Passage 2

If you have got kids, here is a nasty truth: they are probably not very special, that is, they are average, ordinary, and unremarkable. Consider the numbers of those applications your daughter is sending to Ivy League schools, for instance. There are more than a quarter of a million other kids aiming for the same eight colleges at the same time, and less than 9% of them will make the cut. And those hours you spend coaching Little League because you just know your son’s sweet swing will take him to the professionals. There are 2.4 million other Little Leaguers out there, and there are exactly 750 openings for major league ballplayers at the beginning of each scason. That gives him a 0.0313% chance of reaching the big clubs, The odds are just as long for the other dreams you‘ve had for your kids: your child the billionaire, the Broadway star, the Rhodes scholar. Most of those things are never going to happen.

The kids are paying the price for parents' delusions. In public schools, some students are bringing home 17.5 hours of homework per week or 3.5 per school night and it's hard to see how they have time to do it. From 2004 to 2014, the number of children participating in up to three hours of after-school activities on any given day rose from 6.5 million to 10.2 million. And all the while, the kids are being fed a promise- that they can be tutored and coached, pushed and tested, hot- housed and advance placed until success is assured.

At last, a growing chorus of educators and psychologists is saying, “Enough!” Somewhere between the self-esteem building of going for the gold and the self-esteem crushing of the Ivy-or-die ethos there has to be a place where kids can breathe, where they can have the freedom to do what they love and where parents accustomed to pushing their children to excel can shake off the newly defined shame of having raised an ordinary child.

If the system is going to be fixed, it has to start, no surprise, with the parents. For them, the problem isn’t merely the expense of the tutors, the chore of the homework checking and the constant search for just the right summer program. It’s also the sweat equity that comes from agonizing over every exam, grieving over every disappointing grade-becoming less a guide in a child’s academic career than an intimate fellow traveler.

The first step for parents is accepting that they have less control over their children’s education than they think they do -a reality that can be both sobering and liberating. You can sign your kids up for ballet camp or violin immersion all you want, but if they're simply doing what they’re told instead of doing what they love, they’ll take it only so far.

Ultimately, there’s a much larger national conversation that needs to be had about just what higher education means and when it’s needed at all. Four years of college has been sold as being a golden ticket in the American economy, and to an extent that’s true.

But pushing all kids down the bachelor’s path ensures not only that some of them will lose their way but also that critical jobs that require a two-year or less skilled trades, some kinds of nursing, computer technology, airline mechanics and more- will go unfilled.

There will never be a case to be made for a culture of academic complacency or the demolition of the meritocracy. It can be fulfilling for kids to chase a ribbon, as long as it’s a ribbon the child really wants. And the very act of making that effort can bring out the best in anyone’s work.

But we cheat ourselves, and worse, we cheat our kids, if we view life as a single straight-line race in which one one-hundredth of the competitions finish in the money and everyone else loses. We will all be better off if we recognize that there are a great many races of varying lengths and outcomes. The challenge for parents is to help their children find the one that’s right for them.