The Anxious Education (Part 1)

This is the first of four posts focusing on different forms of anxiety in education and the technology that pervades the academic experience.

• In part 1, I discuss the tutor’s role in de-stressing the learning process.

• In part 2, I examine the culture of anxiety that surrounds so much of both the K-12 experience and the college application process.

• In part 3, I analyze technology’s increasing role in altering our understanding of learning.

• In part 4, I offer a manifesto of the rights of the student, suggesting that tutoring is an anti-tech process.

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Anxiety is everywhere in education: from parents who worry their kids aren’t keeping up, through teachers overwhelmed by unmanageable class sizes and increasing demands, to students facing daily social and academic challenges.

American education is stressful, divisive and controversial, especially at the collegiate level, where free speech issues and conflicting political ideologies produce daily headlines (if not also protests).

The learning process, which should be filled with the empowering self-discovery that comes from challenging oneself, is, instead, increasingly fraught.

Homage to Haidt

I’ve taken the title of this four-part post from Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling The Anxious Generation, which describes in devastating detail how Gen Z is the victim of the “great rewiring of childhood.”¹ Through 24-hour internet and social media platforms, teens given smartphones during their sensitive middle and high school years have suffered from increased rates of anxiety and depression. Haidt concludes that the “play-based childhood” has been replaced by the “phone-based childhood.” It is painful for me to witness how what was once hailed as a great advancement in human civilization has resulted in so much harm to children. Though there have certainly been other warnings over the past fifteen years, Haidt’s book is both a wake-up call and a call for action.

Haidt discusses key stages of adolescent development, highlighting a tension that places children between two experiential opposites: “Discover Mode,” in which the child is open, curious, engaged, looking for opportunities to grow. By contrast, children in “Defend Mode,” seeking safety, retreat, reject, and protect themselves.²

As a tutor, I see these two modes all the time, though I mostly work with children who are in a perpetual state of “defense.” They feel overwhelmed in the classroom, are unwilling—or unable—to ask for help or find independent solutions. As a result, they don’t engage with what they’re learning and they don’t seize opportunities to grow. I try to coax them into “discover mode,” to get them to poke at and prod what they’re learning, to test and explore their subjects. But getting them to feel comfortable and confident enough to do so is a slow process. Over time, effective tutoring stitches together “defend” and “discover” modes as two necessary parts of the learning process.

Reducing the Anxiety of Learning

Learning anything new is stressful, and that’s unavoidable. The lack of familiarity creates fear and self-doubt. Competition with one’s peers can make the student feel stupid or slow. The longer this confusion persists with no change, the more he feels weak and nervous, afraid even to reach out for help. It’s a debilitating cycle.

Haidt points out that young trees need wind in order to develop stronger root systems, creating what is called “stress wood.”³ So it is with young students. From my perspective, experiencing some learning anxiety is healthy because it reveals a heightened awareness of the challenge, which stimulates adrenaline and marshals the internal resources to meet it. So it is important to acknowledge that some anxiety is intrinsic to learning anything—as long as the anxiety doesn’t become chronic.

An essential part of the tutor’s job is to help reduce chronic anxiety. Beyond teaching and reinforcing specific skills and content, the tutor must lower the student’s barriers to entry, one of which is the stress brought on by studying challenging material. When a student feels overwhelmed, he begins to display avoidant behavior, and that makes engagement with the material even more difficult.

One avenue to stress reduction is to share personal experiences (“I also struggled with math,” or “Latin never made any sense to me, either”) to “normalize” the student’s struggles. Another is to empathize with and share in his frustrations. It can feel good and empowering to have one’s feelings heard and validated: “The teacher is being dismissive and unfair,” or, “You’re right, your parents just don’t understand.”

Breathing exercises effectively promote calm and focus. I don’t only mean box breathing or yoga-based breathing practices; I also mean remembering to breathe, which is the first thing we humans forget to do when we are stressed. The tutor must make breathing an essential part of the problem-solving processes—promoting oxygenation as a component of studying. Without oxygen, the brain, simply put, cannot function.

Also essential is understanding that anxiety, though it is perceived in the brain, lives in the body; thus, a body-centered approach is key to relieving stress. All forms of tightening and gripping—most of them subconscious—constrict the body’s muscles, putting the brain into fight/flight (“defend”) mode and preventing the senses from easily absorbing information. I often encounter extremely bright students whose bodies are visibly locked and tight. For them, the core work has little to do with intellect; it is, rather, to get them to loosen up and, leading them into “discover” mode, let what they know flow better.

Guiding a student to feel where the stress manifests in his body and to release that tension is a simple tool to reduce anxiety. Similarly, encouraging her to “ground” her body in her chair, and to feel all the points of contact on the chair and floor, will return the body to its physical reality and out of an imagined threat. If sitting in a chair becomes too passive a learning position, energizing and stretching with jumping jacks or push-ups will get the blood flowing.

Awareness of Process

A student who feels she must always know the right answer (which generally overlaps with what is called a “fixed mindset”) is certain to be stressed, but if she sees academic success resulting from effort and engagement (a “growth mindset”), she can better cope with anxiety. One of my most useful frameworks aims to help students understand learning as a process that begins with not-knowing, confusion, uncertainty, and even fear. From my acting teacher, George Morrison, I learned that a student encountering new content moves through the “Four Stages of the Creative Process”:

1. Uh-oh! Something new is approaching. It’s scary. The body tightens. The breath grows shallow. The student braces for impact.

2. Oh-no! The scary object moves closer to the point of contact. The eyes and ears struggle to comprehend it. Overwhelmed, the brain scrambles to react, firing a flurry of neurons.

3. A-ha! The anxiety peaks as the student grapples successfully with what was initially scary. The feeling of being overwhelmed yields to the power of finding a way through.

4. Ta-da! The repetition of the new skill creates joy and confidence. Relaxation sets in as the idea/concept originally thought to be outside of the student now lives inside him.

Moving through the four stages of the creative process occurs repeatedly, though it is not always as simple as the above framework suggests. Some academic subjects loom perpetually in the “Uh-oh!” and “Oh-no!” phases. Math, essay writing, and foreign languages can bring students real challenges for years. Figuring out the correct way to focus one’s energy to move through an academic challenge can take a long time. Of course, as soon as the four stages of the creative process help the student master one idea, a new and more challenging concept appears on the horizon, and the cycle repeats.

But being able to locate oneself in a process/framework is itself empowering, even if struggles persist. Thinking in stages allows the student to self-diagnose, and that is the beginning of independent learning. A student might think, “I’m in that scary ‘Oh-no!’ place and I’m trying to get to ‘A-ha!’” Articulating that process demonstrates added awareness and a strength outside the feeling of powerlessness.

Over time, a tutor can help a student replace the noisy and scattered feelings that dominate her internal life with a more connected, centered sense of her own ability. Defense will yield to discovery.

1. Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation (Penguin Press, 2024).

2. Haidt, The Anxious Generation, 69.

3. Haidt, The Anxious Generation, 72.