“Family life changed as parents tried to produce the sort of children who could get into selective colleges. Over time, America developed two entirely different approaches to parenting. Working-class parents still practice what the sociologist Annette Lareau, in her book Unequal Childhoods, called ‘natural growth’ parenting. They let kids be kids, allowing them to wander and explore. College-educated parents, in contrast, practice ‘concerted cultivation,’ ferrying their kids from one supervised skill-building, résumé-enhancing activity to another. It turns out that if you put parents in a highly competitive status race, they will go completely bonkers trying to hone their kids into little avatars of success,” writes David Brooks.
Yeah, this “concerted cultivation” crowd consists of either very recently college-educated (meaning, first generation) or immigrants. Among the extensively educated, the fashionable thing to do is precisely to leave the child in peace. Immigrant children are dragged to Kumon while the children of the crowd that goes to the opera for enjoyment are all at the playground or in the park.
The hardest skill and the biggest premium on the job market is the capacity for deep focus. The second one is knowing your mind and having initiative. Both skills are actively destroyed in most extracurriculars. Brooks is talking about something that existed in 2005 but has changed dramatically since then.
Clarissa's Blog 
Managerialism.
Managerialism is, at its core, the prioritization of process over product.
[…] objective, concrete outcomes are subordinated to a particular state of mind; the manager is not so much a boss as a life coach.
By resorting to mutable guidelines, by preferring vague communication, managerialism teaches the art of talking in circles, of never really saying anything for which one can be held accountable.
https://www.compactmag.com/email/714e3485-ab44-4122-bf5d-ddae04efe582/
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