Or they feel intensifying international competition. It was bad enough competing with kids in Japan and the "Asian Tigers." Worse to have to compete with kids in China and India -- after all, China and India have far larger populations than Japan and the "Asian Tigers"! Hundreds of millions of whiz kids in Asia, and some of them, legatees of the accursed British Empire, spell better than American kids!
But what American kids are being forced to do now still doesn't seem to me to be in the same league as what Asian kids have been obliged to do. When I was growing up in Japan, there was a quiz in every class period and major exams every year, with no letup till I left college entrance exams behind (or so I remember -- probably my memory exaggerates, but only a little!). And I went to very ordinary public schools in a smallish, very provincial, working-class town (with the population of about 30,000), many of my classmates' fathers working in the same steel factory where my father worked or a Takeda pharmaceutical factory, which was (and probably still is) the other major source of employment in that town. Imagine what kids in elite schools must have been and must be still doing in Japan.
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>