[Patient0]

I think a lot of the hostility about over achieving kids is that parents and their fellow students instinctively recognize that a lot of the success that comes from education is "zero sum".

There are only so many places and scholarships available at the elite universities, employers only pick the academic "winners" for their graduate programs etc.

When a child spends all their spare time studying and does better in life as a result, a component of this success is actually at the expense of the kids who may have been as bright, but did not spend as much of their spare time on it.

So now should all the other kids spend all their time studying so that they can keep up and not lose out? Maybe...

I'm not saying that any of this is wrong or even unfair - just pointing it out.

[soup10]

It's not always that simple, sure the more time you spend researching and reading books, the more certain types of knowledge accumulates but we all know someone that is book smart and life stupid. And so much about being truly intelligent and successful is having a framework in which you are able and motivated to apply what you've learned as well as the motivation to keep learning and doing more. Many kids will burn out(or worse, always shuffled into one matrix or another) if they don't have internal reasons for doing what they doing, not just parents or schools encouraging them but actual drive within themselves that goes beyond social validation, and part of that comes from exploring and learning about life and yourself through first hand experiences.

[Aditya_Garg]

This is exactly the culture in Korea and other Asian societies. Kids regularly spend 3+ hours after school studying “just to keep up”