Since I began teaching in 1998, Drake High has become more “academic”. You would think that from a teacher’s perspective it's good that students are working harder, doing their homework and caring more about their grades. But I see a dark side to it.

I see students who always want to talk to me about the grade they got (why can't it be higher?) but never seem interested in the subject of the class, or how they could improve their skills and understanding of the subject. I see parents who are the same way.

I see students with average skills who sign up for rigorous AP and honors classes for which they are not ready. Or, who attempt to sign up for them. Or, who sign up and then try to quit when the going gets tough. Or parents who encourage students to drop these classes because they are not getting "A"s.

Cheating and sneakiness is becoming more prevalent. (I try to structure my assignments to make cheating not feasible or unproductive.) Increasingly, parents intervene and defend cheating when it is discovered on the grounds that their children are under a lot of pressure and "need" high grades.

I see students showing visible signs of stress (tears, anxiety, depression) over grades. For many students, there is a general sense of joylessness at school. They tell me "I don't really like it, but I have to get good grades to get into a good college. You have to go to a good college if you want a good job. I need a good job to make enough money, so I can live well. My parents expect it of me and besides, I expect it of myself."

(Henry David Thoreau wrote: It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all is when you are the slave-driver of yourself.)

I ask these students how they like their lifestyle now. "Not very much... too much homework, stress, and competition. I don't get enough sleep, and I worry too much." I tell them that unless they change their attitude it's not going to get any better as they get older.

These are the teenagers that the Marin county psychologist Madeline Levine calls "empty", or "missing something inside." They are missing their sense of self. They are externally motivated (by parents, grades, recognition, etc.) and have little or no internal motivation.

Parents talk to me about college admissions in the most explicit and calculating terms – and I mean parents of 9th graders! A few parents seem to believe that the only function of four years of high school is to sort out who goes to which college. Even some parents who are teachers themselves believe this.

William Fitzsimmons, the Dean of Admissions at Harvard College, has called the students he admits "dazed survivors of some bewildering lifelong boot camp"! I'll bet a lot of other college admissions officers think this privately but don't say it.

Education is not supposed to be a race. It's not supposed to be a burden imposed by others. I want Drake students to be self-directed, confident, optimistic for the future, and grateful to have opportunities that billions of other people in the world never get. How can this be if they're motivated mostly by grades?

Why the anxiety?

Is there a shortage of colleges in America?
No - there are over 2,000 colleges and universities in this country. (Four thousand if you count community colleges.) Most of these colleges accept almost everyone. A few hundred are moderately hard to get into, and several dozen are extremely difficult. Nationwide, 70% of all applications to colleges result in acceptance. That means if you apply to several colleges including one that's easy to get into, your odds of getting in somewhere appropriate for you are pretty much 100%. No matter who you are and how hard you have worked in high school, there are places in college available to you.

Is the quality of teaching you find at the competitive colleges better than the teaching you find at the others?
Of course not. Professors at large and prestigious universities are researchers first, and their indifference to undergraduate teaching is famous. Many lesser known colleges have brilliant and inspired professors.

Do young adults learn more in college than they do in high school?
No. You learn more in four years at a good high school than you do in four years of college. I know because I’ve taught both. But if you don't believe me have conversations with an 8th grader, a 12th grader, and a college senior and see which two sound more alike.

Does going to a prestigious college lead to more prestigious and higher paying careers?
No! A well-known controlled study by Princeton economist Alan Krueger and Stacy Berg Dale of the Mellon Foundation showed that whether you attend a very selective college or an ordinary one has no effect on future earnings. They did this by examining the careers of young adults who were accepted by Ivy leage schools but attended less prestigious colleges instead. Those people did just as well as their Ivy-league counterparts.

It was true a couple generations ago that going to the right college "opened doors" because society was more bigoted then and an ivy-league degree meant you had the right sort of white, male, protestant, upper-middle class background. That isn't true anymore. Skills, creativity, and persistence are what opens doors in todays economy.

So if you have the qualities that lead to success in the real world then it doesn't much matter which college you graduate from. And if you don't have very many of those qualities then a prestigious degree isn't going to help.

If you need convincing that where you go to college makes little difference to your future success, read the excellent article by Greg Easterbrook in the Atlantic Monthly, October 2004, "Who needs Harvard?" It makes an overwhelming case that it is the student, not the college, that makes success happen.

Here's a local example: San Jose State University graduated Gordon Moore (founder of Intel), Ed Oates (founder of Oracle) Bill Walsh and Dick Vermeil (football coaches), Amy Tan (novelist), Peter Uberroth (baseball comissioner and olympics organizer) Ben Nighthorse Campbell (U.S. Senator) and Dian Fossey (scientist.)

So why has college admissions become the tail that wags the high school dog?
From my perspective it seems to be about parental insecurity, bragging rights, and a mistaken belief that prestigious colleges do in fact lead to prestigious jobs.

Different people respond to pressure in different ways:

I see different types of people in my job and they manifest their desire for success in different ways.

