The Daily Riff - BE SMARTER. ABOUT EDUCATION.

"College here is like daring yourself to swim the length of a swimming pool without breathing. A lap is a semester. I want to do everything I possibly can." She works on a 28-hour day, she says: some days sleeping 10 hours, others, two. She can describe different levels of exhaustion. One level, she explains, is a "goofy feeling, like feeling drunk all the time; you're not quite sure what's going on. Then there's this extra level of exhaustion, where you feel dead behind your eyes. The last four weeks, that's where I've been. I get sick a lot."

 . . ."They are unbelievably achieving," says Judith H. Kidd, formerly associate dean for student life and activities, who retired from Harvard last year. "They are always on. They prefer to be busy all the time, and multitask in ways I could not imagine. Students will sign up for three or four activities and take one of them up to practically NGO (ed-note:non-governmental org) level. They were organizing international conferences. . . "

" . . . The paradox is that students now live in such a blur of activity that idle moments for such introspection are vanishing. The French film director Jean Renoir once declared, "The foundation of all civilization is loitering," saluting those unstructured chunks of time that give rise to creative ideas. If Renoir is right, and if Harvard students are among the leaders of the future, then civilization is on the precipice: loitering is fast becoming a lost art. And if the tornado of achievement that whirls through Cambridge has its obvious rewards, there are, as with most tornadoes, downsides . . ."

" . . .The explosion of busyness has occurred not in academics (most students still take four courses a semester), but largely in extracurricular activities. 'Extracurriculars are now as important as coursework,' says Gardner (ed. note: Howard Gardner - Hobbs professor of cognition and education Howard Gardner '65, Ph.D. '71).   'I wouldn't have said that 40 years ago'. . ."

" . . . 'Yes, it can often be frenetic and [done] with an eye toward résumés,' says Friedrich( ed note: David Friedrich, M.T.S. '04, assistant dean), 'but learning outside the classroom through extracurricular opportunities is a vital part of the undergraduate experience here.' And extracurricular experiences may in fact be the strongest preparation for the 'real world' . . ."

 ". . . In Excellence Without a Soul, his 2006 book on the future of liberal education, Harry Lewis relates a conversation with three of his former students who had launched a highly successful Internet start-up. What in their computer-science educations had contributed to their success, Lewis wanted to know. There was an awkward silence, then one spoke up. "I really loved my computer-science education," he said, "but I could have read books and learned a lot of that on my own. The thing that was really valuable was running the Quincy House Grill." Lewis explains: "He'd had to get people to show up on time, and make sure there was enough hamburger ordered the day before--but not too much, or he'd have to waste it, and that would cut into his profit margin. He took all this stuff and combined it with his technical skills to become a very successful entrepreneur. The way social progress gets made is by learning to work together, and the real place where people can learn to cooperate is in extracurriculars. . . "

" . . . The pace of that preparation, though, can be frantic. 'People are going nonstop,' says Olivia Goldhill '11, a philosophy concentrator from England, "and there are a lot of negative implications. You don't have time to dedicate to your friends or to yourself--or to thoughts that you haven't been taught to think." Goldhill, educated at London's venerable Westminster School, where discussion and debate are the warp and weft of the school day, marvels that, at Harvard, "there are so few intellectual discussions outside of classes. I try to take at least an hour for lunch with friends. There are days, though, that even when you want to go and hang out, everyone else is in their nonstop mode. . . "

 ". . . Home life has changed in ways that would seem to undercut children's development of autonomy. There was a time when children did their own homework. Now parents routinely "help" them with assignments, making teachers wonder whose work they are really grading. Youngsters formerly played sports and games with other children on a sandlot or pickup basis, not in leagues organized, coached, and officiated by adults; kids had to learn to settle disputes over rules and calls among themselves, not by referring them to grownup zebras. Once, college applicants typically wrote their own applications, including the essays; today, an army of high-paid consultants, coaches, and editors is available to orchestrate and massage the admissions effort. . . "