Response to Race to Nowhere

*Let me just preface this post by saying it's not exactly "rooted in evidence" as Mr. Bolos and Mr. O'Connor generally prefer. It is more of my response to the documentary, "Race to Nowhere" in the context of our school.

The documentary, "Race to Nowhere", catalogues students, teachers, parents, and experts in education across the United States about the increasing level of stress among teens. Teenagers are not only over-scheduled and over-worked, they also face incredible social pressures to look and act a certain way.

The overarching question of the movie is: Where does all this lead? We take all of these classes and activities only to look good to colleges, none of this guarantees "success".

The messages our school and colleges send about managing this kind of stress are at odds with each other. Our school advocates for a well-balanced lifestyle and yet there is that unspoken stigma against taking the lower level classes. Not to mention, colleges recommend to take the most challenging courses offered while also being well-rounded members of our community, leading in sports and the arts, and giving back through volunteer work.

And you need to look pretty. It is high school, after all.

How are, as teenagers in all of our hormonal rages, expected to know how to deal with all of this pressure and stress? It's easy to talk about cutting some of it out...but when everyone seems to be going at the same pace, it feels impossible to slow down. 

It reminds me of a piece we read at the beginning of the year by Rob Reich (a faculty member at Stanford University) in which he quoted William Deresiewicz (former English professor at Yale). According to Deresiewicz, these Ivy League groomed kids were growing up to be "really excellent sheep" - we know how to follow the rules to get places, but, for example, are we really learning how to think critically?

We're jumping through all of these hoops to look like the perfect applicant to college so that we can go to the right college and look like the perfect applicant for a certain job so we can make the right amount of money to buy the right house...and so it goes on. It's an exhaustive series of conforming with an outcome we can't predict.

I don't have any solutions but I wonder in what other ways you see teenagers being affected by these kinds of pressures? How do you see it affecting the future?