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Expectations surrounding education have spun out of control. On top of a seven-hour school day, our children and grand children march through hours of homework, tests after tests, and activities seen as steps on the ladder to a “top” university, an “enviable” job and a “successful” life. Across the world, children are experiencing depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide because of the pressures of school. Is it worth it? Think about it.
“Children are suffering an epidemic of mental health problems in Britain today due to family breakdown, body image worries and too many school tests. Under far greater pressure than youngsters a generation ago, they are increasingly falling victim to depression, anxiety, eating disorders and severe anti-social behaviour.”
Photo: dailymail.co.uk
Given this, it is sickening that the only thing the majority of British politicians talk about is the so-called “Aspiration”: more destructive competition, selfishness, arrogance, greed, jealousy, and indifference, encouraging the belief that what matters most is money and more money:
What is this so-called aspiration?
“We’re teaching our kids wrong: They worship wealth and celebrities”
What about students at universities, their health and well-being?
“Today I have the grim task of sounding an alarm about the spread of an illness that is rapidly becoming the pandemic disease of the 21st century: An epidemic of depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide amongst the children, the youth and students world-wide. This tragedy is global and need a global solution”
Rising numbers of stressed students seek help
Things are not any better in Japan either!
September 1st is when the majority of Japanese children return to school after the summer holidays
‘Last year, for the first time, the most common cause of death of those aged 10 to 19 in Japan was suicide’.
September 1st is the day Japanese children are most likely to kill themselves
And it is not better in Singapore either!
And now what about the children and the youth in the US
“Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?”
JAN*
Photo: nytimes.com
“STUART SLAVIN, a pediatrician and professor at the St. Louis University School of Medicine, knows something about the impact of stress. After uncovering alarming rates of anxiety and depression among his medical students, Dr. Slavin and his colleagues remade the program: implementing pass/fail grading in introductory classes, instituting a half-day off every other week, and creating small learning groups to strengthen connections among students. Over the course of six years, the students’ rates of depression and anxiety dropped considerably.
But even Dr. Slavin seemed unprepared for the results of testing he did in cooperation with Irvington High School in Fremont, Calif., a once-working-class city that is increasingly in Silicon Valley’s orbit. He had anonymously surveyed two-thirds of Irvington’s 2,100 students last spring, using two standard measures, the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. The results were stunning: 54 percent of students showed moderate to severe symptoms of depression. More alarming, 80 percent suffered moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety.
“This is so far beyond what you would typically see in an adolescent population,” he told the school’s faculty at a meeting just before the fall semester began. “It’s unprecedented.” Worse, those alarming figures were probably an underestimation; some students had missed the survey while taking Advanced Placement exams.
What Dr. Slavin saw at Irvington is a microcosm of a nationwide epidemic of school-related stress. We think of this as a problem only of the urban and suburban elite, but in traveling the country to report on this issue, I have seen that this stress has a powerful effect on children across the socioeconomic spectrum.
Expectations surrounding education have spun out of control. On top of a seven-hour school day, our kids march through hours of nightly homework, daily sports practices and band rehearsals, and weekend-consuming assignments and tournaments. Each activity is seen as a step on the ladder to a top college, an enviable job and a successful life. Children living in poverty who aspire to college face the same daunting admissions arms race, as well as the burden of competing for scholarships, with less support than their privileged peers. Even those not bound for college are ground down by the constant measurement in schools under pressure to push through mountains of rote, impersonal material as early as preschool.
Yet instead of empowering them to thrive, this drive for success is eroding children’s health and undermining their potential. Modern education is actually making them sick.
Nearly one in three teenagers told the American Psychological Association that stress drove them to sadness or depression — and their single biggest source of stress was school. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a vast majority of American teenagers get at least two hours less sleep each night than recommended — and research shows the more homework they do, the fewer hours they sleep. At the university level, 94 percent of college counseling directors in a survey from last year said they were seeing rising numbers of students with severe psychological problems.
At the other end of the age spectrum, doctors increasingly see children in early elementary school suffering from migraine headaches and ulcers. Many physicians see a clear connection to performance pressure.
“I’m talking about 5-, 6-, 7-year-olds who are coming in with these conditions. We never used to see that,” says Lawrence Rosen, a New Jersey pediatrician who works with pediatric associations nationally. “I’m hearing this from my colleagues everywhere.”
What sets Irvington apart in a nation of unhealthy schools is that educators, parents and students there have chosen to start making a change. Teachers are re-examining their homework demands, in some cases reviving the school district’s forgotten homework guideline — no more than 20 minutes per class per night, and none on weekends. In fact, research supports limits on homework. Students have started a task force to promote healthy habits and balanced schedules. And for the past two years, school counselors have met one on one with every student at registration time to guide them toward a manageable course load.
“We are sitting on a ticking time bomb,” said one Irvington teacher, who has seen the problem worsen over her 16 years on the job.
