Difficult Questions About Student Stress and Anxiety

Peter Gow

 The Independent Curriculum Group make no bones about our concern for the well-being and mental health of students, as nearly every day brings us a worrisome story or anecdote about student stress. Much of this appears to be very much a function of anxiety around the complex constellation of academic and social pressures felt by students working to succeed in the educational system we have created. We wonder about it, and what we as educators might do to make schools happier places for children and adults. Perhaps we’re just in alarmist mode, generalizing from specifics, but each time we ask a school person about students in crisis at their school, we get an affirmative response

So we present to you, readers, some difficult, discomfiting questions. You are invited to take these as either rhetorical or substantive (or both), and to frame your responses—not to us, but to yourselves—but in the context of your learning community accordingly.

• Have you or the institution you represent noted and acknowledged an uptick in anxiety and anxiety-related behaviors among students?
• Have you or the institution you represent engaged in tactical measures—hiring more counselors, more training of faculty, more…?
• Have you or the institution you represent acknowledged likely systemic and situational sources of this uptick in anxiety and anxiety-related behaviors among students? 
• Have you or the institution you represent considered countermeasures to reduce or ameliorate the systemic conditions that might underlie the uptick in anxiety and anxiety-related behaviors among students?

Following this line of inquiry may invite a kind of “blame game” that can situate responsibility on generalized targets like “the media,” “parents,” “colleges.” If these are apt or common responses (and they may well be), we need to drill down or, paradoxically, to start by ascending to a 30,000-foot level and considering what we do in the broadest sense.

All learning happens in a context, and in the established world of pre-college education we have planted our collective flag atop the mountain of missions and values (think: the accrediting process). We set out with good hearts to create institutions of teaching and learning built around these at least purportedly idiosyncratic, “mission driven” elements:

• Cultures of learning comprised schedules, “grading” and assessment systems, administrative hierarchies, reward systems, professional learning expectations, age-cohort- and academic-discipline-related bureaucracies, and co-curricular offerings with their own hierarchies and systems of reward and recognition.
• Intentional curricula, ostensibly and hopefully aimed at meeting the requirements of larger systems whose demands are more often perceived through our own institutional and personal lenses than clearly stated “from on high.”
• Pedagogies that may be inventively designed or that cautiously default to the hackneyed and cliched, all providing student learning experiences with as broad a range of efficacies as of types.

Try putting on your skeptic’s (or hardcore realist’s) glasses and taking a look at the full context of learning at your school. It might be well to reserve some time for deep reflection as you ponder these related and very germane issues:

• What is the “null curriculum” in your institution? That is, what is not taught or emphasized, leaving learners to infer that these things are unimportant or even, in some way, taboo or off limits? How might this message, however unintentionally implied, create a kind of cognitive or emotional dissonance in students’ minds and hearts?
• What about the “hidden curriculum,” the ways in which certain structures, policies, sequences, or reward systems send messages about what is important that may be at odds with “official” or proclaimed values and beliefs? Is the very culture or organization of your institution in some way contributing to student apathy, cynicism, or angst?
• Consider, for a moment, your school’s “best and brightest,” the students for whom stellar academic careers and accomplishments are forecast; they who will be, say, future National Merit Scholars or hyper-selective college or next-school admits. In the culture of your institution, how are the accomplishments of these students highlighted or rewarded?, In what ways (if any, to be sure) are the expectations placed on these students unlike those placed upon the generality of students. And in what ways (if any) might resources of certain kinds be directed toward these students in ways not entirely consonant with those “official” or proclaimed values and beliefs? Might this actually create undue or iniquitous pressure or stress that is less about a “student-centered” experience than about the needs or even that exaltation of the institution itself?
• Does your school note or acknowledge an “achievement gap” or, equally unsettling, a comfort gap? Are members of certain groups less successful in your school, or do they feel less welcome and included in the culture and the programs? Do individuals in these groups, then—and we would include students, families, and faculty and staff here—experience your school (in any or all of its parts) differently, and perhaps as more stressful, than other members of your community?

There are of course a host of corollary and shadow (as in, “Why not?”) questions accompanying each of those asked here, but we’ll stop for now.
If you are inclined to explore these questions more deeply, we would point you to these terrific and relevant resources:

• Challenge Success, an outgrowth of the work of Denise Pope and others. “We partner with schools, families, and communities to embrace a broad definition of success and to implement research-based strategies that promote student well-being and engagement with learning.”
• The films of Vicki Abeles, especially Race to Nowhere and Beyond Measure
• At What Cost? Defending Adolescent Development in Fiercely Competitive Schools by David L. Gleason, PsyD
• Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls by Lisa Damour, PhD
• The film Most Likely to Succeed and the book What School Could Be: Insights and Inspiration from Teachers Across America by Ted Dintersmith
• Making Caring Common, part of the same Harvard Graduate School of Education project that produced the “Turning the Tide” report. “Collaborating with partners and engaging in national media work to amplify our messages and elevate the importance of developing children’s care for others and the common good in our public dialogue.” 

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