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The students who are successful, by contrast, look at that challenge, wrestle with feelings of inadequacy and stupidity, and then begin to take steps hiking that mountain, knowing that bruised pride is a small price to pay for getting to see the view from the top. They ask for help, they acknowledge their inadequacies. They don’t blame their lack of intelligence, they blame their lack of motivation.

You feel like you are burnt out or that you are on the verge of burning out, but in reality you are on the verge of deciding whether or not you will burn out.

The emphasis on personal achievement has done more than turn the admissions process into a race to rack up résumé points; more important, to the extent that elite colleges set the pace, it is turning the educational culture into one that stresses individual perfection instead of one that stresses social improvement.

At the turn of the last century, the influential philosopher John Dewey saw education as a democratizing force not just in its social consequences but in its very process. Dewey believed that education and life were inextricably bound, that they informed each other. Education wasn’t just something you did in a classroom to earn grades. It was something you lived.

There is a big difference between a culture that encourages engagement with the world and one that encourages developing one’s own superiority.

What are you noticing? Here are some of the things I notice I see the impact that our current grading systems have on students’ feelings of self-worth I see how children use shifts in (math) identity as a mechanisms for maintaining self-worth. I see how school reinforces a view in which your worth as human being can be mapped to your linear hierarchy I see how school reinforces the view that you intelligence and smarts are fixed attributes I see how one of the primary activities of school children is to avoid looking stupid and to maintain one’s standing in the hiearchy