I reviewed this book for Chalcedon back in 2006: The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids. The horror of it is more palpable today than it was back then.
By then it was already easy enough to see that a college education, for most, wasn’t anywhere near worth what you had to pay for it. But the kids in this book are the elite, the cream of the crop, Advanced Placement, they are the idols that their parents worship. They are also slaves chained to the oars, with no hope of escape.
It’s horrible.
Now it’s 12 years later. The nudity of the college emperor is even more glaring than it was.
We have only just begun to imagine that instead of allowing “college” to devour whole generations of our offspring, we just might free ourselves from bondage to it: we just might be able to build it down instead of up.
The sooner, the better!