I recently read Pawan Dhingra’s new book Hyper Education, which explores the competitiveness that some parents feel about their children’s schooling and their fear that their children might be “falling behind.” This pressure, as many here have noted, makes children feel stressed out and deprives them of imaginative and creative activities. I invited Professor Dhingra to write a précis of his book for readers of the blog, and he kindly obliged.
Hyper Education and The Attack on Public Schools
Attacks on the public school take many forms, some of them even outside of the school system. For-profit tutoring centers like Kumon, Mathnasium, etc. have a role to play in educating children. But how big of a role and how much they should be supported by our federal government – that’s a different question. They have become some of the fastest growing companies in the country and show no sign of slowing down, especially under Covid, with significant implications for our public schools.
While one might imagine that it’s mostly children in learning centers who need support catching up to grade level, more and more it is children in higher-income families looking to get ahead. For my new book, Hyper Education: Why Good Schools, Good Grades, and Good Behavior Are Not Enough, I spent time with many parents, educators, learning center directors, children, and more around the pursuit of education outside of school.
Due to people like Bill Gates, parents are told that their schools are failing their children and cannot be trusted. As parents seek external for-profit learning options in response, it erodes the centrality of the public school. Even if we could get equal funding for our schools and avoid budget cuts, we would find growing educational inequality as some families afford to take advantage of these options.
Teachers see the effects in their classrooms of extracurricular academics. A third-grade teacher sees stressed and anxious children who are, “not talking. Being almost non-verbal. Overreacting to a small problem.” A health educator told me, “The thing that breaks my heart – because I’m an educator, I love to learn – is when I talked to high school students about what do you like about school. [They] respond, ‘Nothing. I hate it.’”
It is not only students who can suffer. Children in the classroom who have been exposed to such different amounts of knowledge complicates the entire teaching effort. Parents start to disrespect how much their kids are getting from school. A second-grade teacher was frustrated with the lack of appreciation. “I think if parents come one day, they would go, ‘Those teachers deserve a medal! How do they do it every day?’ And we do.”
I am not against students pursuing academics outside of school, and in fact I think it can be a wonderful thing for children depending on their interests, other commitments, and family atmosphere. But what we are seeing is a new normal in education that is prone to grow under Covid as parents wonder about their schools’ academic content. We need to understand what is motivating parents to seek extra learning, how the children feel, and hear from teachers. But right now, these voices are talking past one another. Only then can we work towards a school system that values compassion, solidarity, and equity.
Pawan Dhingra is a professor Of American Studies at Amherst College with over 20 years of teaching experience. His most recent book is Hyper Education: Why Good Schools, Good Grades, and Good Behavior Are Not Enough. He can be reached at pdhingra@amherst.edu. You can learn more at http://www.pawanhdhingra.com and follow him @phdhingra1
In the Asian communities in NYC there are two tutoring sites on every block, a Chinese parent asked me, “My children goes to Chinese language school from 3-6 three days a week, tutoring the other days and a full day on Saturday, do you know of a tutoring program after church on Sundays?”
Culture is deeply ingrained, “progressive education” is shunned, more, looked upon as an attempt to derail their children.
My grand daughter goes to soccer practice two evening a week (pre-COVID, practices on her own other days and play games on weekends ….
Education is changing around us and remote learning is not a phase, the world of work is changing before our very eyes, btw, including post secondary, .. maybe R2D2 is the professor of the futrue
‘Tiger parenting’ doesn’t create child prodigies, finds new research
September 2013, Vol 44, No. 8, American Psychological Association.
Print version: page 16
“Children of tiger parents reported higher rates of depressive symptoms than children with easygoing or supportive parents, as well as high levels of academic pressure and feelings of alienation from parents.”
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/09/tiger-parenting
Exactly, exactly, exactly.
Here’s what I would suggest to anyone who supports the philosophies of teaching and instruction that draws people to this blog: anytime anyone of them has the chance to speak or testify before local, state, and federal panels, open with two questions: “Do the members (of whatever panel or forum) believe they are well-educated?” (Why, of course!) “Then why are you promoting unproved or destructive rules and policies that not a single one of you experienced during the course of your education?” (Well, uh, duh.)
And…more evidence that Betsy is DeBos:
https://crooksandliars.com/2020/06/trump-school-choice-most-important-civil
It is abundantly clear that long term stress isn’t good for any organism, let alone one as complex as a human. Why don’t we EVER start with PHYSIOLOGICAL BASICS?
I will admit that I sent both of my children to Mathnasium when they were in elementary school (3rd-4th grades). My children attended a Title I school in a very test centric, data driven school system. My children would always do well on “the tests” (because of our family socioeconomics) so they basically got ignored in school. They both read very well, were read to as small children and had a decent vocabulary so no tutoring was necessary. Math in our district wasn’t a strong suit and if I wanted my kids to learn “the basics” then I had to make sure that I was on top of it. I am not a teacher and did the best that I could, but Mathnasium was a great help. I didn’t like having them go to school all day only to go to tutoring after school, but this was the only way that they would be challenged in Math and allowed to think through problems instead of just learning rote algorithms to pass the test. They only went 2-3 days per week. Now with Common Core, parents no longer are able to understand the math and they want their children to learn pre CC math concepts…and they use Mathnasium to do this.
The “tiger parent” comments above make a lot of sense. These extra, private schools are like the cram schools common in southeast Asia (called “jukus” in Japan). There are some serious concerns about student stress, fatigue, etc.
However, I would like to echo what LisaM also said: If a child’s academic needs are not being met in public school, then the parents might begin looking elsewhere.
I am concerned about this during this time of covid. The public school where I teach has historically been strong academically. With covid, however, our administrators are undercutting education in the following ways: 1) they reduced the academic level and challenge; 2) they required us to assign less work; 3) they would not uphold zero-tolerance policies for plagiarism and cheating; 4) they would not maintain requirements for incomplete grades and makeup work.
What I see happening in the future is that–if schools continue to lower and lower the bar for all students–some parents will pull their kids from our public schools and enroll them elsewhere. One parent already told me she is considering doing this because our school’s academic level seems to be falling.
More parents will follow. This will be a huge change in Montana, where we don’t even have charter schools.
I will also admit that I pulled child #2 out of public school and enrolled him into private school that we pay for (I do not support vouchers). Child #1 completed public HS this year. Test centric, data driven , teach to the test curriculum does not equate to a very good educational experience and child #2 was not doing well with being bored (behavior issues) and would not do well in the district’s “AP for All” at the HS level (test prep curriculum). I believe in public education, but the “deforms” that have been pushed into public schools has not been good for many kids.