How many more inspirational quotes about how adversity is the catalyst of growth will it take before we get the point? It seems like every other article is about how the Ancient Stoics reminded us that the obstacle is the way or how Carol Dweck encourages us to cultivate a growth mindset.
When creators share an idea to the point of it becoming cliche, there is usually a simple reason behind its unhindered ubiquity. While we can all sympathize with the message and think, “Yeah, that’s true enough,” we rarely actually apply those messages. So, we recycle the content — over and over again.
Writing this, it crossed my mind that this post may simply be another garbage post about how adversity is key to success. But, this time, I am going to discuss adversity in schools: a topic about which I feel experienced as I have been a student for several years and as an advocate for student mental health.
To understand this topic, however, we must first address the paradox of discomfort. It’s a paradox in which we are grateful for the adversity in our life but also want none of it for others. Discomfort is good until it’s someone else’s discomfort.
To piece part the paradox of discomfort, I thought I’d turn to The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Their book serves primarily as a critique of the direction of higher education in which emotional pain is equated to physical pain. While they concede that chronic stress can be incredibly harmful to students, they also point out that a good dose of stress can have significant benefits for the majority of the population: it can help them learn coping skills, how to overcome obstacles, and advocate for oneself.
The truth of the human condition is that humans are only as strong as their environment demands: “Human beings need physical and mental challenges and stressors or we deteriorate. For example, muscles and joints need stressors to develop properly. Too much rest causes muscles to atrophy, joints to lose range of motion, heart and lung function to decline, and blood clots to form.” Our body gets stronger in response to increasingly difficult environmental stimuli — it develops ways to handle it the next time it comes. But, if we all agree that there is a certain level of stress that developing minds should and can experience to grow, how do we know how much is too much?
A significant issue in the current stressors on students’ lives is that quite a lot of it comes from school. Lukianoff & Haidt argue that education has imposed an increasingly significant presence on the lives of students.
In The Cult of Homework, the author, Joe Pinsker, outlines the many ebbs and flows of homework culture. Overwhelmingly, the reason homework becomes more common is the fear of falling behind — whether that’s behind the Soviet Union or our economy worsening. And while well-intentioned, the evidence that homework is worthwhile has not progressed far past correlational studies. Moreover, not only would homework have to prove itself effective, it would have to prove itself more effective than what the time could instead be used for — e.g., socializing, exploring interests on one’s own time, and finding a love for learning. Barbara Stengel, education professor at Vanderbilt, argues that if we gave students more time to explore and less homework, test scores would improve. They could expand what they think about and are interested in.
In short, homework is predicated on the premise that the school knows how students should spend their time better than students know. And if we want students to grow into productive and curious men and women, it’s time to loosen the reigns and give students the freedom to do what they believe is right, to make mistakes and learn from them — that’s how development occurs, not by spending hours on busy work.
