This is a question asked by adults to children everywhere, without the slightest realization of how completely insane that is. Most people, let alone children, have no idea what they want for dinner. But what they plan on doing for 40 or so years of their life day-in and day-out is apparently an easy question. In fairness to adults, it’s hard to strike up a conversation with kids–they have a boring taste in pretty much everything. So perhaps it’s forgivable. But once these kids hit high school, it becomes a very serious question.
We apparently legitimately expect, by the time a young person is 17 or so, to have a considered choice of what they want to do with their entire life, and to make a major time and financial commitment to pursue that in the form of picking a college. This is a mind-bogglingly difficult task, and I’m not sure we appreciate the psychological weight young people are shouldering by us placing this expectation upon them. Until maybe the last century, this was completely unprecedented in human history. Quite literally 99% of Homo sapiens’ existence was spent as hunter-gatherers. There was no such thing as a vocation. You either hunted and gathered or you starved. Once civilization rolled around a few thousand years ago, the division of labor kicked in, but in general, your vocational roles were not terribly open. 90% or so of people were farmers with no real prospects of changing that career. Beyond that, specialized jobs tended to be hereditary. You had your career chosen at birth. Wealthy and/or urban folks were essentially the only ones with any hope at changing their prospects, and it pretty much never happened for women. The industrial revolution started to change this a bit, but it really hadn’t shifted too tremendously until the 20th century.
The notion that an average person could basically do anything they chose to was not even remotely feasible until maybe three generations ago. As far as human timeframes go, that’s no time at all to figure things out. The process has accelerated, and we haven’t kept up psychologically. It’s a monumental existential crisis in the making, and I’m not sure we realise it. Having specific expectations makes things psychologically simpler. Knowing that you’re going to be a farmer or a blacksmith means you don’t ever have to worry that maybe I should be doing something different. Do not take this as a yearning for the days of old. I very much want people to have as many opportunities as possible; I think that’s wonderful. But that is a ton of pressure. To be at peace existentially, you need a perceived goal or purpose. Without it, you get either anxiety or depression, depending on your personality (or both). So at the very least, buy stock in Eli Lily and Diageo….
Most people do not have any raison d’être that pops out at them, especially at a young age. Some do, but it’s not most people. In a world where you could do anything, there is the implicit presumption that you will make the most of it. “I could be an astronaut president athlete, but I’m an assistant manager at a heartless multinational. I hate my life.” That’s going to be the coming generations of people. That’s not good. The utmost duty of the current generations is to ensure the survival and thriving of the coming generations. We need to get our shit together. But we have no idea what we’re doing. And we don’t seem to be keen on trying to actually fix things. Our education system, despite raising the smartest group of humans ever seen, is woefully suboptimal. Gen X apparently decided to put all its eggs in the “send my kids to college, then everything will be perfect” basket. Please read this if you haven’t already.
It’s unsustainable both economically and psychologically. Costs of college are skyrocketing, and we would rather drive a generation into bankruptcy than admit that maybe college won’t solve all our kids’ problems. Politicians and people who fancy themselves politically involved like to talk about “funding education” as if spending money on schools actually constitutes education. It doesn’t. I went to school, actually a rather above-average school; a lot of adults wouldn’t recognize a good education if it bit them in the ass. Everyone, regardless of circumstances, is given the same standards. Sounds fair, but it’s completely stupid. There’s no triaging. There’s no recognition of precedence. Sure, it’d be great if everyone got through pre-calculus. But the reality is that only a small number of kids are in a position to do so. So at the very least, maybe we make damn sure they can do the basic arithmetic. But instead of figuring out how to secure a more basic education, we try to pretend that everyone’s equally capable and judge them accordingly. Nota bene that I am not just talking about student aptitude. A kid who lives in a poor district with illiterate parents is not going to do as well academically as kids in a wealthier district whose parents read to him every day. Not the kid’s fault, nor necessarily the parents’ or district’s, but the reality is what it is. Even for kids with ample opportunity, there’s a lot of unnecessary material and a dearth of necessary stuff.
99% of people are never going to see a polynomial in their life. Yet basic polynomial algebra is a requirement to teach nationwide. Things that do come up, like large number sense, and statistics-sense, are woefully under-covered. I have genuinely intelligent friends who went to the same school as me who, say, couldn’t recall the number of 0’s in a billion versus a trillion. If you want to be a productive participant in our democracy, knowing these very numbers and the difference between them is hugely important. That is not to say that all education is purely utilitarian. The intrinsic value of this is good to know as a human being is important too. Music and art should be celebrated academically, but we as a society are so sick that we have kids who, in the pursuit of getting good grades, will forgo the arts to take more classes that have higher-weighted GPA’s. This should be gut-wrenching and unacceptable to any decent human, but yet it is allowed to happen.
Even the “practical applications” appeal to education make sense. But we’ve slid from even that to “it will help you get into college” as the reason any class exists. It’s insane.
How to succeed in life:
1. Get into college
2. ???
3. Profit!
As if college will solve all our children’s problems. Look, if you’ve got an idea of what you want to study and have an inkling that it will lead to a career, go for it, but considering how many people go these days, that’s not the mindset of a lot of people in it. Fully one fifth of college degrees in the US are business degrees. Tuition plus room and board even at a public school will run you well over 50 grand by the time you get out of undergrad. Most people don’t have that kind of cash lying around, so they take out loans. What would these same young people have done with a loan for 50 g’s up front to invest in actual business? We don’t know, is the answer, so we don’t take the risk and send them to college instead, because in the old days, a college degree was a guaranteed ticket to a lot more money. It still is worth a good deal of money, but it’s a lot less, relatively, and that value is shrinking rapidly.
College doesn’t necessarily set up someone for success if they have no aim whatsoever. It just delays the inevitable. What college doesn’t do that people sorely need is to tell you how to value yourself. To an extent, we all have a responsibility to develop this idea ourselves, but it is also the duty of society, particularly parents, to help us out. When every career is a possibility, we tend to think that what you do for work is what gives you value– or at least a necessarily large chunk of it. And that works for some people, but not everyone–probably not most people. Being a cog in the machine is actually completely acceptable. Earning money to raise a family is 100% okay (I mean, I am not advocating you get your money immorally). Spending time putzing around doing nothing in particular with your spouse is totally kosher. When you grow up, be involved in your community, be involved in your family, be a good person. If you can get a job doing something you like, or even don’t hate, cool. But it doesn’t have to give your life meaning (unless, of course, you really want it to).
Stop worrying if your kid is going to get into college and start worrying if they’re being taught anything valuable. It’s not as much important as to what they do than how they do it.