I know it's the internet, but...

so there was this article in the NY Times last weekend about "Amazing Girls" who all have next to perfect SAT scores, take tons of AP classes, are the president of 12 different clubs, and have solved world hunger in their spare time, but still can't get into Harvard. article here. Versions of this article get written all the time (hello, Alexandra Robbins.) but this was a particularly compelling one. I read it, I liked the cute little description of Smith College's Ivy Day that one father gave, and I moved on. I have a lot of opinions about college admissions, but none of them are new or original, and in fact, I was beginning to thing that there wasn't anything new or original to be said. Today, however, Judith Warner of the NY Times, managed to do just that. link here.

The big idea she came up with was that it may actually be good for these girls to not be part of the 9% accepted to Harvard or Princeton or whatever. They've been striving towards and achieving these incredible goals since a very young age, and it's probably good for them to fail for once. maybe they'll learn to base self worth on something less fleeting than outward success. to be sure, she said some things that unsettled me, like:

I think this is partly why so many grown-up amazing girls with high-earning husbands find themselves having to quit work when they have kids. They simply can’t perform at work and at home at the high level that they demand of themselves.

On the one hand, I think she's right. People expecting perfection from work & family life are unlikely to get it. On the other hand, I think it's too easy to interpret her as saying people are wrong for wanting accomodations to be able to work and raise families simultaneously. whatever, I'm not going to get into this now, but suffice it to say, I don't agree with everything she said, but her blog post definitely got me thinking...

and then I read the comments. They were filled with so many self-congratulating platitudes that I actually felt my capacity for original thought shrink as I slogged through them. A few people had interesting or at least valid things to say. For example, when anyone posts an article like this, it is good to point out that hey, most of the kids in the US don't have the opportunity to be this overachieving, even if they want to. Still, there were far too many comments of the form, "Judith, I totally agree with you! That's why when my kid got a B once, I was totally okay with it! He still got into [insert highly selective school here], and yeah, it's not Princeton, but he's so happy on his path to become this generation's great theoretical mathematician that we're glad we didn't push him to re-take the SATs when he only got a 1520. And he's so polite and caring, too! I always knew it was the right decision to make him quit Lacrosse and Karate so he could focus on becoming a world class Badminton player. Other parents should just lighten up!"

okay, I'm exaggerating. but not much.