Students Worry More About Friends Than Studies

It’s no secret that today’s students know less than students did 25 years ago. Scholastic Assessment Test scores have declined among all groups. Many colleges have been forced to institute remedial programs for incoming freshmen.

A new study - humbling, frustrating and alarming in its implications - tells us that the reason for the decline is that kids have become less interested in being educated. School reformers will be fighting a losing battle, the study concludes, unless they focus on the out-of-school influences on students’ attitudes - disengaged parents and an increasingly influential peer culture that demeans having brains.

The power of friends is so great that even parents who have stressed academic achievement can have their lessons undone if their children are not associating with like-minded friends, researchers said.

“A large proportion of kids told us that they basically hide their intelligence because they worry their friends are going to make fun of them,” said Temple University psychologist Laurence Steinberg, one of the researchers in the 10-year project that focused on out-of-school influences on academic achievement. The researchers interviewed 20,000 students in nine high schools in California and Wisconsin. The schools were average or above average, the students from all walks of life.

One-third said they got through the school day primarily by “goofing off with their friends.” They spend an average of four hours a week on homework, compared with four hours a day spent by kids in other industrialized countries. Fewer than one in five said their friends think it is important to get good grades in school.

Choosing from among the strictly defined social cliques in high school, one-third said they wanted to be “partyers,” one-sixth “druggies” and only one in 10 wanted to be known as “brains.”

Several studies have shown that peer pressure is greatest from seventh to ninth grade and has even more importance for minority children.