For what purpose, parents might ask, have we banished boredom? And for what price have we filled the nooks and crannies of the everyday, cramming out the teachable moments as we sit in our house, and when we walk by the way, and when we lie down, and when we rise (Deut. 6:7)?Will someone finally ask what gets lost in the rush to get somewhere?

In a July article for The New Republic, William Deresiewicz admonished parents to abandon Ivy League ambitions for their children. Having spent 24 years at Columbia and Yale, he surmises that students at our most elite universities have lost their sense of purpose.

These high-achieving students may be “winners in the race we have made of childhood.” They may have mastered “a double major, a sport, a musical instrument, a couple of foreign languages, service work in distant corners of the globe, [and] a few hobbies thrown in for good measure.” But if they are great at what they’re doing, they have no idea why they’re doing it.

Joshua Rothman, in a response published in The New Yorker, draws a different conclusion about the apparent soullessness of today’s best and brightest. He concludes that Deresiewicz mistakenly ascribes “to his students, as personal failings, the problems of the age in which they live.”

According to Rothman, Stanford and Brown aren’t the problem but the symptom. Modernity itself is the culprit. Everything and everyone is running at breakneck speed (not just at Harvard), and the busyness masks a troubling ambivalence of our era: “Careers means more to us because the traditional sources of meaning, like religion, mean less; increasingly, work is the field upon which we seek to prove our value.” We may be racing—but are we sure of where we’re going? Have we defined the goals worth pursuing?

Christians can imagine a different kind of flourishing for our children and grandchildren—something other than busy lives built on the sand of impressive resumés. But it will require self-examination: How guilty are we of making childhood a race? Though we may not entertain ambitions of sending our children to the Ivies, have we not surrendered ourselves and our children to the dizzying, soul-destroying pace of modernity?

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