people, it's economic rent and exploitation by money issuers. On that let's be clear - this is not the kids' fault.
The irony is coupled with your statement about buying property. You don't pay rent, we pay you.
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.
Sometimes though there are some nagging doubts that creep in. I worry that the balance I'm comfortable with doesn't quite line up with what society seems to expect, or at least idealize. Sometimes I feel like I "should" be doing more, but whenever I try to push myself harder I just end up expending a lot of energy spinning my wheels. I worry that something unforeseen and external could pop up and disrupt my current situation, or at least make it unmaintainable. I guess that's life though - adapt and enjoy.
When the situation changes, I'll live as the situation has changed.
I know one day it will happen, that is why now is the time to live life as it is now, or later I'll regret why I didn't take the time to enjoy what I have now.
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.
They get this through debt issuance, primarily via land prices. Fiat money costs absolutely zero to produce, they give it out freely and in return you pledge to give part of your labour for 30 years.
If land prices were far lower we'd all be working 3 or 4 days a week. Employers wouldn't have enough workers. They'd be paying you most of the value you produce as they bid for you against other firms. And you might not work for them because you no longer have to spend most of your labour on banker tribute for the right to exist.
Land value tax is the answer. It would replace income tax, removing the regressive tax on labour and punishing economic rentiers.
I hope for the sake of my kids we can win this one.
http://www.henrygeorge.org/pcontents.htm
When people hear about LVT their immediate reaction is "another tax". Realise that it would replace income tax (or at least significantly reduce it at the lower end) and also it would reduce the massive tax via land price ramping.
Right now the banks are getting our tax instead of it being ploughed back into the state, via debt issuance. And producing nothing of value for it.
Have a read of the link or many other sites on LVT.
I think we also need to deal with money creation by private banks. This has been an absolute disaster since it became effectively unconstrained with the end of the gold standard. (not that I'm a gold bug).
It's the issue facing our generation, and the next. Just look at SF where land prices have made it very expensive to live there as ultimately all productivity gains flow to land prices rather than to workers.
And to the guy who replied below you need to put some effort in I'm afraid:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
Basically you can't pass on LVT via rent.
I don't understand how this makes any sense, at all. If the town raises the property taxes on my rental, guess what, the rent is going to go up at least as much as the tax increase.
This is only true if the rent is based on the cost of the unit in terms of purchase price and upkeep. That's true in lower cost-of-living areas, but in expensive areas, the rent is high primarily because demand is outstripping supply, not because the cost of landlording has gone up. And if rent prices are not based on cost, then an increase in cost (which is what a property tax increase is) will mostly not be passed onto renters.
This is why house prices are just as insane in Silicon Valley as rents.
Rents do go up when wages go up (SF) and when there is speculation they rise but it's capped by wages.
He's claiming that a land tax would not be passed on to renters if instituted, because rent is being driven demand-side (what renters are willing to pay) not supply-side (cost to provide a house to people). Any attempt to increase rent would result in a lower demand by renters, meaning the market would fail to clear -- the rent would then need to be re-lowered.
But you are correct, that rent shouldn't be higher than purchase plus upkeep. In the event of a land tax, rent holds constant but upkeep increases (taxes); consequently, for the equation to hold, purchases prices (and thus land values) will fall.
And that's why this is so politically impossible to pass, even though it is considered the "least bad" tax economically. Land owners would see their assets sufficiently fall in value if a land tax were enacted.
They're not doing it willfully. They're doing it because they have no choice. Let's say the current average rent in Seattle is $1,500/month. Why $1,500, and not $2,000/month? Why are the landlords willfully cutting into their profit margins by not increasing rent? We both know the answer: because the current price is based on what the market can bear; in other words, it's based on the relationship between supply and demand. They can't arbitrarily decide to raise rents without risking losing tenants and having units go unoccupied.
Now, let's say the property tax increases a bit. Will that be passed onto the tenants? Well, can the market bear it? If no, then it won't be passed on. If yes, then why wasn't the rent increased before?
Like I said before, it's different in low cost of living areas. There, the profit margin on top of the costs is relatively small. The rents in that case aren't really based on demand, because supply in those areas tends to be very flexible, you can always make more housing to match demand. For a property tax increase in those areas, the costs will be passed onto the renters, because the primary determinant of rental prices is cost.
Isn't it amazing, all these capitalist landlords who could be taking a greater cut of their tenant's labour but somehow are not.
The advantage of the LVT is that in theory the market could bear the price increase because there will be a corresponding drop in the salary tax that most renters are paying. The idea is that the government effectively takes a large slice of the profit from rent, instead of it all going to landlords. The problem of course is that this creates a disincentive for landlords to invest in property, reducing supply, and now we go back to high prices because of market forces.
