Making Your Kid Super and Using Education to Hedge Your Bets

Okay, admittedly, this is going to be a more cynical reflection than the title of the post suggests.

Two recent op-ed columns are worth reading back to back: Bill Keller’s The University of Wherever,” about the unsustainability of today’s expensive university educations, and James Atlas’“Super People,”on young adults with over-the-top lists of achievements for college and graduate school applications.

Atlas marvels at the resumes of young adults who have worked in orphanages around the world and founded farmer’s markets in lower-income neighborhoods, all while learning several languages and playing multiple instruments. He wonders, “has our hysterically competitive, education-obsessed society finally outdone itself in its tireless efforts to produce winners whose abilities are literally off the charts?”

Atlas’ column links the over-achievement of today’s young adults with “helicopter parents,” particularly mothers who give up careers to manage their children’s prospects for future economic success. But actually, he does more than blame the mothers, a familiar theme in many articles about what’s wrong with today’s children. The article subtly raises the deeper moral dilemma that this new “species” of “super people” represents. Even as wealthy young people have been striving to become hyper-competent to compete for fewer and fewer desirable positions at the top, those young people from the lowest socioeconomic levels suffer greater declines in verbal and math skills compared to earlier generations. So those with privilege focus on making sure that they’re able to access the best, while those without are less competitive even for the positions their parents might once have held.

Even the hopes we once held out about the “leveling” potential of the Internet are now fading. Maybe once we would have celebrated the ways that university professors could make their content accessible to those who otherwise would have little means to gain the insights of higher education. Access to outstanding university-level education could be accessible for more than just the “Super People” that Atlas discussed in his column. But NYT columnist Bill Keller seems a little more skeptical.

Keller talks about a Stanford faculty member who’s made his lectures available worldwide and for free. Stanford’s Sebastian Thrun offers a course titled, “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.” Keller notes that after the New York Times ran a piece about this offering, online enrollments in the course grew to 130,000. Certainly, this indexes a desire for outstanding education about a significant topic, and demonstrates that the Internet can make it available to those who couldn’t go to Stanford. But does it solve the fundamental problem of shrinking access to “the top”?

In Keller’s article, Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun is quoted as criticizing the traditional university as “insanely uneconomical.” After all, he says, he can provide “free” education to whoever wants it at a fraction of the cost (never mind the fact that Stanford is paying him to create this “free” content for those who are actually paying $50,000 a year to receive it in a classroom).

What’s interesting in Keller’s article is that this description of “free” university education gets examined in relation to the question of whether or not its offerings will undermine traditional brick-and-mortar schools. After all, he cautions, higher education remains one of the last of the desirable U.S. “exports,” a point on which he cites both Thrun as well as Stanford’s president. Sure, the Internet makes it free, these experts as well as the article’s author seem to suggest. Just as long as it enhances, rather than undermines, the pedigree of a Stanford degree. “We” in the U.S. need to maintain our space at “the top,” after all. Wow, are we collectively nervous about that. And rightly so.

It’s kind of funny how much Thrun, the Stanford professor, sounds like a grown-up version of the earnest Super People young adults Atlas reviewed. Can you imagine having 130,000 sign up for your college course? When he talks about wanting to make his course available “for free,” he sounds as if he is being generous and populist – until you consider the fact that the added value he brings to the university (even through “free” students auditing his class) actually, and maybe ironically, guarantees his own “spot at the top.”

We in the U.S. sure do love — and loathe — these stories of individual greatness. Sure, we all want fairness. But when it comes down to it, parents want whatever will give their kids an edge over others. We are profoundly competitive. Our current economic strife didn’t cause this competitiveness, but it certainly has brought it to the fore.

But as we focus our energies on competing, what might we be losing? If there are “winners” and “losers,” are we ok with the fact that we can no longer ignore the huge discrepancies between “winners” and “losers” that have a lot more to do with luck of birth than with giftedness, drive, or education? Or perhaps I should ask, how long will we be ok with this? Isn’t this fundamentally the opposite of the U.S. dream of a society of equal opportunity?

I feel like we as parents are so nervous about the future of our own kids that sometimes, we fail to see the ways in which that future is inextricably bound up with the future of *all* kids. Maybe not thinking about that inevitable connection, actually, has become a central strategy in how we’re hedging our bets. Because if we thought about it, we might have to change what we’re doing as parents. We might have to think less about “us” and “them” and more about shared futures and win-win (rather than win/lose) scenarios. And we just might have to examine our assumptions about what makes a kid “super” to begin with.

Question to Tiger (and all) Mothers: Why is leisure bad?

