How Crucial Is It for Kids to Be Challenged?

Are high-achieving kids better served by harder schools?

Recently, several of my son’s friends have left our small local public school to attend more selective and challenging independent schools. Every time my son says he finds school “boring,” I cringe and wonder whether he should do the same.

There’s a common assumption, especially among middle- and upper-middle-class communities, that kids who aren’t challenged enough at school wind up less successful — the idea being that if they don’t get enough stimulation early on, they will wind up left behind. Is this actually true? Or is this yet another first world parenting dilemma that shouldn’t actually be stressing parents out at all?

It’s hard to answer these kinds of complex questions. What does it mean to be “challenged enough,” anyway — and what does it mean to be successful? How do we identify groups to compare? We can’t just contrast educational outcomes among kids who attend difficult schools and kids who don’t, because these children are often different from each other in numerous ways, not only in which schools they attend. How can we begin to tease out the truth?

There is no perfect approach and no clear answer. But some studies have tried to get at the question in various ways, and their findings are, in a word, surprising. I’m going to walk you through some of the literature today, starting with a study published just last month in the British Journal of Education Studies.