>how did we manage to screw this up?
Not a parent, but as someone in that generation - I almost feel like it’s the natural evolution of how stuff was done when we were in school, just made worse with always-on technology.
20 years ago, when I was a high school freshmen, I wasn’t supposed to have my cell phone in class (or even turned on during the school day. I consistently broke that rule.) and grades were still generally handed out in person. But by the time I graduated, we had pilot online classes, were often emailed grades, and there was a database for the county that could be accessed to see GPA. None of this was in real time, which was better, but the building blocks were already there.
But to me, this isn’t really about technology. It’s about culture and society that, in my opinion, is extremely unhealthy. As another commenter says, much of this can be seen as “school X does this so we have to follow” and parents are often very competitive about their children’s performance, whether it is in school or sports or drama club or whatever. Those of us raised in the era of “everyone gets a trophy” (but the unspoken part of that is that you still know what the “real” trophies are) and lessons for everything (I was in gymnastics and drama most of my life and took golf, tennis, cheerleading, piano, and voice lessons at various times in my childhood/early teens - and that was modest compared to some of my peers), were often preconditioned or encouraged to achieve certain things — whether they were ultimately important or not. I’m not surprised that kids raised that way would also raise their own kids with similar expectations, now with the additional horror or real-time access not just to grades, but location and other stuff.