Last week my book
club read the debut novel Everything I
Never Told You, by Celeste Ng. Ng recounts the story of Lydia, a
Chinese-American teenager who dies in mysterious circumstances. Lydia is the
daughter of a mother who was unable to reach her own goal of becoming a doctor,
and of a father who struggled unsuccessfully to be accepted by others. Predictably,
both parents try to relive their own lives through Lydia.
I reacted to the book less favorably than many
reviewers have, finding it maudlin and overdramatizing some unimportant parts
of the story. In thinking about the book later, though, I saw it as being a perfect
example of a tragic current problem, the enormous pressure put on high school
students to compete for admission to the best colleges and to excel in other
aspects of life. In the current Atlantic,
writer Hanna Rosin describes the pressure in “The Silicon Valley Suicides.”
In particular, she writes about the high rate of suicide at Gunn High School in
Palo Alto.
That article struck
home with me. In the early 1980s I was a research assistant in the Stanford and
the Schools study (published as What High
Schools Are Like: Views from the Inside). We grad students spent many hours
“shadowing” high school students in Palo Alto, talking with them and their
teachers, and sitting in on their classes. Though we never met their parents,
we easily inferred what they were like.
My own results
showed a sharp contrast between the education of college-bound and other
students. Those who were not considered college material were tracked into
appealing classes with warm, caring teachers. Foreign languages and other
subjects were taught with entertaining curricula that did not appear to be "dumbed down." Classrooms for this group
were colorful, and the students seemed to be enjoying themselves.
In contrast, the
college-bound students were tracked into very challenging classes that seemed boring to me. The students themselves seemed only mildly interested in the
science or math; they were totally focused on getting high grades that would
lead to admission to Stanford or other top schools, and eventually to
high-paying jobs. Many of them took classes that began before 8 A.M., so they
could end the school day early and take part in extracurricular activities to be added to their portfolios. One student I followed, a personable, very intelligent boy, swam in the school swimming pool at 7 every morning, then put in a long day of classes. When I asked him about his long-term goals, he seemed surprised; he shrugged and answered that he studied hard so he could go to a good college, and then to graduate school. However, he had no special career goal or other interests.
That research
took place before the Silicon Valley dot-com revolution, but in the years since,
pressure on students to achieve at any price has gotten even higher. Rosin
writes of anxious, depressed boys and girls who attempt suicide by swallowing toxic doses of pills
or throwing themselves onto train tracks. If achievement is this overvalued, both parents and schools have much to
answer for. Learning should be rewarding in itself, not just a route to more learning.
