Take a look at this sobering but thoughtful article from the new Atlantic. I've been thinking about the issues Professor X discusses a lot lately, especially since I've been encountering some students who sound a lot like the ones he describes.
Now the obligatory quoted paragraphs:
"America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting anyone’s options. Telling someone that college is not for him seems harsh and classist and British, as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines. I sympathize with this stance; I subscribe to the American ideal. Unfortunately, it is with me and my red pen that that ideal crashes and burns.
Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it—try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish. But one piece of the puzzle hasn’t been figured into the equation, to use the sort of phrase I encounter in the papers submitted by my English 101 students. The zeitgeist of academic possibility is a great inverted pyramid, and its rather sharp point is poking, uncomfortably, a spot just about midway between my shoulder blades.
For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college."
3 comments:
You know what? I have never bought into the idea that everyone should go to college. Some people have the desires and skills to go on to "higher education," but other people have the desires and skills to learn a trade or go into retail. I think there would be many, many fewer unhappy college students is people would just accept this. I don't understand how college has become the goal that all must attain. When I was looking for a job back in TN, I was shocked at the number of high-paying jobs that required experience and trade work and not academic degrees. (I always sort of wish that I had studied masonry at the vocational school. Masons make a lot of money, and I think it would be so satisfying to start with a pile of bricks and some mortar and end up with a nice wall.)
Who knew you had dreams of being mason? You are a complex woman, Amber. (And I am vaguely reminded of Poe's "Cask of Amontillado"...do what you want with that.)
I just looked up "Cask of Amontillado" (thank you my dear friend Wikipedia), and now I am a tad horrified.
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