A Riveting Narrative About Hyper Education in the U.S.

Though I have spent most of the last three decades of my adult life in Bengaluru, India, I have been part-enthralled and part-appalled by the well-known storming of the Scripps National Spelling Bee by Indian American contestants. Held every year at Washington D.C. and aired on ESPN, the contest has acquired national and even global prominence. The dominance of Indian Americans and the concomitant displacement of others has been expectedly cheered by Indian newspapers and other Indophiles, sometimes accompanied by a problematic ascription of racial superiority to the winners.

This ‘browning’ of an American competition scaled new heights in 2019, when for the first time in the history of the contest, there were eight co-champions, of whom seven were Indian American. And this, despite the fact that since 2016, the Bee had actually been designed to prevent co-champions. It was almost like the system had conceded defeat to these indefatigable spellers.

Like viewers of the Bolshoi ballet or Olympics gymnastics, I was enthralled that these spelling champions flaunted a mastery that was unattainable to most of us. On the other hand, I was aware that most Olympics contestants (and their parents) had to make the kind of personal sacrifices that could be hugely rewarding for some, but also perilous for others. So when I encountered Pawan Dhingra’s book, Hyper Education, I almost felt like I had been waiting for a study like this.

Dhingra Embarks On A Sociological Study of Hyper Education

As a second-generation Indian American himself, Dhingra has an insider’s view of the community. Moreover, as a sociologist, he brings an academic’s dispassion to an arena that seems increasingly fraught with the contending tugs of various racial participants. Dhingra’s motive to embark on this study was broader and deeper than merely detailing the side-effects of such zealous mental coaching. He was curious about why families were doing this in the first place? What were the larger social or cultural imperatives?

Beyond that, he was also interested in the rub-offs of such frenzied pursuits: “More significant than harming the children engaged in it, hyper education supposedly hurts children not involved as well.”

From 2014 to 2018, he conducted in-depth interviews with about 100 families, Asian Americans, Whites, mostly upper middle-class. Most of these belonged to the highly educated strata. Many of the Asian Americans were in STEM-related fields, who had moved to the United States for higher degrees or professional job opportunities. In addition, Dhingra also attended many academic competitions – not just spelling bees, but also math competitions, geography bees, history bees, science contests and other such academic wrestling bouts. Contests in which Asian Americans, drawn mainly from Indian, Chinese and Korean families, knocked out their opponents with a savvy and craft that even the martial artist Bruce Lee might have applauded.

In studying this phenomenon, Dhingra coins the term “hyper education” to describe the slew of after-school programs that these kids are made to pursue, well beyond the confines of normal school curricula. The focus of these programs is not so much on special children – who might benefit from remedial after-school lessons – but on the already high-performing who are being turned into super-stars.

The Families’ Key Drivers

Such a widely-dispersed national phenomenon could not have emerged from a cultural vacuum. As Dhingra very astutely points out, hyper education is almost a natural outcome of a neoliberal system that lauds intense competition, private responses to public deficits, and the obligations or duties of families.

Since many of the Asian American parents in this cohort are first-generation immigrants into the U.S., they rightly conclude that their kids do not possess the social networks or cultural capital to infiltrate esoteric fields like music, art, literature or even Wall Street. They attempt to compensate for these drawbacks with excess “human capital” – in other words, their kids have to be super-smart, the kind of whiz-kids that colleges and corporates will be compelled to admit, for their sheer nimbleness with words or calculus equations. As end goals, colleges like Harvard and MIT seem to feature frequently in Dhingra’s conversations.

Moreover, while this hyper-schooling is largely propagated by Asian Americans, a growing number of white families also subscribe to these practices. Attendant terms are seeping into the mainstream lexicon. For instance, ‘hothousing’ means according pre-school children with an academic and cultural leg-up, even before formal schooling begins. Dhingra reports: “I saw a child still in diapers getting instruction at a learning center.”

A Mushrooming Business

In response to such demands for after-school classes, corporatized learning centers have proliferated across the country. Programs like Kumon, Kaplan, Mathnasium, Russian School of Mathematics, JEI, Sylvan have established franchises in all parts of the nation. These are profit-oriented businesses, so they inevitably or “logically” target high net-worth families and professionals.

In other words, inside a seemingly meritocratic system, privilege begets privilege. This only exacerbates educational inequality, further disempowering certain communities – like African Americans or Latinos, who do not fall into the radar of these learning enterprises as target customers.

Even the Spelling Bee, which is often flaunted as a meritocratic (and multicultural) construct, can require pricey coaching to break into its sound-wielding echelons. Companies have been founded by ex-winners, some of which coach aspirants using software programs priced at $ 200 per hour. As Dhingra notes, “Families have paid over $2000 for eight one-hour spelling coaching sessions or $3,450 for sixteen sessions.”

