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The stress in the US system is very different. Indian schools (basically the oldschool british system I grew up with in boarding school) are hard but not stressful. Performance metrics are clear and students know what they have to do. US schools have become strange minefields of nebulous collage prep. Grades are given, everyone gets As. So students are forced to pad their resumes is other ways. You don't see indian students picking sports based on whether they can make team captain. You don't see average Indian students participating in 4+ team sports during a given week.

I've talked to Canadian kids who, when caught using steroids, have said that their performance on the field was part of their entrance plan. They had consciously decided to take drugs not to become pro athletes, or even to win a scholarship, but simply to get into a proper university. Similarly, I haven't heard of many indian students taking "learning drugs". I heard an ivy league admissions person talk about the sports thing. She spoke of a boarderline case involving an athlete who had competed at the Olympics. He had failed to medal. THAT was part of the schools decision, whether they metaled or not actually mattered.

I rarely see others mention it but I have a pet theory that grade inflation makes school more stressful. When A's are expected, a single bad day can easily sink a semester of effort. Additionally, as you say, grades don't leave much room for students to distinguish themselves positively anymore. Student have little room to excel, but every day is a chance to screw up.

My son is a junior now in a very competitive high school, and they had to do away with valedictorian/salutatorian because the difference between that and, say, just top 5% would be a 99.6 vs a 99.4 in one class in the 10th grade. It was so stressful for these kids, like it even fucking matters long term.

I'd like to add to this.

For people who burn out in high school, that's usually your first experience with it. The first time is always the worst, whether it happens in high school, college, or on the job.

Once you've already burned out once in high school, twice in college (once before and once after switching your major), and hit your breaking point at a job or two (regardless of whether you switch jobs, or careers, or just take a long vacation, or just spend six months kind of just putting in time at your job before you're ready to really try again) ... well, burning out still sucks, but you kind of get used to it, you know how to deal with it, and you know that eventually you're going to pick yourself up again.

But man, that first time, you really feel like a failure, like you're never going to amount to anything, and like you'll never be able to try again.

The narrative is that it does matter long term- it supposedly defines which college you get into.

The biggest advantage to getting into an elite school is the networking. If your kid is making friends with the children of board members of Fortune 500 companies then they have a chance at the big leagues. Otherwise they're just clawing their way up to middle management like every other schmuck.

Of course even then it's a total crapshoot, but there's very little chance of that panning out in the state school.

> The biggest advantage to getting into an elite school is the networking. If your kid is making friends with the children of board members of Fortune 500 companies then they have a chance at the big leagues.

I wonder how the math works out on that. Realistically, I would only think so many connections could be made at such high levels for any given class of students.

How much does getting into the right college matter though? I'm not sure about the US system, but in Canada it doesn't feel like it matters all that much. Some schools are a little bit better than others, but it doesn't feel like a world of difference (at least when it comes to STEM). I've especially noticed this when interviewing candidates from various schools.

It doesn't really matter outside of fields like investment banking, parents (and college prep companies) place an artificial importance on it for the most part. In a tougher economy prestigious schools can provide useful connections, but in a bullish economy a degree from a regionally-known state school is equally valid.

It's not what you know, it's who you know. Even in Canada, a Waterloo grad is going to have much better connections then someone from the University of Northern BC.

Even that is only important a little bit. Excelling at a mid-tier university is completely FINE. It's so much harder to get into an Ivy League school now than when I was applying in the 90s; I'm not pushing my child to the brink for a tiny blink of undergrad prestige.

The 'arguing grades up' I always saw students doing seemed weird to me. But I was paying for school and ultimately just paying for a job-entry ticket so maybe I wasn't in the right mindset.

Wait, there's grade-inflation in HIGH SCHOOL now?

Absolutely and application padding began as early as the 90s when I was applying to colleges. It definitely was a thing back then but not as bad as we have today.

>The stress in the US system is very different. Indian schools (basically the oldschool british system I grew up with in boarding school) are hard but not stressful. Performance metrics are clear and students know what they have to do. US schools have become strange minefields of nebulous collage prep. Grades are given, everyone gets As.

Can you please point out the schools giving away A’s? My high school and the colleges I attended were certainly not that way. Not even remotely. I’m going to get a masters soon and I want to go to this type of school.

Who said anything about given away As? I said that having As was a given, not that it was easy. I do know of schools where 80+% of graduates have strait-As on government exams. They earn those through constant prep. My former highschool is now like this but nobody complains because almost all of their students go to university. (There is always that one kid each year who has mandatory military service to attend in his home country.)

