Episode 56: The Toxicity of Achievement Culture with Dr. Jeannine Jannot, Founder and CEO of The Balanced Student

Dr. Jeannine Jannot, Founder and CEO of The Balanced Student, had been teaching preschool after being home with her kids for years and years. From there, she eventually moved into elementary schools, then started teaching college after that. Because of her experience in teaching at multiple levels, she’s had an unbelievable bird's eye view of what education looks like for kids across the developmental lifespan of their careers. With having a background in developmental psychology, she found herself fascinated. 

Unfortunately, beyond her fascination was a huge concern, because what she was seeing in college students was complete overwhelm. She didn't see a lot of translation of learning from high school into their college courses. For example, she might have students in her class who took AP Psychology, but were still not be able to demonstrate the basic knowledge they should have walked away from in that class. That's what inspired her to start The Balanced Student, which is student and parent coaching to help them figure out what's going on while also helping kids become more mentally astute as they're trying to be academically successful.

What Dr. Jannot saw in her teaching over a gradual period of time was that students she didn't expect to see (e.g. high achieving kids) were extremely overwhelmed and falling apart, hitting a mental wall. Now with the pandemic, just about every student feels like they're disintegrating to some extent. Parents may play a role in that issue, but achievement culture is the ultimate root of it all. In our society, we have a high stakes, high pressure, and high achievement culture that's ticking downward. It starts as soon as kids start preschool to some extent, but certainly by the time they're in second or third grade, where kids are feeling the full force of the achievement culture.

Approaching Success Differently

Of course, achievements are a great thing and we all want to attain our goals. But where the achievement culture has gone off the rails in the last several decades is the way we are valuing data as far as a measure of what is success. Kids feel like data points to their parents, and their parents are responding to this achievement culture by making their children feel like they need to get an A in school while checking all these other arbitrary boxes. Ultimately, it's not translating into good learning — and it's definitely translating into poor mental health outcomes.

The problem is that for the past several decades, politicians, corporations, money interests, employers, and colleges are responding to this glaring issue by thinking that they need to crank out the kinds of employees employers are going to hire. Our primary education system is looking to feed the colleges what they want, so the system is off kilter. While a proper solution isn't fully realized yet, it's apparent that a solution has to come from the bottom up. We need to be looking at students, parents, and educators, because they are the last people to be approached for solutions. They're given practices, policies, and procedures to put in place, but they're not looked at as the experts.

Failure Makes Kids More Resilient

There's a lot of stuff on the parenting side of things that can be done to remedy the challenges of achievement culture. It's an extremely difficult balance letting a kid experience failure without running in to rescue them, or thinking you have to make every situation perfect for them. Not letting kids fail is ironically setting them up for failure, because we all have to fail, eventually. Kids need to get that resilient skin built up before they go off to college, where they will inevitably have some of their most difficult experiences. 

The best way for a parent to be more helpful and connected to their child is by simply listening. That's the secret sauce. It's not only what they actually want, but it's what is most helpful to them. There's a lot of compassion, empathy, and vulnerability that parents need to foster in their families to buffer themselves from this high stakes, high pressure achievement culture we've all marinated in for so long. If we collectively begin to get back to that, then achievement culture can revert back to valuing things like curiosity and lifelong learning. If you build a responsible student, you're building a responsible citizen. If you're building a responsible or disciplined learner, you're building a disciplined workforce, which is the true linkage from success in school to success in life.

Changing Educational Culture

If you look at a standard educational institution, you're taught to be submissive, for the most part. If a teacher tells you something, "shut up and do it." Even if you feel like a teacher or instructor has said something incorrect, rather than correcting them, you are taught to just listen. But if you think about it, leadership all comes from out-of-the-box thinking, standing up for what you believe in, and openly questioning the status quo. To incorporate that type of learning, we need to bring back something like mastery, which isn't simply getting an A on a test, but more centered around project-based learning or pass/not pass options. Getting an A is fairly meaningless these days, except for checking a box. But it's hard to change a culture.

Most students have skill deficits and counterproductive behaviors in seven core areas: time management, organization, their mindset around school, sleep quality, stress, study skills, and study habits. Now that hybrid learning is here to stay, it's going to be key over the next five years to build flexibility into the culture, hopefully turning things around for the better — both in the positive impact it will have on education front and in the job market. People are approaching careers differently, and it’s vital to integrate these changes from the bottom up. 

Connect with Dr. Jeannine Jannot: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanninejannot/

Learn more about Dr. Jeannine Jannot at https://www.jeanninejannot.com/

Learn more about The Balanced Student at https://www.thebalancedstudent.com/

Subscribe and listen to our podcast atIlluminateHigherEducation.com

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