Fw: wsj

["GERALD BRACEY" <gbracey1@verizon.net>]

This sure fits my experience.  


----- Original Message ----- 
From: Susan Ohanian 
To: Gerald Bracey 
Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2006 6:28 AM
Subject: wsj


Kids Come First

By JOSEPH EPSTEIN
August 1, 2006; Page A12

Every weekday morning this summer I have dropped my granddaughter off in front of New Trier High School, in posh Winnetka, Ill., with a slight feeling of depression. What brings it on is the scene before me of all these high-achieving, aspiring adolescents, carrying lacrosse sticks or tennis rackets, their backs laden with heavy packs, their hearts set on getting into Brown and Duke or -- the heart flutters to contemplate such heights -- even beyond.

These are rich kids, which doesn't mean that they aren't also good kids. They seem extremely nice, with nothing obviously aggressive or menacing about them. Yet I feel a slight sadness when I contemplate their energy, their too-early-in-life resume-building, all devoted to a path of success set out for them by others. If they perform well in school, have lots of extracurricular activities, work weekends at homes for battered husbands, they might just have a shot at one of the country's 10 or 12 hot colleges. And once they get there, with more stellar classroom performance, more extracurricular activities, weekend work now with orphaned hummingbirds, the right internship junior year might just turn up. Which can't hurt when it comes to that tricky application to law or business (less nowadays medical) school, after which . . .

Ambition doesn't put me off. Nor does capitalism, of which I happen to consider myself a running dog, though now at the breathing-heavily stage. What does offend is kids aiming themselves so carefully so young at a future that has a good chance of disappointing them. When was it first decided that children had to perform brilliantly at school and right out of the gate, that everything was riding on it, that not taking that physics course AP could affect one in a decisive and adverse way?

Perhaps it began when the Russians put Sputnik in space and everyone became worried that America was falling behind intellectually. (Hence every year those newspaper stories about whether SAT and other national test scores are up or down.) Perhaps it was further advanced when America became less of an upper-class-dominated country and more of a meritocracy. (The snobbery under each arrangement is roughly the same; it's just that today everyone, not just old-line WASPs, has a full opportunity to become a snob.) Perhaps it set in with a vengeance when America became the insanely child-centered country it is.

And child-centered we indubitably are, like no other people at no other time in history. A major enticement for parents to move, for example, is good schools. Private schools, meanwhile, flourish as never before, heavy though the expense usually is. Parents slavishly follow their children around to their every game: soccer, little league, tennis. Camcorders whirl; digital cameras click. Any child who has not been either to Disneyland or Disney World by the age of seven is considered deprived. Serious phone calls are interrupted because Jen or Tyler needs Mom or Dad now. Attention must be paid.

Nor does it end in childhood. A friend wrote to me about his 16-year-old: "My daughter Hope is a serious rocker, and I've been taking her and her girlfriends to a lot of concerts recently. The latest was at a biker-bar-like club in a suburban Virginia strip mall next to a Korean grocery store to see a Swedish metal band called Opeth. It was about 95 degrees in the place, and when I got home at 1:30 a.m., my clothes were still damp and smelled of smoke." He wasn't complaining, please understand, merely describing.

I don't quote that in a spirit of mockery. I began by saying that I take my own 16-year-old granddaughter to summer school every morning. I should add that I also pick her up. Her music, not mine, plays on the car radio. This is not something we argue about; it isn't really up for discussion. When she is with my wife and me, menus are arranged to her liking. It's in the air, the culture: Children, in America, now rule.

Whether the vast attention currently paid to children will end in smarter, kinder, larger-souled adults we cannot yet know. For myself, I'm pleased not to have grown up under such full-court, adult supervision as kids today receive. From the age of 12 or so, more and more freedom to go my own way was what I wanted most -- and my parents gave it to me. After the age of 14, every decision about my education was my own: from what language to study in high school to what university to attend and what to study there. My parents paid the bills and, apart from an occasional well-meant but irrelevant homily from my father, got out of the way. I shall always love them for this.

Waiting for my granddaughter's class to end, watching the New Trier students pass by, I wonder if they mightn't sense that, after all they have been given in the way of heavy attention, lessons in sports and culture, psychological counseling, SAT-coaching, love at the smothering level, they are soon to arrive at payback time. What if they don't get into one of the top schools? What if all the promise they were told they had seems to come to nothing? The pressure now is on them, poor privileged kids, and I don't envy them.

What I would like to do is to remind them of all the geniuses who didn't do well in school -- Tolstoy, Henry James, Paul Valery -- and all the other successful men and women whose attendance at merely OK colleges didn't slow them down in the least (Warren Buffet comes to mind), and still others (Bill Gates, for one) who chose to drop out of putatively superior schools (in his case, Harvard) because they were bored midnight blue by what went on in class. But they wouldn't believe me. In their hearts they know that the meritocracy is merciless, and hardest of all on those it would at first seem to favor.

Mr. Epstein is the author of "Friendship: An Exposé" (Houghton Mifflin, 2006).