Indeed. My education was no free ride!

What on earth are you talking about? You think the average American student is participating in 4+ team sports during a given week?

There are hundreds of millions of people around the world who's parents are spending their life savings to send them to a broken down public school, and anything short of an A+ means abject poverty (I mean real poverty, not the American "I can't afford my iPhone bill poverty") for another generation of their family name. My dad is the only person in his small shanty town who made it out, and he studied 16 hours a day, 7 days a week - all to achieve a decent middle class salary and drive a Toyota Camry. I was an exceptionally gifted student thanks to him, graduated at the top of my class, and now, again, barely eek out a middle class life

Not to mention the societal aspect - in many Asian cultures anything short of an A and you're an abject societal failure and a generational disgrace. Western-raised people don't have a clue what that kind of pressure feels like.

Anyone who thinks American schools are stressful are completely delusional about how the rest of the world works. Americans have had life too easy for too long - depression is simply a symptom of an overly easy life. It's the same reason depression & mental health issues overly present in zoo animals.

Suffering and struggle are necessary for a fulfilling, happy life - the West hasn't been exposed to real suffering in over half a century.

> I carry 10Kg bag to school and has to do homework in 7 subjects, and get beaten by stick if I fail to do any of them separately by respective teachers, and has to spend time till 10pm after school (ends at 5 pm) at tuition to finish the homework.

That sounds more like pain, not stress. If you (or the you at the time, which is an important difference) can easily externalize your problem—i.e. blame the school for being stupidly strict, rather than blame yourself for not living up to its standard—then as much as it might be an ordeal to go through, it won’t really affect your psyche.

The concern here isn’t that school is harder; the concern is that school (and the way parents talk to children about school) is being treated with more seriousness than it deserves, and so the potential of failure at school is being seen—at least on average—as more of a personal, moral failing, an automatic source of shame.

Of course, children always treated some school environments this way—mostly high-cost private schools, intensely-competitive academic schools, and military academies. But this attitude seems to be spreading to all schools, and that’s a bit concerning.

Competition is way up now because the stakes are so high. When I was a kid, there was a spectrum of success: people who did well in school and went to college did well as adults, people who did a little well were a little successful, people who did average had average adult lives, etc. We are moving toward a bimodal winner-take-most world. Straight A’s plus good university in the right major and you’re set for life, but come up short in any way and you’re going to end up on welfare or homeless. That’s the message my fellow parents are telling their kids (I’ve heard it in person), and that pressure is the norm. The Middle Class bus only has a few seats left, and you need to do everything at 150% intensity during school to get a ticket.

Pain and fear of pain is stressful. I think people are trying too hard to dismiss the perfectly reasonable point that schooling used to be stressful in a different way, became more reasonable as we moved away from corporal punishment, but is now becoming too stressful again, just in a different way.

And a brief search suggests India has something between an extremely high and the highest rate of youth suicide in the world...

> Stress at schools? I hail from India and when I was a kid in 90s, I carry 10Kg bag to school and has to do homework in 7 subjects, and get beaten by stick if I fail to do any of them separately by respective teachers, and has to spend time till 10pm after school (ends at 5 pm) at tuition to finish the homework.

One person's suffering doesn't diminish or invalidate the suffering of someone else.

> they can feel like they can control people in real-world as if thy do a 3d character in their latest game

It's actually hilarious to me that you think this could possibly be true.

Anecdata. I personally know a person mid-30s that truly thinks life is exactly what you can see in the series Friends [0]. With almost all the unrealistic expectations promoted by scenes in that series. And that person sees any deviation from that as a failure in life.

And to be clear, we're talking about an educated person with a relatively successful life. But the expectation that real life follows "Hollywood" is still there. I started to doubt that everybody is able to draw a clear line between reality and fiction as long as they bask in that fiction for too long or at key moments in life.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108778/

What? I could very much see someone having that expectation at 20, maybe even at 25. At 30, we're already talking about a serious lagging in somebody's development as an adult (unless that someone was in jail/hospital the whole time and knows society only from TV etc.). At 35, I don't even know where to begin.

Your generation is teaching the current generation, so there might be an feedback/reinforcement effect, where the same ideology has worsening effects with each generation. Maybe our academic/educational culture is worse now than it was a bit earlier, because we've had more time to exercise it.

Stress is very different from physical things, like carrying heavy stuff or getting beaten. Pain, you just have to endure once and then it will slowly go away until the next time you receive pain. Stress accumulates. Forever. Getting stronger and stronger over time. If you can't deal with it it will devour you.

I can tell you don't know any kids if you think they're using G+.