One type I call the “careerist”. The careerist is competitive, analytical, and pessimistic. The careerist believes that opportunity in the world is limited, and that access to opportunity is controlled by powerful people. Those powerful people must be cultivated and appeased to get ahead. Education, accomplishment and college admissions is a zero-sum game. Your accomplishments diminish mine. The careerist believes that the rules which govern social recognition today will be the same in the future. She has tremendous confidence that the future can be controlled through hard work. The careerist says “just tell me what to do to get ahead, and I will do it.” School really rewards this kind of attitude!

The careerist looks like a great student until you notice that she doesn’t seem to care about learning. The careerist is just “doing school” – playing the game for the grade. The careerist doesn’t even know anymore what she wants out of life, except for success. This is the psychic cost being a careerist, and they are common at Drake today.

Another type I call the “curious” and I wish I had more of these in my classes. The curious student is self-aware, creative, and optimistic. She makes plans, but isn’t afraid to change them. She doesn’t always wait to be told what to do, but sometimes takes the initiative. She has strongly grounded convictions. She sees value in learning for its own sake, and feels rewarded by a job well done. The curious student wants success almost as much as the careerist, but worries about it much less. She appears to believe that the universe is full of opportunity. She doesn’t feel diminished by the accomplishments of others, but senses in them the possibility of a better world.

I believe that the future will be kinder to the curious student than it will be to the careerist.

The careerist by working hard and neglecting her sense of self will probably get into a slightly “better” college. Her situation will not improve after that. She will carry her focus on recognition through college and graduate school into the working world. She will spend her life doing what others tell her to do for money and advancement. She will become so used to following directions that she will end up working for people with more imagination than she has. She will lose touch with who she was when she was ten. She may look forward to retirement, but when she does retire she will not know what to do with herself (and that's if retirement still exists in fifty years.) When life sends her unexpected disappointments and setbacks, she will feel cheated.

The curious adult, by seeking balance and keeping her sense of wonderment alive prepares herself for a future that may be very different from the present. She is more receptive to change, more apt to spot opportunity in unexpected places, and more willing to take risks. Since she is less likely than the careerist to compromise her core values for advancement, she will work at a job she likes. Retirement will mean less to her. She will respond to life’s challenges with ingenuity and grace. Since she has initiative, she may surprise you (and herself) with her accomplishments.

Nobody is purely one of or the other of these types. Everyone has a little of the careerist and a little of the curious person inside. Young people will be better off if they nurture their curiousity and snub the careerist in themselves. The world will also be better off if they do this, since real learning enriches others as well as one's self.

My advice to parents of teenagers:

• Love your child unconditionally, not for her accomplishments.
• Where your child goes to college is not a referendum on your parenting.
• An "A" is never an entitlement, no matter how many "A"s your child has already earned.
• Many colleges in California are now far more difficult to get into than they were in your day. This is not a sign of anything wrong in the world – it only means that some other colleges are as excellent and prestigious today as those ones used to be. But don't be a snob about colleges.
• Don't even talk about grades unless they are D's and F's .
• Encourage your child to pursue his or her own fun interests.
• Broaden your child’s horizons by taking her to museums, concerts, plays, lectures, etc. and by traveling.
• Read Madeline Levine's The Price of Privilege.
• And, don't forget to be a curious adult yourself.

My advice to teenagers:

• Your parents love you no matter what, so resist the well-meant pressure from the adults in your life to take on more than you can handle.
• The more you care about grades and getting into colleges, the less you will care about other valuable things.
• An "A" is never an entitlement.
• Don’t sign up for honors and AP classes unless you actually like the subject enough to do the work.
• Pursue your own fun interests even if they don’t appear to be relevant to college admissions or a career.
• Try to keep alive that love of learning new things that you had when you were little.

You are lucky to be here at all. Drake is a school with a big heart and a good academic program, and you get it all for free. No matter what grades you are earning, you are on track to become richer, freer, and better educated than 90% of the world's people. There are millions of teenagers in the world (and in America) who are just as smart as you but attend really dreadful schools, or have no school to go to at all. Compared to you, those teens are going to grow up with very few options.

You are especially lucky to be a California resident, because no matter how much you screw up your high school education you can always get into the University of California the easy way.

Notes:

I call the careerist "she" because I've observed that Marin families put much more pressure on their daughters to get good grades than they do on their sons. Of course careerists and curious people come in both genders.

Many of the most intellectually curious, self-directed and creative students I have known have gone on to enter engineering programs in college. These students earned good grades in high school, but never seemed to worry about them.

There is a personaliy type called the "slacker." The slacker is blessed with intelligence, good health, a school where teachers work hard to inspire/ challenge him, and a family which provides him with food, clothing shelter, and love. However, because he is emotionally immature and lazy, the slacker does very little work in school or out of it. He prefers to spend his time in sterile and addictive pursuits. The slacker doesn't worry about the future because he rarely thinks of it. He lives in the moment, like a very young child. Many slackers outgrow this eventually, but waste an enormous amount of their potential in the meantime. When I say "don't be a careerist" I don't mean you should be a slacker.

I went to a prestigious college myself - the University of Chicago. Does that make me a hypocrite? No, because: (1) Chicago was much easier to get into in the 1980's than it is now (2) I never worried about grades, and my parents never bugged me about them, and (3) I really liked ideas and learning, so school was easy for me.

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