Perhaps I’m late to this realization: If striving for high grades stresses a kid out, why would anybody push that kid to get high grades? This occurs to me now because school-stressed Chinese kids were most likely to get PTSD after the 2008 earthquake.

Jeeeee-zuss!

Recap: In 2008 the Wenchuan earthquake smacked the crap out of south central China. A bunch of schools collapsed. Upward of 69,000 people died, and hundreds of thousands were injured. It was traumatic.

Now researchers have used that trauma to investigate the “who’s” and “why’s” of PTSD. Studying adolescents, they characterized the psyhcological burden each kid was carrying:

• Directly impacted by death or loss of house, etc., in the quake

• Post-quake trauma, punishment, illness, conflict, school pressure.

• Coping style — naturally retreats in hard times, or naturally seeks solutions

By 97 points on the Richter Scale, school pressure was the strongest predictor of which kids ended up with PTSD.

SCHOOL IS SO BAD FOR YOU!

There are, to be fair to school, there 99 potential problems with this study.

Prior research says that a naturally active amygdala — which is also active in anxious people — is a damn good predictor of who gets PTSD. So it could be that the same kids who are vulnerable to quake PTSD are also vulnerable to school pressure — that this is a mere correlation.

SCHOOL MAY ONLY BE BAD FOR ANXIOUS PEOPLE!

Another potential confound is that the scientists asked kids to recall the events in their lives, and human memory is notoriously full of crap.

Anyway, China is the right place to study this: Getting good grades early on sets a kid up for future educational opportunities. So academic pressure sets in early and hard in that culture.

But speaking purely anecdotally, based on convos with a number of educator pals, the same pattern is on the rise in the U.S. culture. Starting in high school, kids are pushed and prodded to do more, do better, reach for higher level courses, and start a small nonprofit providing clean water to all the people of Panama, so that they can get into a prestigious college. Where — and this is not anecdotal — a record number of them are suffering anxiety problems, in part because they don’t belong there. They were boosted, shoved, leg-upped, shot-putted, and application-tutored into schools more demanding than they could handle.

Whereupon they encountered their natural fear of heights. They’ve been told for so long that they’re special that most of them (three-quarters) believe they’re above average. This implies either a poor national grasp of math, or of reality. The fact that these kids hit a brick wall of stress when they hit college suggests it’s a realistic self-image that has eluded them.

Anyway, interesting insight into the pressures that come to bear on the human head: Rigorous schooling ain’t always good for your character, apparently — not always the best path to your child’s future.

Unless you want your kid’s future to be spent on anti-anxiety drugs.

Watching my own head, here: Knowing what I know of my culture, I bet most people would still want their kid to get into Harvard even if they knew it could stress the kid into an anxiety disorder. I mean, there’s a pill for that, right? There’s no Harvard pill.