This post is an op-ed written by Deborah Malizia and me that was published on December, 2022 in the Mercury News.  Here’s a link to the original.  It’s about how the pressure for rigor and high academic achievement in American schools has been damaging the mental health of students.  Another example of schooling’s role in fostering a toxic form of meritocratic competition

For another analysis of this problem, I recommend this wonderful analysis by longtime educators Olaf Jorgenson and Percy Abram with the telling title, “The Dark Side of Rigor.”

Examine the causes of youth mental health crisis

The problem has been addressed by trying to diagnose and treat symptoms without giving much thought to the sources

David Labaree and Deborah Malizia

The tragedies keep mounting, here and across the country. Yet, despite the long-term decline in youth mental health prompting the U.S. Surgeon General’s declaration last December of a youth mental health crisis, little attention has been paid to the underlying causes of this growing national epidemic. Instead, the problem has been addressed by hiring mental health providers to diagnose and treat symptoms without giving much consideration to identifying the underlying causes – consideration essential to solving the problem. Band-aids instead of solutions.

Further, any efforts made to examine causes focus primarily on characteristics of young people themselves rather than on their environment – one that the Surgeon General identified as posing unprecedented and uniquely difficult challenges even before the Covid pandemic. Moreover, while it’s easy to blame social media, research shows that it has amplified but not created those challenges.

From our perspectives as a scholar of education and as a parent, a primary source of the mental health crisis among our nation’s youth is the hyper-competitive race for individual achievement that characterizes their school environment and is embedded in all levels of our education system. This pathological system is what we need to fix rather than the students who suffer ever-increasing rates of anxiety, depression, and tragic deaths by suicide and drug overdose because of it. 

Schooling has become a gladiatorial arena with a focus on getting ahead by narrow, extrinsic measures of academic, athletic, and other extra-curricular achievement. Students’ intrinsic interests and learning for its own sake have become obsolete. And parents and educators feel they have little choice but to help young people compete in this dysfunctional system. No wonder our youth are suffering a mental health crisis—they’re missing a supportive, enriching system of education to guide them toward a healthy and fulfilling adulthood.  

Our educational system negatively impacts students at all levels. Those at the bottom face a life of limited options. Students in the middle compete for disappearing middle-class jobs. Even those who make it into the elite ranks feel the pain—the competition never ends. Instead of school preparing students for life, life for students becomes an endless school of competition in which every situation can feel like a matter of life and death. This system generates chronic stress, which neuroscience research shows can have profoundly negative impacts on adolescent brain development and long-term emotional well-being.

Furthermore, the system increases young people’s unhealthy tendency to focus on self and robs them of unstructured, pressure-free time to just be kids, i.e., to relax, to explore different activities, relationships, and ways of being necessary for neural remodeling that is supposed to occur during adolescence to increase emotion regulation and higher-order thinking.

The system also harms society by creating and demoralizing the so-called “losers”, causing many to feel humiliated, develop strong grievances, and embrace right wing populism that “hears their pain” and gives voice to their resentments. This outcome has helped produce our country’s largest political divide since the Civil War and is putting our democracy at great risk.

Our country is at an inflection point. The Covid pandemic has both amplified the staggering decline in young people’s mental health and illuminated the hidden costs of perpetual and intense achievement competition. It has also created a huge opportunity to reimagine our educational system for the benefit of students, educators, and society at large.

We believe strongly that we must all act now to fuel a movement demanding systemic reform of the education establishment. To do otherwise would be to close our eyes to the grave harm being inflicted on our young people’s mental health and our country’s future.

Dr. David Labaree is a sociologist and emeritus professor at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education whose research focuses on the relationship between education and society. His books include Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling (Harvard 2010).

Deborah Malizia is an attorney/mediator who studies mediation training as an approach to increasing emotional well-being among lawyers and young people.