There is no simple solution to the high price of land, except by increasing supply or reducing demand. In other words, building more housing (which requires us to encourage landlords, not discourage them), or reduce the population. Just think, in a world with half the population of today, we would drastically reduce the percentage of salary devoted to housing. Not bad really.
...the decay of trade and industry was not a cause of Rome’s fall. There was a decline in agriculture and land was withdrawn from cultivation, in some cases on a very large scale, sometimes as a direct result of barbarian invasions. However, the chief cause of the agricultural decline was high taxation on the marginal land, driving it out of cultivation. Jones is surely right in saying that taxation was spurred by the huge military budget and was thus ‘indirectly’ the result of the barbarian invasion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_the_fall_of_...
History does not repeat, but it surely does rhyme.
No one with a clue is worried about anything "abrupt". Rebellion is literally impossible.
Did they put guns on Big Dog since 2011? What's changed? Good old UK had to stop the press reporting on it they were so flustered.
Your example proves my point. There is nothing to fear from the poor. They are completely checked and have no access to power whatsoever.
The other thing that's crazy is how ridiculously cheap the same stuff is in countries with lower land prices, like South East Asia. A nice apartment with a pool on the beach is 1/10 the price of San Francisco. The food is cheaper, services are cheaper, etc ,etc. Meanwhile, people living in South Eat Asia running online businesses can make the same amount of money in the American economy. The manufacturing thing is even more mind blowing. The cost to manufacture in a developed country vs China is on the order of 20x cheaper. When Big Box stores like Ikea open in China they struggle because they can't charge western premiums for the stuff they're selling because of domestic competition and they have to lower prices by 50%[1]. That would be totally impossible in a developed countries!
Someone should go through the whole cost structure of a developing country manufacturing operation and figure out the reason they are so cheap. My hunch is it would come down to incredibly cheap food, provided by incredibly cheap land prices forming a foundation for incredibly cheap everything else. Garlic growers in the California central valley say that the price that the Garlic gets delivered packed and shipped at the grocery store from China is less than what it costs them to grow it before harvesting.[2]
[1].http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1300942/ikea-last-cra... [2].http://www.wbur.org/npr/11613477
You can't steal from people on the breadline. Once they are above this you can by selling their own futures back to them (and dismantling the future for their kids).
Prices are set by credit. It's the banks.
The main drivers of developing countries costing more is going to come down to better infrastructure (which costs more money) and stricter regulation. Sure, being able to drink water from your tap, have a low risk of being injured at work, having high food safety and a strong social net leads to higher costs, but to most of us, it's completely worth it.
It could be different if "success" was actually a well-defined concept, and determined by hard work and intellect. But right now, success seems to follow more from a mix of randomness, networking (which is also partly random), but also from more or less insincere practices, like using charms and underhand business practices, fake-it-until-you-make-it behavior, and so on.
But this shouldn't surprise us, as, even in politics these days, not the person with the best argument wins the debate, but the person who puts the best spin on the topic.
On the other hand, the ideal person for the economy (on average, forgetting outliers like inventors) is a psychopath with a penchant for conspicuous consumption. Such a person is geographically mobile, able to dedicate his life to attaining wealth and power, and is also incapable of happiness. The normal among us, unfortunately, have to try live up to that ideal. Therefore, you see people spending very little time with their families, trying to earn more and more just to satisfy their need to consume. That is stressful! This is a form of mental sickness.
YES. The system we live in is sick.
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.
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.
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...
Money that is wasted may as well never have been used.
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.
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).
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't care much about you.
Maybe this is a terrible failing on the part of society, but from a pragmatic perspective it's much easier to change one's viewpoint than to change society. It can be surprisingly liberating to not expect anything from the world.
I think your first sentence is either logically vacuous or a sneaky way to disregard someone's emotions: Either you are stating that "feeling mistreated is the same as existing and feeling mistreated" or your clause "just because I was born" is putting words in this abstract person's mouth: "I feel mistreated but I am unjustified in feeling mistreated."
Like, your ideas are logically consistent: If you don't feel mistreated then you don't feel mistreated. If you can just stop feeling mistreated then you will be liberated from feeling mistreated. It completely sidesteps the issue: People feel mistreated for a reason.
Why not apply this logic to everything? "Just because I was born, people shouldn't saw off my leg at the knee". The gall of such entitlement! If only one adjusted to the viewpoint that their leg should be sawed off at the knee, they would have a much easier time! Does it sound absurd because I am exaggerating? I'm not really exaggerating that much: depression and anxiety can hurt so much that they drive people to kill themselves. How could such illness be anything but agonizing?
