Failing to Succeed: What preschool parents can do to counteract the pressures of America's achievement culture

By Lisa McLeod, MW2s


Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

My 2-year-old daughter loves going to school. She usually still makes it hard for me to get her dressed and out the door, but by the time I’ve got her in the car she is often talking excitedly about school, about how she gets to paint and pet the bunny and drive the bike. Her enthusiasm for school and learning is heartwarming and joyous, but every time I see it, I can’t help but wonder how it will be possible to keep that love for school from fading as she enters elementary, middle and high school.

Recently my husband and I attended a screening of the documentary film Race to Nowhere about the immense pressure that children, parents and teachers face in our achievement obsessed culture and school system. The film’s director Vicki Abeles was inspired to make the movie after her daughter was diagnosed with an illness induced from the stress of struggling with the pressures of school, homework, and extracurricular activities in her effort to do it all. But even after the director made changes in her own home and the way that she parented, she soon came to see that the problems she and her children faced were more systemic and widespread. Speaking with other parents, teachers, students and experts in various fields, she decided that the best way to help other struggling families was to make a film highlighting the need for change in the way that we view the purpose of schooling and achievement in America.

With the adoption of No Child Left Behind, the obsession with high stakes testing and increasing student achievement has pushed academic pressure down even into kindergarten and preschools. Teachers get pressure from administrators to “cover” all the material before the tests in April so that students will at least have been “exposed” to the material and have a better chance of guessing the right answer on the multiple choice tests. In an effort to cover all the curriculum standards, teachers send home packets of homework that they may or may not have had much opportunity to cover in class. Parents then feel pressure to make sure their children do all of their homework and master all of the material, but the end result of this system is that American schools are more concerned with broad coverage of material than about deep learning and thought. Students are taught to jump through hoops and pass tests, but once those tests are over, how much is truly retained? According to the students in the film, not much.

My husband and I are both high school teachers (though I am currently on leave), and we have had lots of first hand experience with burnt out students. We have both taught students on opposite ends of the spectrum of the achievement culture, from the honors students who have melt downs when they get anything less than an A to students who have straight Fs and long ago decided that school was a place of failure and boredom. It is a frustrating environment for teachers and students alike, and as a parent, I dread the idea of seeing my own child go from being a curious and eager learner to someone who just jumps through the hoops or gives up all together.

Of course that doesn’t have to happen. It is possible for children to retain their love of learning, their natural curiosity about the world, and their enthusiasm for mastering new skills, but it requires parents to be able to think deeply about what they value in their children.

All parents want what is best for their children, but how we define “best” determines what we provide for our children and what we expect from them. Too often in our achievement focused culture, we put pressure, consciously and unconsciously, on our children to be the “best” at school, sports, community service, and more in hopes that they will get accepted to the “best” schools and go on to get the “best” jobs. But is that what is “best” for our children? Is the purpose of school to learn and understand or is it just to build a resume that will obtain admission into an Ivy League university? We want our children to be successful in life, but what does that mean? What does success look like to us, and more importantly, how will we teach our children to define success? How do our preconceived notions of success affect the messages that we transmit to our children about their worth as human beings?

We need to rethink how we view the goals of school and education and what really helps children to achieve those goals. Does learning how to memorize and regurgitate loads of facts help children to become successful adults? If being successful is defined as getting a perfect score on the SAT, then maybe. But if being successful is defined as being a confident, competent, contributing member of society, then the purpose of school and education should be to teach children how to fail without becoming failures, how to fall down and get back up and try again, to experiment and take risks and learn from their mistakes. The purpose of school should not be to teach finite facts and skills that can be easily tested with multiple choice tests, but to teach students how to learn, create, and be resilient in the face of difficulty.

It's our hope that by sending our children to Explorer, this is the kind of education that we are giving our children. The school’s philosophy of child-directed learning helps children gain confidence in their own abilities and ideas, laying the foundation of self-confidence and resilience that will help them to maintain their desire to learn and discover well into their high school years and beyond. Rather than learning to read flash cards or mimic the directions given to them by adults, children at Explorer are encouraged to try things for themselves and see what happens, to “give it a go” and not get discouraged if something doesn’t work out the way they thought it would.

Because Explorer is a parent-participation school, we parents are also getting an education. We are learning how to put down the flash cards, put away the Brainy Baby videos and let our children take the lead, how to encourage our children’s learning without killing their internal motivation, and how to turn off (or at least ignore) our own internal voice that says, “how come so and so’s child can recognize her name and my child can’t even recognize a letter?” Because though we may think to ourselves, “I’ll never be the parent that pushes their children too hard,” it starts in small and insidious ways, with comparisons on the playground and the small nagging doubts about our children’s abilities. The parent who “helps” his child do her homework by taking over and doing it for her, may have started out by “helping” his preschool child make a snowman the “right” way.

Fortunately at Explorer, we parents are taught to take our hands off of the children’s activities, to not make examples for them to follow, and to learn and grow with grace when we forget and the teachers have to remind us to let the children take the lead. Through play and free choice, the children at Explorer learn how to feel confident in their unique creations, how to see value in their differences, how to keep trying to build something even when the blocks keep falling down, and how to fall off a bike and get back on. And we parents learn how to let them.

Though the film Race to Nowhere focused on children in the K-12 environment, our attitudes and beliefs are shaping the way our children will view school and learning well before they enter Kindergarten. When we learn to stand back and let the children direct their own learning we communicate to them that they are competent people who can make valuable contributions just as they are, without adults “fixing” their work, that it is OK to try and to fail, and that failure only really happens when you quit trying. And that, rather than getting a perfect score on the SAT, is truly the “best” tool possible for building successful, fulfilling lives in which their love of learning will not be dimmed, despite the best efforts of the American educational system.

Lisa Mcleod is a high school english and library media teacher with masters degrees in education and library science. She and her husband, Ted, are expecting their second child in March.