A growing body of medical evidence suggests that long-term childhood stress is linked not only with a higher risk of adult depression and anxiety, but with poor physical health outcomes, as well. The ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) Study, a continuing project of the Centers for Disease Control and Kaiser Permanente, shows that children who experience multiple traumas — including violence, abuse or a parent’s struggle with mental illness — are more likely than others to suffer heart disease, lung disease, cancer and shortened life spans as adults. Those are extreme hardships but a survey of the existing science in the 2013 Annual Review of Public Health suggested that the persistence of less severe stressors could similarly act as a prescription for sickness.
“Many of the health effects are apparent now, but many more will echo through the lives of our children,” says Richard Scheffler, a health economist at the University of California, Berkeley. “We will all pay the cost of treating them and suffer the loss of their productive contributions.”
Paradoxically, the pressure cooker is hurting, not helping, our kids’ prospects for success. Many college students struggle with critical thinking, a fact that hasn’t escaped their professors, only 14 percent of whom believe that their students are prepared for college work, according to a 2015 report. Just 29 percent of employers in the same study reported that graduates were equipped to succeed in today’s workplace. Both of those numbers have plummeted since 2004.
Contrary to a commonly voiced fear that easing pressure will lead to poorer performance, St. Louis medical school students’ scores on the medical boards exams have actually gone up since the stress reduction strategy was put in place.
At Irvington, it’s too early to gauge the impact of new reforms, but educators see promising signs. Calls to school counselors to help students having emotional episodes in class have dropped from routine to nearly nonexistent. The A.P. class failure rate dropped by half. Irvington students continue to be accepted at respected colleges.
There are lessons to be learned from Irvington’s lead. Working together, parents, educators and students can make small but important changes: instituting everyday homework limits and weekend and holiday homework bans, adding advisory periods for student support and providing students opportunities to show their growth in creative ways beyond conventional tests. Communities across the country — like Gaithersburg, Md., Cadiz, Ky., and New York City — are already taking some of these steps. In place of the race for credentials, local teams are working to cultivate deep learning, integrity, purpose and personal connection. In place of high-stakes childhoods, they are choosing health.”
*Vicki Abeles is the author of “Beyond Measure: Rescuing an Overscheduled, Overtested, Underestimated Generation,” and director and producer of the documentaries “Race to Nowhere” and “Beyond Measure.”
The above article by Vicki Abeles was first published in New York Times on 2 January 2016:
Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick? - The New York Times
Read more:
Depression in Schools pain.com
Depression in children and teens
What a good, values-led education may look like?
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“The case of infamous ‘affluenza teen’ Ethan Couch has reignited incredulity toward money-borne illness. But is it about more than being spoiled brat?”
“The word affluenza, which has been used in various contexts over the last century, is a portmanteau of “affluent” and “influenza”. And because of Ethan Couch, the notorious “affluenza teen” caught on the run with his mother in Mexico last week, it appears to be fast en route from relative obscurity to household word.
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Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, usually referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian writer who is regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time.
Born to an aristocratic Russian family in 1828, he is best known for the novels War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877), often cited as pinnacles of realist fiction. He first achieved literary acclaim in his twenties with his semi-autobiographical trilogy, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth (1852–1856), and Sevastopol Sketches (1855), based upon his experiences in the Crimean War. Tolstoy's fiction includes dozens of short stories and several novellas such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Family Happiness, and Hadji Murad. He also wrote plays and numerous philosophical essays.
In the 1870s Tolstoy experienced a profound moral crisis, followed by what he regarded as an equally profound spiritual awakening, as outlined in his non-fiction work A Confession. His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him to become a fervent Christian anarchist and pacifist. Tolstoy's ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal 20th-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
“The secret to a happy life - courtesy of Tolstoy”
By
Roman Krznaric*
“Tolstoy, who was born in 1828 and died in 1910, was a member of the Russian nobility, from a family that owned an estate and hundreds of serfs. The early life of the young count was raucous, debauched and violent.
"I killed men in wars and challenged men to duels in order to kill them," he wrote. "I lost at cards, consumed the labour of the peasants, sentenced them to punishments, lived loosely, and deceived people…so I lived for ten years."
But he gradually weaned himself off his decadent, racy lifestyle and rejected the received beliefs of his aristocratic background, adopting a radical, unconventional worldview that shocked his peers. So how exactly might his personal journey help us rethink our own philosophies of life?
1. Keep an open mind
One of Tolstoy's greatest gifts was his ability and willingness to change his mind based on new experiences. The horrific bloodshed he witnessed while fighting in the Crimean War in the 1850s turned him into a lifelong pacifist. In 1857, after seeing a public execution by guillotine in Paris - he never forgot the thump of the severed head as it fell into the box below - he became a convinced opponent of the state and its laws, believing that governments were not only brutal, but essentially served the interests of the rich and powerful. "The State is a conspiracy," he wrote to a friend. "Henceforth, I shall never serve any government anywhere." Tolstoy was on the road to becoming an anarchist. He would be the first to encourage us to question the fundamental beliefs and dogmas we have been brought up with.
