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Jewish World Review August 30, 2006 / 6 Elul, 5766 Overachiever writes about the madness By Karen Heller
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | High school is misery, at least the way Alexandra Robbins describes the place, managing to make work seem indolent. "The Overachievers'' chronicles students at Robbins' former public high school who constantly cram and overschedule, not so much out of desire but out of ambition to get into the same six colleges. The location is suburban Washington, a vortex of ambition (see Judith Warner's precursor, "Perfect Madness''), but it could be a public, private or parochial institution in any affluent community. The fallout is a decided lack of fun, adolescence, enlightenment and, in one poor girl's case, hair.
Affluence, education and comfort seem to provide the ideal toxic stew for anxiety and heightened expectations. Robbins' study reads like "The Amazing Race: The Ivy League Version.'' Teenagers zip along so fast, hepped up on Red Bull and diet pills, trying to accomplish, the enjoyment from learning and doing entirely absent. "The Overachievers'' is highly addictive even while you want to yell at every student, "It's not the end of the world if you don't get into Stanford." Apparently, in this world, it is. A senior torn between Duke and Penn mails her acceptance to the former, only to flip out and beg the post office to retrieve the letter. "AP Frank" takes a record 17 Advanced Placement courses, gaining entrance into the Promised Land - Harvard - where he can finally play Ultimate Frisbee and date. Admission is the prize, education something of an afterthought. The world Robbins describes is acutely self-aware and turned inward, with constant peripheral vision kept on the competition. As one girl puts it, "You can't just be the smartest. You have to be the most athletic, you have to be able to have the most fun, you have to be the prettiest, the best-dressed, the nicest, the most wanted." Reading this would make anyone's head hurt and hair fall out. But it's not imagined. "I hate how I was only described in numbers and letters and no words," a junior despairs. Yet, she's right. B's are death, as is appearing average. A professional college guidance counselor fires a top student as a client. "She's not a great student. She's not going to get into a top college," the counselor declares after one meeting, and not being able to deal with her reputation being "slammed." Fortunately, the adult turns out to be wrong on all counts. Robbins understands about "overachieving," a wretched term and hollow. This is her fourth book since graduating from Yale eight years ago. She wants to stop the madness, even while her book breathlessly exploits it. Her prescriptions are sane though a tad naive: drop class ranking; de-emphasize No Child Left Behind testing (good luck); colleges' boycotting U.S. News & World Report standings (ditto); eliminate early decision; scrap the SAT (in your dreams). Robbins places too much emphasis on the students. Not yet 30, she interviewed almost no parents - a mistake, as they share in, guide and subsidize this journey. Instead, she chose to focus on a Harvard-obsessed immigrant parent who is borderline nuts. Parents are hard-wired to want better for their children. Watching them go through such rejection at an early age has become an intensified form of misery. You could argue that it makes kids tougher and wiser for the experience, but I'm not sure that's true. This is a big game of musical chairs with too many students fighting for the same precious seats. A smart, motivated student will thrive almost anywhere, and a slacker is going to punt at Yale. Income is tied to having the degree, not where it came from. We're dealing with more labels, this time academic ones. Americans are fortunate to have such problems while much of the world deals with calamities and loss far worse than thin letters. I'm not convinced the problem is as epidemic as Robbins believes. Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Karen Heller is a columnist for Philadelphia Inquirer. Comment by clicking here. © 2006, The Philadelphia Inquirer Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. |
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