Clearly, there is a large pool of students (the majority) who are “just achieving” or even “underachieving” but that’s not what we’re talking about and one set of problems does not invalidate another. Furthermore, the more overachievers overachieve is the steeper the gradient of what Sir Ken Robinson calls “educational inflation.” The overachievers set the bar and the higher they raise it, the harder it is for anyone to achieve anything at all and that’s a big problem.
So, with that disclaimer and, at the risk of still sounding elitist and irrelevant, let’s talk about the struggles of overachievers.
Ashley gets mostly A’s and an occasional B but she’s really struggling and failing in Math. Ashley’s mother graduated top of her class—valedictorian, 10 extracurriculars, Head Girl, the works—and Ashley cannot be anything less! Getting less than straight A’s is a reflection on her mother, it is a waste of her mother’s investment of time and money and it makes more real the possibility that Ashley will not be successful in life. She’s heard it all before.
Darrien’s father gets his report card from school. He doesn’t even look at Darrien’s average, which is a high B. “You placed 10th in the class? How? What do those 9 people have that you don’t have?”
Zanielle is an A+ student, active in extracurriculars both inside and outside of school, well-read and an absolute perfectionist. Zanielle’s brother goes to a school where merits are awarded freely. You get a merit just for answering a question correctly in class. By the end of the school year, Zanielle’s brother has 15 merits on his report card and, by some stroke of luck and a lot of hard work, Zanielle has 6—all because of that one teacher who actually believes in giving merits, but of course, not without effort. Zanielle earned those merits and she was proud of them but her dad says, “Why couldn’t you get as many merits as your little brother?”
Those are slightly altered versions of real-life experiences that students have shared with me. They highlight the root cause of a lot of children‘s overachieving and perfectionism — parents.
Now, I have no intention of villainising parents. No blame games here. In fact, although I have many students who don’t, all of the students in the scenarios mentioned above have pretty good relationships with their parents. Most days, Ashley even considers her mother to be one of her closest friends. None of the parents mentioned above is a bad parent. They do not push their children to overachieve because they are cruel but rather because, at the heart of it, they’re scared. They have cultivated a mindset of scarcity and fear. They believe that this mindset is realistic and that they have a right to push their child and to view things the way they do and, if I really stand up and step into their shoes, I might be inclined to say they’re right.
These parents live and work in a world where resources are limited. College places are limited. Opportunities are limited. In the working world, good jobs are limited, positions of responsibility are limited, honor is limited and, in the minds of parents, and eventually their children, all of these things are related. All of these things hinge on one thing—success in school. Scholastic success is like currency: the more you have, the more you’re worth and the greater your chances of exchanging that currency for success in the real world.
This has been a frightening reality in my teaching experience. Burnout, once a term used to describe frazzled corporate executives, is now a phenomenon with which high school students are far too familiar. By the penultimate year of high school, they’re done, spent, exhausted. Their performance starts to decline and that just leads to more pressure from parents and some less than understanding teachers.
Karelle was an unusual case. She was always quiet but she was smart. She got high B’s in my class and sometimes A’s. In one exam session, a teacher thought she was cheating—which she wasn’t and would never! The teacher confiscated her exam paper, told her she wouldn’t be allowed to finish and that she would get a zero for that exam. Karelle thought about how that zero would cause her average to plummet. She couldn’t focus on anything else. This was her first paper for this exam season and after that, she did not attend any more exams. She couldn’t. She saw all she had worked for all her life in school going down the drain just like that and she snapped. There was no coming back. She was never herself again.
Karelle’s situation is special because Karelle’s parents never really put pressure on her to overachieve. The pressure always came from Karelle herself. It is important then to note that even if parents are not pushing their children to fit into a narrow mould of success, there are still extrinsic factors like social media, the school system, other students and even teachers and administration that can make students feel forced to meet or even exceed a certain status quo.
In the Jamaican school system, students are typically required to sit at least 8 subjects in their secondary school exit exam, CSEC. Some of these subjects they choose and others, like English and Math, tend to be compulsory. However, in the midst of rising uncertainty in the job market, limited spaces at colleges and sixth form programmes and limited opportunities for scholarships, some students just want to do a little extra just to push themselves over the edge, ahead of the curb, just to secure their space in the world, just to be sure. So some students will sit 9 subjects. Other students find loopholes and start sitting 10 or 11 subjects. It has metastasized to the point where the students who I work with who are sitting 9 and 10 subjects are the norm, while the students choosing to sit the required 8 are now considered average or even low achievers. Coupled with that, they participate and multiple extracurricular activities and reach out for positions of responsibility and even make time to volunteer just to secure their space in the world, just to be safe, just to be sure. This is the educational inflation we were talking about.
