The title of Mount Vernon native Jeannine Jannot’s new book captures its message succinctly: “The Disintegrating Student: Struggling but Smart, Falling Apart, How to Turn it Around.”
Jannot, a graduate of Mount Vernon High School, is a psychologist, teacher and academic coach living in Atlanta. Her parents, Ron and Connie, still live in Mount Vernon.
The book explores the impact of today’s data-driven achievement culture in education where grades and standardized test scores often take precedence over the love of learning, Jannot told the Mount Vernon News.
“It’s taken the motivation to learn away from students,” she said. “Students don’t care about learning as much as they care about grades and scores they need to get into the college, to get the job. That’s not a very fun way to go to school.”
One way parents can help in many cases is to actually do less, said Jannot, a mother of three.
“We are in the achievement culture, too,” she said of herself and other parents. “We worry about our kids getting the grades up and getting the scores and getting into the colleges. We tend to help when our kids neither want nor need our help. That’s taking control away from our kids.”
Children with parents who are overly involved in their education may not learn from mistakes or how to take responsibility or have autonomy over their lives, Jannot said.
Parents should trust their kids, give them more control and acknowledge the pressures on them, she said.
“We know how to educate our kids,” she said. “But we’ve lost our away in what success means. I think that’s the biggest problem.”
The 2019 college admissions bribery scandal involving Hollywood stars was an extreme example of parents going too far to help their children, Jannot said. But it plays out in smaller examples in families across the country.
“I wasn’t surprised,” she said of the scandal. “I think it happens at all kinds of levels up to that extreme. Parents are trying to help their kids checks those boxes get those data points. They hire tutors; they send their kids to private schools; they’re signing them up for test prep programs. It really should go in the other direction. It should be the students and teachers telling us what the culture should be and what learning should look like.”
