<p>Fascinating article. I agree that what we’re expecting of our kids nowadays is nuts. I will say that I think high school kids have always had to sit and keep still with little opportunity to get up and move around, so I don’t think that’s changed. (Whether it should be changed is another matter.) Elementary schools have definitely cut back on recess and PE, with disastrous results for many kids, but high school I think was always a “sit at your desk and behave” kind of experience.</p>
<p>But the expectation of doing EC’s, which used to be a fun activity for kids but is now presented and felt as a requirement if you expect to attend college, is definitely one more time demand put on our kids. I was recently thinking about how many EC’s I did back in my high school days, and wondering how on earth I managed it, since I hardly ever felt stressed about schoolwork – I didn’t get all A’s like my kids do, because I didn’t feel the same pressure to get an A in every class that they do, but I got mostly A’s with some B’s. And then I realized that it wasn’t just that there wasn’t as much homework assigned back then as nowadays – it was also that the classes weren’t as demanding. History for us was a matter of reading the chapters in the textbook, memorizing the important facts and dates, and taking a test at the end of every chapter (and then a final exam) that was a combination of true-false, multiple choice, and short fill-in-the-blank. My kids’ history classes require them to examine issues in depth, do independent research, write essays, give presentations, and generally put a lot more thought and analysis into it than we were ever required to do. Now, I think this is a good thing – but our kids are trying to fit this intellectually challenging and time-consuming work into the same amount of time that we had back when we were just memorizing the dates of Civil War battles and listing three of the five main causes of WWI.</p>