It’s five minutes before the test, and the two freshman girls standing in line next to me–one from Northwestern, one from the University of Chicago–are still trying to one-up each other on who had the longer drive to her respective magnet high school. The mother down the hall is reconfirming for her 21-year-old son that this test is important: “You worked through all those trivia books we got you, right?” I watch another guy walk past me and scan the line, then cut in front of two people looking the other way–presumably only to get his choice of seats in the testing room.

I have the Twilight Zone feeling–that uncomfortable sense that you are in some place or time where you don’t belong, like when you accidentally wander into an upper-level human-sexuality seminar on the first day of your religious-studies discussion. It seems so foreign that you start to think it is a dream, that it will only be a faint inkling of weirdness when you wake up.

But I didn’t wake up–I only drove home from Chicago. The memory of my morning at the College Jeopardy tryouts–more specifically, my memory of the people there–still gives me that Twilight Zone feeling, a glimpse into the lives of a group in which I was never indoctrinated … and, perhaps, a peek at the future of American students.

The girl who drove two hours each way to her “accelerated” high school, the kid whose mother forced trivia books upon him and the guy who cut into line all, I believe, share one common origin. They are the products of parents who pushed them toward America’s definition of success, brainwashed them into believing their ultimate purpose was to get a job with prestige through every means possible–the best schools, the hardest classes, the most academic honors.

I am generalizing, of course; I never asked these students why they pursued such seemingly masochistic endeavors, and they probably would not know the real answer if I did. But such attitudes do not exist in small children; they are not inherent human nature for anyone. They have to come from somewhere, and suspicion must fall on the parents–not the parents who give positive encouragement to their children to excel but those who force it upon them.

These are the parents who send their children to rigorous prep schools–essentially a college before college, where meeting others with the same goals forces them to work even harder to keep up. It is these parents who spend money on college coordinators to dictate their children’s goals and activities from middle school onward. It is these parents who send their children to 12 hours per week of standardized-test prep in high school.

These parents have always existed in America, but rarely to this extent; the boom in test-prep businesses, college coordinators, prep schools, advanced-placement classes and talented-and-gifted programs gives testimony to this fact. More and more, parents seem to treat their kids like investments–not for their own financial returns, as with some families in earlier American history, but for the dual purpose of their own vision of the child’s “best interest” and for their own prestige as parents.

This “best interest” belief comes, perhaps, from jealousy of other adults; they see what they could have become, had they only worked harder instead of having fun as a child, and they want it for their kids. Their own prestige comes more from culture; as society looks more and more at the connection between parents and their children, particularly with regard to crime (“he must have had a bad childhood,”) they refuse to let their children be less than exceptional.

All this pressure and motivation, all these extra classes and tutors and homework and summer school, all the ever-present stress will pay off someday, the parents say (and, often, their children believe). But they do not mention that the payoff is merely a change in social location, a change in title. The kids move from being ultra-stressed at school to being ultra-stressed in some prestigious, 60-hour-per-week job. They might be able to buy more stuff, to take better vacations, but nothing has really changed; their lives aren’t really any better or any different.

Is this the American dream? To constantly sacrifice for some better future that is never attained, to live in constant stress for shallow rewards?

The picture is not so bleak when children are allowed to discover their own dreams and learn how to pursue them and sacrifice. The reward is no longer a shallow one for them. But the children who are forced to work for their parents’ dreams, the children who have no dreams of their own because they never had a real childhood in which to develop them, the children who do not feel true enjoyment in anything but success and perfection … these are the casualties of this growing phenomenon.

The Twilight Zone feeling returns when I think about the son whose mother pushed him to study trivia books for the tryout. He sits nervously awaiting the names of those who had passed the test. I watch him walk out when his name wasn’t called, selfishly glad I would not have to witness him telling his parents or see their ugly, upset faces. I know they aren’t going to ask the most important question, the one that fewer and fewer parents are asking in this achievement-driven society:

“Well, did you have fun anyway?”

Matt Lynch ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in English and political science.