You call it reality, but it is not indifferent and impersonal like disease or a storm that sweeps one's home away: We are talking about people. People are intelligible to people. People are answerable people. People interacting with people changes the way people interact with people.
Feeling mistreated isn't a feeling; feeling bad is a feeling. We feel bad when we perceive something we interpret as bad happening to us. If we didn't perceive that action as bad, as "mistreating", then we wouldn't feel bad about it.
This is hardly a new idea; philosophical traditions like Buddhism and Stoicism are bad around the idea what what causes suffering is our perceptions of the world, and by changing how we perceive things (making fewer value judgements) we can increase our happiness with the world.
>You call it reality, but it is not indifferent and impersonal like disease or a storm that sweeps one's home away: We are talking about people. People are intelligible to people. People are answerable people. People interacting with people changes the way people interact with people.
It doesn't matter whether it's a natural disaster or people causing the issue: the point is that if it's not something that can easily be changed, getting emotional about changing it won't lead to a happy state of mind.
>Why not apply this logic to everything? "Just because I was born, people shouldn't saw off my leg at the knee". The gall of such entitlement.
If someone saws your leg off at the knee and there's nothing you can do about it, you'll have a less miserable time if you just accept it and move on than if you remain bitter about it.
These two sentences are logically inconsistent; if enough work must be done to allow you to exist, then that means someone must be made to work.
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.
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?
Stanford is 1/4 Asian, plus another 9% "international". UC Berkeley is about 40%, plus another 10% international. And as I said, it's about competition for the elite slots at those and similar places. Look at, eg, the student body composition at very "hardcore", high stress schools like Thomas Jefferson HS, or Gunn HS (recent subject of http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Why-are-Palo-Alto-s-ki... ).
The parents of students in that kind of environment are the intended target of this editorial. It provides them with a coordination point.
Either way, I don't see an argument against the article's main thrust, namely "working children into depression, anxiety, and burnout is bad."
yes, yes, and yes.
but there is one more factor:
Asians have way higher IQs than whites.
In the past 150 years in China there were 6 major wars.
1. 1850-1864 Taiping Rebellion (My grandmother's great-grandparents lived this.)
2. 1894-1895 First Sino-Japanese war (My grandmother's grandparents lived this.)
3. 1911-1912 Xinhai Revolution (My grandmother's parents)
4. 1926-1928 Northern Expedition
5. 1937-1945 Second Sino-Japanese war (My grandmother)
6. 1946-1950 Chinese Civil War
Four social upheaval movements:
1. 1919 May fourth Movement
2. 1958 Great Leap Forward
3. 1966 Cultural Revolution
4. 1978 Chinese economic reform
There were also 9 famines during this period with total deaths of 120 million people during this period.
I think these events have contributed to a certain set of attitudes in Asians in the two generations after 1970, i.e Hungry and humble, as our ancestors were during those times, literally; the ones who survived, anyway.
What the article does not mention, which I feel is material to the content, is that 70% of the students at Irvington are Asian, and most of those have immigrant parents. The majority of those parents work in technical fields and have advanced degrees in science and technology. This is material in my opinion, because the demographics of Irvington do not represent the demographics of the US, which readers may not realize.
We moved to one of the top ISDs in Texas years ago, ended up pulling our kids out and home-schooling. It was a hyper competitive, near-toxic environment. No thanks.
I have found the recipe for well-being to be pretty simple: good health, work I enjoy, good relationships, community, time to be quiet. Don't need much else, imo.
The Scandinavian countries are known for their extremely lax culture especially when it comes to child education, yet same discussions are present there.
Being poor is also making you sick. I wonder if it's more to do with our interpretation of sickness than with any actual change. I would still expect our kids to grow older than we ever where, but sure it doesn't mean they will be happy.
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...
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.
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.
I wonder what a society without that "drive for success" would look like. My first thought, maybe a little sad, is if everyone else didn't have that drive I might actually succeed.
I think that those kind of unproductive signaling games are done more by the middle and upper classes, always running as fast as they can to stay in the same place.
I think a big impacting factor from the adjustments made to the program is the fact they created study groups.
Many students are socially isolated, that is by itself something that creates anxiety and depression. Being in a competitive environment without social supports doesn't help.
Human beings are social animals, we need physical touch and proximity to survive. Even just having a conversation with friends and family is something that generally relaxes people. Sure, it may not always be the case but if you ask me, human beings have evolved in a way that we have become very dependent on eachother's physical presence for our mental/physical well being.
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.
I don't understand this statement.
Doesn't this mean it's a problem every developing nation will eventually face?
Wouldn't it be nice to have already figured out a solution by then?
There is a related thing called "fallacy of relative privation."
What was your point here?