ChildrenUnnecessary Anxiety About Academic Success
A recent story in the Boston Globe described the anxiety being experienced by a group of parents waiting to hear if their young children were going to be accepted by the "top" kindergarten programs. The logic was that the best kindergarten leads to the best private elementary school which leads to the best secondary school, then the best college, and, ultimately, the most successful life. Only one problem with this logical progression. There is no significant correlation between grades, schools (even graduate schools) and life success. It is simply an alluring fantasy that mollifies parents' desires to ensure that their children will be happy and successful. It is my impression that this anxiety about the best education has intensified in the past few decades in response to a number of factors: increasing technical aspects of many careers, the predominance of college educated parents combined with the frequent desire of wanting children to exceed parents' success, guilt on the part of dual-career and single-parent families who are trying to compensate for their lack of time spent with their children.
Regardless of the reasons, parents refuse to face the reality that getting your child to the best schools simply does not ensure the "good life". One of the main reasons for this is that being an excellent student requires a set of skills that play a minimal role in the real world. In fact, the only career path that does seem related to grades and level of college is being a college professor. Obviously, the skill requirements overlap.
I am not saying that education isn't important. It's just that there are many other factors that influence success in the real world which are not reflected in grades and that going to the best schools only means that you will probably land a higher quality first job. After that you are on your own and an entirely different set of skills, pretty much ignored by education, will begin to determine your long-term success.
Parents tend to believe life is linear, that there is some kind of a straight line from how a child behaves and performs and what that child will be like as an adult. Some of this is the fault of my own profession, which historically claimed such falsehoods as our personality is formed by age five or most of what we will learn in life occurs in the first five years. The former is pure bunk! While there are some characteristics that endure over our lifetime, we have clearly learned that people continue to change throughout the life span. As for the amount we learn at an early age, of course when you start with a relatively empty reservoir, the highest percentage will be from the early filling process. But, with regard to knowledge, it is not what we learn in the first two decades of our life that will primarily determine our outcomes, even if it were to represent as much as 90% of all we'll ever learn (which I doubt). It is that last ten percent that has the maximum influence and the bulk of that learning takes place in the third decade of life, after graduation. Some of this reflects our society's obsession with youth and lack of respect for the cumulative wisdom of life experience.
There are many types of children who are not going to be great students but who have the potential to be very successful adults: highly active; questioning/challenging; narrow interest; poorly organized; very creative; hands-on learners. Some skills that are typically critical to success as adults such as interpersonal skills and leadership capacity are barely touched on in most schools. Most important, children need to enter the adult world with a desire to learn or to be successful or with a willingness to take risks and accept mistakes. Schools tend to reduce all these factors in children. In fact, many of the top schools are the worst culprits because they are so incredibly competitive (and often elitist), that they poorly prepare their students to be effective in the real world. And while the top graduate schools may teach the maximum technical knowledge, they rarely teach the skills required to actually carry out one's profession.
Why do parents, whose own lives are filled with all the twists and turns and unpredictability that characterizes all of us, believe that their children's lives will operate in straight lines? So your child didn't get into the school of your choice (this also applies do the young adults currently waiting to hear about college and graduate school acceptances). But maybe the number three or four choice that you end up at is the place where you meet a professor who has a special impact on your life, or a friend (or that special someone) who changes the course of your life in ways you can't possibly predict. Meanwhile the anxiety of parents about school acceptance and academic performance often has such a deleterious impact on children that it undermines the very objective of trying to ensure that your child is happy and successful. Lighten up parents. You are making this whole process too serious.
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