I was a tutor for 20 years and now run an edtech company. Teens are often given 4-6 hours of homework a night and are under constant pressure to perform on quizzes and tests or fail out of school. Instead of teaching the material well in class, they are expected to do the studying outside of school. The whole system is designed to prepare them to do well on exams so that they can either enter an Ivy League School (private school) or do well on a standardized test (public school). Their success is measured by grades (A,B,C,D,F) Often they are so afraid of failure that they underperform on these tests. This performance anxiety gets passed along to parents as well. I've seen extremely successful CEO's in a state of total panic about how their children will perform on the SAT - and this panic is infections - it gets passed along to the children. The irony is that the name of your school has very little to do with how good the teachers are or how much you'll learn there.

The consequence too is that deep learning rarely happens. Kids learn enough math to pass a test, but don't develop a sense of creative problem solving. They learn enough French to pass a grammar quiz or an AP exam, but not to converse with a person in France.

School has become a place that is not focused on learning, but performing, and often performing well according to arbitrary standards.

My current focus is on helping families opt out and design their children's education through modular learning (homeschool 2.0), not going to school from 9-3, but through a mosaic of educational, social and childcare experiences: community classes, meetups, learning apps, books, online classes, tutors, apprenticeships. The assessment and accountability is available through incredible tools like CoGat, MobyMax or just assessments built into mastery-based, adaptive learning apps.

People often say, but how do kids socialize? Won't they get isolated and depressed?

The irony here is when you read an article like this and see how depressed kids currently are IN SCHOOl.

School is a socially engineered environment. Kids sit in classes of other kids the same age and stress out about how to do on tests. They have little time for real socialization because they are overburdened with homework. They have no time for plan and relaxation (recess only being 30 minutes a day) They don't get enough sleep and they don't have time to reflect or study the topics that interest them independently or do outside projects. Often they are also overloaded with extracurriculars like gymnastics and piano that they have to take outside of school because it's not available in school. These extracurriculars are often part and parcel of the big game plan to get them into college and add even more stress. For example, practicing an hour of piano a day outside of lessons to prepare for competitions.

kids whose bodies are not designed to sit still 6 hours a day are given ritalin to force them to conform to an unnatural system when they would learn so much better if they had the freedom to move around. It's decided something is wrong with them because they need to move their bodies.

Schools develop clicks and often kids who feel isolated join groups that revolve around experimenting with drugs or alcohol, the only groups within they feel included.

The children doing modular learning (homeschool 2.0) get to design their own social experiences. If they are in an urban environment, or even a rural one, this can be working on projects together, going on field trips, 9th graders mentoring 1st graders and teaching them to read, playing at the beach.

These kids have busy, full social lives that often include groups that meet with parents and grandparents as well. Kids aren't separated from adults all day. They get to learn from older kids and mentor younger children. Their aren't these exclusive clicks and bullying we see in private and public school.

And last but certainly not least, they get to sleep in! Teenagers bodies are not designed to get up at 6am every day for school. They need lots of lovely sleep to be healthy!

This is kind of a rant, but it's so clear to me that this entire system is set up to produce huge stress and anxiety for kids, with very few tangible benefits to their well being.

Our teens are depressed. They are suffering. But there is another way. It doesn't have to be like this for them to have succeed and have rich, meaningful lives right now.

BTW Social media and the impact it has on children is a whole other topic, but a big piece of this.