Everyone knows that achievement takes hard work and discipline.  You’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s claim that 10,ooo hours of focused attention on an activity separates experts from the rest of us, right?  But if there are 8,765 hours in a year, and children spend on average 3,800 or so sleeping (9 hrs/night) and 1,000 in school (6 hrs/day x 180 days), and even if they spend an average of 3 hours a day on homework (3 x 180 school days = 540) and another 3 hours developing expertise in the arts and/or sports throughout the year (about another 1,000 hours) and a couple of hours each day getting ready for school, getting transported to and from school, doing chores, and getting ready for bed (730 hours), then they still would have about 1,695 hours a year that they can spend in free time.  1,695 hours: more time than they spend in school!!  More time than they spend in extracurricular activities!  Isn’t that terrible?!!  It seems that recently, the parenting mantra has been in favor of zero free hours: no free time is seen as a good thing.

And thus it’s no surprise that some parents have celebrated Amy Chua’s new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (excerpted in the Wall Street Journal on January 8 2011), which pits the Eastern emphasis on discipline against the Western focus on self-esteem.  Much of the review of this book has focused on the issue of discipline, and of parental means of controlling both children and their time.  Hannah Rosin in the Wall Street Journal agrees with Chua, noting that in the U.S. “we believe that our children are special and entitled, but we do not have the guts or the tools to make that reality true for them.” In other words, we’re not doing enough to get them into the special activities that would help to cultivate their unique gifts. Sociologist Annette Lareau has a term for that approach.  It’s “concerted cultivation:” the approach that tends to be accepted among middle and upper middle class families, and that tends to see children as a project to be disciplined through time.

One of Chua’s enthusiastic supporters put the issue more baldly by focusing on the specifically aggressive and insulting “tools” of controlling children that’s associated with the Tiger Mother approach, lamenting, “American parents have no courage to put welts on the backs of their children.”  Given the fact that Chua’s article and book tend to trigger this kind of response, it’s no surprise that many other parents have taken Chua and her supporters to task for her over-the-top efforts that have occasionally crossed over into child cruelty.  The Times’ Lisa Belkin calls Chua’s book a stinging tribute to discipline with what Belkin suggests borders on Mommy Dearest tendencies.

The debate over Chua’s parenting styles illustrates, once again, the conflicted feelings we have about parenting and about such issues as child-centered versus parent-directed activities.  As the Boston Globe’s Joanna Weiss wonders, we might ask:  should we browbeat our kids into practicing so that they learn the benefits of discipline ?  And if we do so, are we doing it because we see them as weak and in need of our help (the Helicopter Parent approach), or strong and able to handle pressure and challenge (which is what Chua argues)?  Either way, we want to see ourselves as in charge, and our children as benefiting from our parenting labors.

But what if we’re not fully in charge?

What if we’re living through a seismic economic shift that is leaving fewer and fewer routes to what middle class parents have been conditioned to think of as middle class success?  It may be that this lack of our ability to control our children’s environment is what drives parents to anxiously want to schedule up all that “wasted” free time.  Perhaps, as Laurie Essig writes in The Chronicle, the real issue motivating Tiger Mothers is a fear that their children won’t enter the upper or upper middle classes of their stressed-out parents.

It’s easy to take credit for discipline gone well.  It’s not so easy to acknowledge the fact that kids with fewer privileges need not only disciplining parents, but also a lot of luck, to make the odds work in their favor.

Maybe part of the problem, then, is that across the economic spectrum, we’ve been conditioned to see our children through the prism of our own financial insecurities: as future workers who need to be prepared for the precarious workforce that they’ll inhabit someday.  In David Brooks’ critique of Chua’s book, he takes exactly this position (He thinks it’s fine that Chua prefers to prepare her kids to excel, but he thinks that homework and the arts are easier than preparing kids for their eventual role in team-oriented workplace environments.  For that, he says, things like playdates and sleepovers teach important skills, and Chua’s shortchanging her daughters by forbidding them).

But what if the workplace wasn’t the only model for what it meant to be a successful person?

What if our goals as parents included not only helping children to manage their time according to the dictates of an increasingly time-demanding workforce that asks adults to mold their free time activities so as to fit into their work schedules?  What if we valued music and the arts because they make us appreciate our humanity, and because they help us to value our own voices, expressions, and experiences, and in turn make us more capable of viewing ourselves as participants in democratic action?

As we as a society continue to move more toward embracing the dictates of the workplace in ever-more places in our lives, we can lose sight of the fact that there is an alternative to seeing ourselves, and our children, as workers destined to serve the interests of those who pay us for our labor.  We are more than our economic utility.  Contemplating that simple yet profound idea is an important outcome of leisure, and one that can help our children to envision other ways of valuing lives and gifts beyond the place that such efforts might garner them in the economic realm.

So maybe leisure or a lack of personal discipline isn’t the enemy after all, just as building self-esteem isn’t the only solution.