I'm not sure where this belongs, so I'll try here...
Caught between a brutal meritocracy and a radical new progressivism, a parent tries to do right by his children while navigating New York City’s schools.
I grew up in the Sixties. I was a white, middle-class kid living in suburbia that still verged on rural -- no dense neighborhoods, no sidewalks, "downtown" was a gas station and a little mom & pop market, and there were still little farms down the street we lived on.
The public schools I attended were "good enough" -- I was a bright kid, got good grades, encouraged to think about college, from both family and teachers.
I didn't attend preschool or kindergarten. It was only in my first weeks of first grade that I realized that classmates had, but I didn't feel like I'd missed anything. I've always been introverted, and I was good at occupying myself when not at school or doing chores. My childhood summers in that suburban town seemed endless, spent in entirely undirected play and exploration, tramping through woods and fields, splashing around in streams with nets and buckets, chasing bugs and watching birds.
I attended college at a Midwestern land-grant school where room + board + tuition totaled $2,500 my first year. It was the college of my choice, with a good reputation in the field I'd decided to go into (computer engineering), and I was never concerned about getting in -- it was a state school, and as a resident I only needed a C average to be admitted (which wasn't a problem).
What the author of that Atlantic piece described sounds like sheer hell to me, for all involved. I don't think the kind of hyper-competitiveness that author experienced with his son -- in preschool, for goodness' sake! -- serves US society well. I mean, I do get that NYC is not semi-rural Connecticut, so by it's nature it's a more competitive place. But setting kids on a path at two freaking years old to be worrying about their academic future seems unhealthy, and frankly counter-productive. Kids need to feel able to explore and make mistakes, and for those mistakes not to loom so large as to truncate their futures. Not everyone can or should want to be a "world-class something". Simple happiness is a worthy life goal.
It's hard not to feel like all of this is what capitalism was wrought upon us. "You are the pile of money you can (or cannot) earn." How disturbing.
Caught between a brutal meritocracy and a radical new progressivism, a parent tries to do right by his children while navigating New York City’s schools.
The Atlantic said:
I grew up in the Sixties. I was a white, middle-class kid living in suburbia that still verged on rural -- no dense neighborhoods, no sidewalks, "downtown" was a gas station and a little mom & pop market, and there were still little farms down the street we lived on.
The public schools I attended were "good enough" -- I was a bright kid, got good grades, encouraged to think about college, from both family and teachers.
I didn't attend preschool or kindergarten. It was only in my first weeks of first grade that I realized that classmates had, but I didn't feel like I'd missed anything. I've always been introverted, and I was good at occupying myself when not at school or doing chores. My childhood summers in that suburban town seemed endless, spent in entirely undirected play and exploration, tramping through woods and fields, splashing around in streams with nets and buckets, chasing bugs and watching birds.
I attended college at a Midwestern land-grant school where room + board + tuition totaled $2,500 my first year. It was the college of my choice, with a good reputation in the field I'd decided to go into (computer engineering), and I was never concerned about getting in -- it was a state school, and as a resident I only needed a C average to be admitted (which wasn't a problem).
What the author of that Atlantic piece described sounds like sheer hell to me, for all involved. I don't think the kind of hyper-competitiveness that author experienced with his son -- in preschool, for goodness' sake! -- serves US society well. I mean, I do get that NYC is not semi-rural Connecticut, so by it's nature it's a more competitive place. But setting kids on a path at two freaking years old to be worrying about their academic future seems unhealthy, and frankly counter-productive. Kids need to feel able to explore and make mistakes, and for those mistakes not to loom so large as to truncate their futures. Not everyone can or should want to be a "world-class something". Simple happiness is a worthy life goal.
It's hard not to feel like all of this is what capitalism was wrought upon us. "You are the pile of money you can (or cannot) earn." How disturbing.
