The Overachievers

This book about the ways in which being over-driven, over-ambitious and over-scheduled is sucking the life out of teenagers may have been novel when it was published, but to my ear it has all been discussed to death already in many other fora. What set this book apart was the individual case studies that Robbins did of students at her Alma Mater, Walt Whitman. Although she refers to them as “Overachievers,” it was honestly my opinion that with a couple of exceptions, they were pretty average students, with a small handful of extracurriculars and GPAs in the high 3's. Nonetheless, I found myself drawn to them and their stories.

The researched portions felt pretty redundant and Robbins didn't have much novel to add in them. Also, I found her breathless scare tactics a little dated, given that it's my experience that now that the overachievers are old enough to have kids of our own, it's a huge status symbol to underschedule your kids, put them in play-based preschools or opt out of preschool entirely and not pressure them. Who knows if that'll stick as our kids get older, but certainly the horrors of Baby Einstein and Baby Galileo are remnants of a past era.

I also found that there were some parts that stuck out – that in the drive to make a point, Robbins just put in everything that sounded like it fit, whether or not it was a good idea. For instance, she complains about summer homework. Summer homework and summer curriculae are the best evidence-based interventions to bridge the gap between lower and upper class students that develops over summers. Similarly, she decries full-day kindergarten, which I see as a necessary invention in the women's liberation movement. I also wish she had talked more about the effects of burnout on long-term career success, which scored only a glancing mention at the end.

Still, I found it a kind of fun and easy to read what was essentially a rant about a topic on which I mostly share the same view.