Some people flaunt the fact that Asian Americans are winning such contests as proof that the country is color-blind. Heather Mac Donald, author of The Diversity Delusion, said the following on Fox News: “If white privilege explained everything, please tell me how seven out of eight of the recent national spelling bee example champions were Indian Americans?” While there is no doubt that the spelling bee finalists have worked extremely hard, slogging through monumental word lists, such a slog (at least for more than a few) has also been further facilitated by socioeconomic status or cultural access.

Moral Imperatives

Some of these centers impart skills that enhance school performance; some build capabilities that go well beyond the purview of the current schooling system.

The logic for inducting a child into such classes often rests on the notion that public schools do not handle advanced children well. Parents feel like they have no other recourse, but to admit their higher-potential progeny into these centers, which of course, further increases the performance gap, making the whole system a self-serving setup.

Because so many Asian Americans attend these extra classes, and hence outperform those who don’t, all Asian Americans are held to a stereotype promise. This is the opposite of a stereotype threat and unsurprisingly, no less pernicious. In other words, all Asian Americans, are expected to ace their classes, especially Math, and a “B” or anything lower would be considered an Asian F.

Besides the building of human capital and career capital, many Asian American parents believe they are protecting their children from other corrupting American influences, by inducting them into these centers. The classes are perceived as a kind of community space, with Math and Science activities filling in for church choirs. Dhingra notes that “Hagwons serve this purpose for Korean Americans,” as perhaps the buxiban do for Chinese. Parents want their kids to mingle with co-ethnic kids in order to glean values like perseverance and diligence.

The anthropologist of ethnic relations, Frederick Barth observed that we can learn about a community’s culture by tracking the manner in which it differentiates itself from other communities. Asian Americans perceived their extracurricular academics as being a means to differentiate themselves from White Americans. Dhingra observes that they also feared their kids’ “downward assimilation” into mainstream culture, which they felt was responsible for social problems like “divorce, guns, premature sex and complacency.”

Interestingly, many of the white families who have also signed up for these after-school classes cite similar drivers. They want to raise their kids with an immigrant’s mentality, and a competitive edge that can overcome the complacency of second or third generations. They also refer to a halcyonic past, when their families lived on farms, and their kids were made to labor in ways that current modern or pampered kids are not.

After Effects of Hyper Education

Naturally such hyper-schooling or hyper-coaching has effects on both participants as well as on the surrounding culture. Even kids who do not attend these classes are affected. One mother who did not want her child to be put through the extra hours, said her daughter was nonetheless stressed by the fact that these other kids already knew so much. Some of this is gendered, with the hyper-educated boys tending to brag or show off more than girls.

Among Asian American kids themselves, there are psychological consequences. At a Boston public school district, Mary a “prevention specialist” asked third graders to express their top concerns. They wrote, “Am I going to get into a good college, am I going to do well in the SAT, [and], am I going to do well on [the state standardized test]?” These were responses from third graders.

As Dhingra observes, “while stressed-out third graders are alarming, the tension ratchets up so much during high school that educators worry their students feel they are in a life-or-death situation.” Along with inflating grades, cases of anxiety and depression are also spiking. And kids might be resorting to the very activities – like cutting, pills, alcohol, teenage sex – that their parents are attempting to shield them from.

Moreover, as one mother noted, even among those who succeed and get admitted to prestigious colleges – like the Ivy Leagues – the burnout rate can be high. Some kids do exceedingly well through their elementary, middle and high school years, and even into the first year at college and then start declining after their second or third year.

Dhingra is also emphatic that not all Asian parents are stereotypical “tiger parents.” Many Asian American kids are not being compelled, by aggressive means, against their wills. But the surrounding ecology is certainly fostering a hyper-competitive do-or-die attitude – which can affect the future generations in not very salutary ways.

Possible Alternatives

While Dhingra is also conscious that the battle to be waged against hyper-education is a much larger one, he proposes shifting the focus of education from creating career capital to “social transformation.” He also believes that schooling, which ideally can involve project-based learning, should not just be a means to build a college-worthy resume. After all, college itself has to be a means to something larger or more purposeful.

Some parents are also drawing from movements like ‘slow parenting’ or ‘free-range parenting’ to counter or resist the hyper-educational model. Perhaps, in general, we need to ensure that the primary participants in this endeavor – the kids – also have a voice and a sense of agency in driving their lives and futures.

References

Pawan Dhingra, Hyper Education: Why Good Schools, Good Grades and Good Behavior Are Not Enough, New York University Press, New York, 2020