Are we hastily "tracking" children onto a college-bound path right from
their high school freshman years, and perhaps even from middle school
on?
Over the last couple of years, I have gotten into a habit of
chatting with students, especially those in my freshman-level classes,
about their reasons for attending college. It never surprises me when I
find out that most would be doing something else, if they really had a
say in the matter.
But, they end up in college because of the tremendous pressure on
them to have a college plan from the moment they enter high school, or
even earlier. It is not difficult to imagine that most fifteen year olds
have the vaguest idea of career plans, and yet they are forced to think
about college and, sometimes, even the kinds of subjects they would
like to major in the undergraduate program. As one student recently put
it, "I didn't even know how to drive and these people were telling me I
had to know what to do in college."
Interestingly enough, similar thoughts about the role of higher
education are beginning to preoccupy at least a few educators and
parents in India, too. Spending a hundred days there, and observing the
American scene from the other side of the planet, was a learning
experience, in this context also.
For instance, the director of the Madras campus of the Indian
Institute of Technology, which is recognized as one of the ten best
universities in India, noted, tongue-cheek, that the public would prefer
a college major even for children in kindergarten! Meanwhile, he is
opening up to the idea that engineering students could take literature
classes also during their undergraduate programs.
This need for breadth was echoed by a college classmate, who, unlike
me, continued on with a career in engineering, and is now a senior
executive at a leading outsourcing firm, and oversees nearly 30,000
employees. His complaint is that it is getting harder for them to
recruit college graduates with good thinking and communicating
abilities. He reasons that the system is failing right from the early
years of schooling, and worries about the future if schools continued to
focus on tests as the pathway to college.
Despite our own healthy experiences of the past, when high schools
and colleges promoted thinking and creativity, and despite those from
faraway places like India, we tell thousands of Oregon children,
explicitly and implicitly, that K-12 schooling is nothing but the road
to college. Even worse is the notion that they are losers in life if
they do not go to college immediately after graduating from high school,
and many students I have talked with are keen on avoiding that "loser"
tag. A new "scarlet letter" that we have created through the schooling
process.
We push teenagers to higher education by scaring them about the
earnings they could lose. Here, we commit two huge mistakes. First, we
simply equate higher education to nothing but a passport to a job,
instead of instilling in the young a joy for lifelong-learning as a path
towards understanding their own respective potentials, of which
earnings is merely one. On top of this, by constantly dangling the
dollar sign in front of them, we are almost brainwashing teenagers to
think that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is nothing but
the pursuit of money.
Instead, the young ought to understand something entirely
different--life entails making decisions all the time, and that this
will mean difficult tradeoffs, which sometimes can be expensive. Thus,
we would not simply push teenagers to college because they would
otherwise be losers, but we would help them think and act every time
they reached a fork in the road of life. The tradeoffs that Robert
Frost so elegantly articulated as "the road not taken."
By focusing on an economic argument, which is weak at best, in order
to get students out the high school doors into college, we are rapidly
reducing them to mere worker bees who have to compete against those in
India and elsewhere. Is that really what we want from the billions we
invest in education?
