From The New York Times that came with today’s paper…
PALO ALTO, California—Palo Alto High School, one of America’s most prestigious public schools, is sandwiched between two stark and illusory paths. Just to the west, Stanford University beckons as the platonic ideal, a symbol of the road to Google, to fabulous success. To the east, across a bike trail, are the railroad tracks where three boys from the school district killed themselves this year.
This year’s suicide cluster is the second contagion to visit this city. Five students or recent graduates of the district’s other high schools, Gunn High School, killed themselves beginning in 2009.
Experts say such clusters, while rare, typically occurs when suicide takes hold as a viable coping mechanism—as a deadly, irrational fashion. But that hasn’t stopped this community from soul searching: Does a culture of hyperachievement deserve any blame for this cluster?
The answer is complex: No, the pressure to succeed is not unique, nor does it cause a suicide cluster in itself, but the intense reflection underway here has unearthed a sobering reality about how Silicon Valley’s culture of high achievement is playing out in schools.
In addition to whatever overt pressure students feel to succeed, that culture is intensified by something more insidious: the contradictory talk from parents and administrators. They often use all the right language about wanting students to be happy, healthy and resilience, said Medeline Levine, a psychologist who treat depressed and suicidal tech-industry executives, workers and their children.
“They all say, ‘All I care about is that you’re happy,” and then the kid walks in the door and the first question is, ‘How did you do on the math test?’” Ms. Levine said.
Denise Pope, an education expert at Stanford, calls this gulf between what people say and what they mean “the hidden message of parenting.”
But here, and in lots of other ultrahigh achieving communities and schools everywhere, Ms. Pope said that what children are hearing in the overriding message that only the best will do. “In everything,” she said.
“I hear students tell me that if I don’t get into X, Y, Z college, I’ll wind up flipping burgers at McDonald’s,” Ms. Pope said.
She said that wrongheaded idea becomes emotional and physiological threat when multiplied by at least three other factors: technology that keeps teens working and socializing late at night, depriving them of essential rest; growing obligations from test-prep classes and extracurricular activities; and parents too busy to participate in activities with their families.
“We’re not teenagers,” Carolyn Walworth, a junior at Palo Alto High School, wrote in an editorial in the local paper in response to the suicides. She described students as “lifeless bodies in a system that breeds competition” and wrote of going to the emergency room to deal with stress, missed periods and having “a panic attack in the middle of a 30-person class and be forced to remain still.”
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Point is, the kids in high school today ARE already facing a TON of pressures, because, this ain’t YO nanas’ schoolin’ days, and yet, you have these parents who just push, push, P-U-S-H their young toward excellence, and no wonder, that these teens are slowly, CRACKING.
Life, the Obstacle Course 