“Mr. Donahue teaches high school English at Greenwich Country Day School in Connecticut.” This article appeared in The New York Times, September 7, 2024.

To earn the distinction of valedictorian at Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton, Calif., a student must maintain a straight-A average and take at least 32 honors-level, semester-long classes. One weak “Gatsby” essay during these four years, one math test taken after an ankle sprain, one poorly conjugated verb can put a leak in the boat. And yet this past May, 39 of the 606 graduating seniors maintained the buoyancy to become valedictorians.

This is hardly unusual. In 2022, Edison High in Fresno, Calif., had 115 valedictorians in the class of 558. In 2017, Central Magnet School in Murfreesboro, Tenn., had 48 out of 193. And in 2019, Washington Liberty High in Arlington, Va., had 213 earning the top honor in their class of 595.

In the way some teachers sniff out A.I.-generated essays, some colleges engage in “countermeasures” to decode the truth behind the ever-increasing numbers of ever-improving transcripts they read. But the bigger truth is that many colleges just throw up their hands and don’t factor in weighted G.P.A.s (scaled according to the difficulty of the class) at all. So the same students who are now sweating on the too-hot turf during early-season practices are going to sweat through lots and lots of classes whose contents they can’t possibly retain in order to simply tread water.

We have pushed high school students into maximizing every part of their days and nights. Those who take the bait are remarkably compliant, diluting themselves between their internships and Canva presentations. We condition students to do a so-so job and then move on to the next thing. We need to let them slow down. Critical cognition, by definition, takes time.

The underbelly of grade inflation is that now the ambitious student must clear more time in their schedule for the stuff that really makes a difference. Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education, Amanda Claybaugh, said: “Students feel the need to distinguish themselves outside the classroom because they are essentially indistinguishable inside the classroom. Extracurriculars, which should be stress-relieving, become stress-producing.”

“When we are overloaded with mental activity,” wrote Leidy Klotz, the author of “Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less,” “we are less likely to think about taking things off of our plates. So, this overload that students get into creates a feedback loop that is hard to get out of. The more overloaded they are, the more likely they are to rely on heuristic thinking, and that heuristic thinking is going to tell them to add things first.”

Students are spending slightly more time in classes than in the past. In 1965, for instance, public school students in Arizona met for 175 days, beginning at 9 a.m. and ending at 3 p.m. In 2022, they had 180 days, beginning at 7:20 and ending at 2:40. I challenge the seasoned Times reader to try just one day of this — every 45 minutes, move through a crowded hallway to another hard chair in front of a different personality who will judge and grade you. Perhaps this could be a new season of “Survivor.”

It’s no wonder kids are so fried when they get home that they retreat to their screens. And in the maelstrom, home life gets eroded, too. “Between classes and sports, I never see my child,” a well-meaning parent at my prior school told me. “I come into their room and drop dinner on their desk. I feel like a prison warden.”

Students, parents, teachers — none of them are aligned about what they want, and as a result, all parties are blindly agreeing to go on like this and see what happens. Even with the deans, advisers, health and wellness counselors, ethics-in-technology coordinators and therapy dogs that are also wedged into some students’ day-to-day experience, nothing seems to alleviate the anxiety. While parents may push back about stress and grades to teachers and administrators, the wider problem persists because the beast is too amorphous.

Without a collective pushback, the general squeezing of things will continue apace. And that squeezing is now happening in classrooms. Reading full-length books can feel like a transgressive act when the National Council of Teachers of English in 2022 announced its support for the idea to “decenter book reading” in English language arts education. Instead, they suggest “critically examining digital media and popular culture” as more worthwhile.

This past year, the SAT reading section moved from using roughly 800-word passages, with many questions, to roughly 50- to 100-word paragraphs, with just one question. (In spite of all the valedictorians, only 37 percent of American 12th-grade students were considered “proficient” or better at reading, according to the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress.) And though we are still understanding all that A.I. can do for us, it is squeezing longer writing projects into the parameters of assigned in-class essays.

And so what is really being squeezed out is the value of reflection.

Consider what slowing down to think about this passage from Henry David Thoreau can do. He’s musing on the origin of the word “saunter”: “Some, however, would derive the word from ‘sans terre,’ without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.”

That sounds nobler than kids taking a fourth year of math because private consultants instruct their clients to “optimize” their college application even when so few Americans use calculus in their daily lives. It sounds better than launching into thousands of hours of French that will never be used. Consider that college-bound seniors cramming it all in will, in a matter of months, be taking half the number of classes when they matriculate.

This year, Americans have flown and driven at record levels, used more energy in their houses than ever and have continued to deny the palpable, growing doom of this more than ever. But we have made this climate; we have brought this on ourselves.

Our high school students also have a breaking point, and it has been announcing itself for quite some time with its own resounding trends — depression, anxiety, migraines. We are letting this happen, too. We are letting it waft through the floor vents, fueled by the gnawing sense that there are ever more young business founders competing for select colleges with ever dwindling acceptance rates.

Can we take it down a little? Can we allow them to do less so that they can do it better?

Let’s not forget that exploration is the catalyst of learning. If we allow for more unbroken stretches of time, we begin to see those meadows that have been in front of us the whole while. When students are allowed uninterrupted thought, they can build ideas together. A gut reaction to a character’s monologue can lead to understanding of another passage, which can lead students to connect not only with fiction but also with one another.

What was once invisible becomes apparent; sustained thought offers a grounding and an ascension. Molly Worthen, a history professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is pretty adamant about this: “We need an intervention: maybe not a vow of silence but a bold move to put the screens, the pinging notifications and the creepy humanoid A.I. chatbots in their proper place.”