2. Practise empathy
Tolstoy displayed an unusual capacity to empathise by stepping into the shoes of people whose lives were vastly different from his own. In the 1860s, he not only adopted peasant dress but began working alongside the newly emancipated labourers on his estate, ploughing the fields and repairing their homes with his own hands. For a blue-blooded count, such actions were nothing short of remarkable. Although no doubt tinged with paternalism, he enjoyed the company of peasants and consciously shunned the literary and aristocratic elite in the cities. Tolstoy believed you could never understand the reality of other people's lives unless you had a taste of it yourself.
3. Make a difference
He also distinguished himself from his upper class peers by taking practical action to alleviate other people's suffering, most evident in his famine relief work. After the crop failure of 1873, Tolstoy stopped writing Anna Karenina for a year to organise aid for the starving, remarking to a relative: "I cannot tear myself away from living creatures to bother about imaginary ones." His friends and family thought it was crazy for one of the world's finest novelists to put one of his works of genius on the backburner. He did it again following the famine in 1891, spending two years working in soup kitchens and fundraising. Can you imagine a bestselling author today setting aside their latest book to do humanitarian relief work for two years?
4. Master the art of simple living
Following a mental breakdown in the late 1870s, Tolstoy rejected all organised religion, including the Orthodox Church he had grown up in. He adopted a revolutionary brand of Christianity based on spiritual and material austerity. He gave up drinking, smoking, and became a vegetarian. He also inspired the creation of utopian communities of simple, self-sufficient living, where property was held in common. These "Tolstoyan" communities spread around the world and led Gandhi to found an ashram in 1910 named the Tolstoy Farm.
5. Beware your contradictions
This new, simpler life was not without its struggles and contradictions. Tolstoy famously preached universal love yet was constantly fighting with his wife. Moreover, the apostle of equality was never able to fully abandon his wealth and privileged lifestyle. He lived until old age in a grand house with servants. But in the early 1890s he managed - against his family's wishes - to relinquish copyright to a huge portion of his literary works, in effect sacrificing a fortune. Given the privileged position in which Tolstoy started his life, his personal transformation, if not complete, still deserves our admiration.
6. Become a craftsman
Tolstoy recognised that striking a balance between mind and body was an essential part of his creative process. He not only regularly put down his pen to guide a horse-drawn plough across the fields, but kept a scythe and saw leaning up against the wall next to his writing desk. In his last years, when writers and journalists came to pay homage to the bearded sage, they were always surprised to find one of the world's most famous authors huddled over his cobbling tools making a pair of boots. If Tolstoy were here today he would no doubt suggest we get some craft into our lives rather than grant so much of our leisure time to tweeting and texting.
7. Expand your social circle
The most essential life lesson to take away from Tolstoy is to follow his lead and recognise that the best way to challenge our assumptions and prejudices, and develop new ways of looking at the world, is to surround ourselves with people whose views and lifestyles differ from our own. In Resurrection, he pointed out that most people - whether they are politicians, businessmen or thieves - "instinctively keep to the circle of those people who share their views of life and their own place in it". Cosseted within our peer group, we may think it perfectly normal and justifiable to own two homes, or to oppose same-sex marriage, or to bomb countries in the Middle East. We cannot see that such views may be perverse, unjust, or untrue, because we are inside circles of our own making. The challenge is to spread our conversational wings and spend time with those whose values and experiences contrast with our own. Our ultimate task, Tolstoy would advise us, is to journey beyond the perimeters of the circle.”
*Roman Krznaric is the author of The Wonderbox: Curious Histories of How to Live, on which this article is based - he is founder of the EmpathyMuseum and the digital Empathy Library
The above article was originally published in Magazine on bbc.co.uk on 1 January 2016
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The secret to a happy life - courtesy of Tolstoy - BBC News
Leo Tolstoy/ a few notable Quotes
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
Only those live who do good.
Let us forgive each other- only then will we live in peace.
Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.
All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.
In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
Boredom: the desire for desires.
It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.
The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.
Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.
Life is everything. Life is God. Everything changes and moves and that movement is God. And while there is life there is joy in consciousness of the divine. To love life is to love God.
And all people live, not by reason of any care they have for themselves, but by the love for them that is in other people.
Patriotism in its simplest, clearest, and most undoubted meaning is for rulers nothing else but a means of realizing their ambitions and venal ends; for the governed it is a renouncing of human dignity, intelligence, and conscience, and a slavish submission to the rulers. Wherever patriotism is championed, it is preached invariably in that shape. Patriotism is slavery.
Christianity, with its doctrine of humility, of forgiveness, of love, is incompatible with the state, with its haughtiness, its violence, its punishment and its wars.
The only thing that we know is that we know nothing and that is the highest flight of human wisdom.
Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.
Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly.
I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means -- except by getting off his back.