So what are the repercussions?
• Poor mental health and self-destructive behaviours
• Stress and burnout
• Comparison which leads to endless competition, jealousy, discouragement, low self-worth and envy
• Strained relationships between parents and children
• Aversion to failure and inability to learn from mistakes
• Narrow definitions of success — definitions that do not prioritise happiness or health
• Dishonesty / loss of integrity — students, parents and teachers cheat or cut corners to get ahead
• Productivity loss and increased inefficiency
In South Korea, the Suneung exam which students need to sit in order to enter into college, is being more and more criticized for bearing these repercussions. Over the years, Suneung has become ever more taxing on students because the pressure is high in the work world. Unemployment is rising and one of the best ways to stave off unemployment is to get accepted into one of the three prestigious “SKY universities.” Since it’s only three universities and students and parents are constantly upping their standards, the competition is getting more and more intense. But even graduating from these top universities is no guarantee that you will get a well-paying job or any job at all and that takes an even greater mental toll on students.
Here’s an excerpt from a 2018 BBC article:
Dr Kim Tae-hyung, a psychologist working in Seoul, says: “Korean children are forced to study hard and compete with their friends.
“They are growing up alone, just studying by themselves. This kind of isolation can cause depression and be a major factor in suicide.”
Globally, suicide is the second leading cause of death among young people, but in South Korea it is the number one cause of death for young people aged between 10 and 30.
The country also has the highest levels of stress among young people aged 11 to 15 compared with any other industrialised country in the world, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Dr Kim says the pressure in Korean society to go to a good university and get a good job begins early.
“Children are feeling nervous from a very young age. Even first-year elementary students talk about which job pays the most.”
More and more, this is becoming a reality in many pockets of the Caribbean and I’m sure, in many other places.
So how did we get here? Maybe after the Great Depression, maybe after the 2008 Recession. I couldn’t tell you.
The bigger question is: how do we solve it and how do we recover?
My honest answer: I don’t know.
Saying “just do your best and don’t compare yourself to others” can sound like a farce because the world is going to compare you to others so you have to protect yourself. Prioritizing happiness and health sounds like a fairytale in the midst of rising global uncertainty. It’s hard to tell parents and children to focus on happiness in a dominant culture of scarcity because it takes cash to live and the truth is that a certain minimal standard of living is necessary for happiness.
Even though I don’t have all of the answers, here are some things I know to be true:
• Students need emotional security at home. They need to know that the love of their parents is not based on their how successful they are in school but that they will be supported and loved whether or not they are high achievers.
• Children need strong work ethic from home. Teach them how to do chores at home and do them well. Involve them in problem solving at home and teach them financial literacy. Training them at home will help them to do better in school. Moreover, the training they get at home will teach them skills and life lessons that will prepare them for the adult world and will prove more valuable than anything they could learn at school. (Take it from me!)
• Students need to be allowed to fail and learn from it. No browbeating. No name-calling. No comparison to anyone else. Just: Where did you go wrong? What could you do better next time? When and how do you plan to make these changes? Done. Move on.
These tips will help to build emotional, social and mental resilience that will truly help them to be prepared for life in the midst of any circumstance.
What I know is this: We can’t control the world but we can control the qualities we build in ourselves and our children to cope with the world. Packing more and more pressure on students to achieve in preparation for an uncertain job market is like adding layers and layers of raincoats on a child in preparation for possible heavy rains. If it doesn’t rain very hard or doesn’t rain at all, the child is resentful that they had to spend all that time being hot and sticky and uncomfortable and probably developed heat stroke in preparation for something that never even happened or wasn’t even as bad as people made it out to be. If it does rain however, no matter how many rain coats they have on, it will only be a false sense of safety. They can’t just stand there in their many raincoats. They need to learn how to navigate the puddles, how to find shelter, how to keep moving despite the rain, how to turn the rain into an opportunity. Pretty soon, they realize that the raincoats barely mattered and they probably should have focused on learning the skills to handle rain instead of cloaking up to hide from it when it came.
No plummeting job market, no low employment, no high cost of living can overcome a child who has been trained to be a confident, self-sufficient, self-assured, resilient, responsible critical thinker. That training starts from the home and that training is deeply rooted in unpopular wisdom and unconditional love. That child, when they face unemployment as an adult, will be more likely to work odd jobs, turn to entrepreneurship and seek out help and advice until they make it. That child will make better decisions, decisions that will help them to be truly successful in every sense of the word.
Miss Education JA 