It is interesting to me how little our education prepares us for the real world. When you start school its all about learning to read and write, to count and do simple mathematics, to color and make friends. Then you get a bit older and you start, "your proper education." What they mean to say is now you get to learn about a bunch of things that once you graduate from high school you will probably never use again except to liven up conversation at fancy cocktail parties. You learn about history, being bias the way I am I like to think that this is a furiously important subject but in the grand scheme of the job world its probably not, though it does explain a lot about politics and why the world works in the way that it does today. Then you have subjects like geometry, trigonometry, economics, chemistry, biology, P.E. so that the schools can feel like they are doing something about the fact that so many people these days are morbidly obese though they only make you take it for 2 years, which in my opinion completely defeats the point. These subjects are all very important but again once you are leave high school you will probably never use them again.
Now, I know what some of you might be thinking at this time, I use that everyday or economics is vital to understanding the stock market and the way that our country's financial system works. You are completely correct but unfortunately the average person does not think about these things until they are directly affected by them, which is seldom. I am also not saying, by any means that I know better than someone else how our students should be taught or what are the things are that we should be teaching them. In fact this is, in a some what clouded way, my point. How do we know what courses the children/ young adults of this country should be following? Why is it not ok for some students, as young as 12, to want to be artists or musicians? If that is what they are passionate about and that is where they are truly gifted in, then who are we, who are the adults, who are the politicians and the unions to say that this is not ok; that they should be focusing on more usable trades or modes of study?
I believe that this is one of our main problems as a society and for that matter what is wrong with most of the major countries in the world. We are all so focused on what career path for ourselves and our children will make the most money, will allow them and us to have the highest status in society. Where this is a notable and very normal thing for parents to want for their children and for us to desire for our ourselves it totally disregards their wants and desires. Not only this but once we have indicated to them what they "should" want to do as a career, doctor, lawyer, CEO, etc. then we send them to college where they are able to expand their knowledge base and continue their educations in a glorified high school setting. It really is like high school without the parents and that you can actually get kicked out of if you don't do well in your courses, though unfortunately most college age kids don't care about that.
Once they have finished their college education, now between 21 and 23 years of age, sometimes older sometimes younger, we tell them that they are required to know exactly what they want to do as a career, 9-5, Monday through Friday for the next 30 years. Every recent graduates most hated question, "so what are you going to do with your life?"
Explain where the logic is in that? How many people do you think there are who know or knew what they wanted to do at 22? Not many, but yet this is how it is once you get out of college. "They," the wonderful disembodied "they" tell you to "get a job" or if you want to continue your educations, as some people mistakenly assume is because you don't know what you would like to do with the rest of your life just yet, you can go to graduate school. The problem is that deciding what you want to do in graduate school is a lot like deciding what you want to do with your life for the next 30+ years, and perhaps even harder. I say this because the beauty is if you get a job you don't like you can always quite and go find another one and yes it takes time but there really is no negative impact to you. Unfortunately, if you are in a graduate program you don't like you can quite, but if you do then you just wasted in the neighborhood of 20 to 40 thousand dollars.
Applying to graduate school you have to know A: what area you want to get your degree in. specifically, take psychology for example. If you were to apply for a master's in psychology you would need to know, what type of psychology you wanted to practice, clinical, child, abnormal, neurological, marital psychology. B: you would then need to know who are the authorities on that type of psychology and what their research background is in, where they studied and if their knowledge will be an asset to your educational development. Then it gets even more difficult. As if trying to decided what type of psychology of all the types their are, you wished to continue learning about you must now decide what area of that branch of psychology you wished to study. This is where I get tied up, not knowing enough about psychology I must change my analogy to something that I do know more about so please bare with me as I try to clear this up for you. We are switching our example to history. So now lets give our victim a name, "Vivian."
So now Vivian has decided that she wants to study history as a grad student, that she would like to continue to learn about Chinese history, which is just great for Vivian but now she must decide what time period in Chinese history she wished to focus on for what will become her master's thesis on the subject. Ok so Vivian, is extra special and she knows that she wants to write her thesis on something to do with the Tang dynasty. Now she must find out where the best professors are who study The Tang Dynasty of China. Eventually she finds them, great! Now she has another decision she has to make, what about the Tang dynasty does she want to study? Does she want to study about their burial practices and how those differ from the burial practices of the Xia Dynasty, or from burial practices in Japan or Mongolia during parallel time periods? Maybe she wants to write about the political turmoils during the Tang dynasty or the relationship of the emperor and the heads of the religious orders, or political relations between the Tang Dynasty and its surrounding countries? Or perhaps the size and power or the Tang dynasty gained or lost during the its dominance.
And too all these things that Vivian must decide before even applying to graduate school, she must also find out where the professors are who have interests similar to hers, which makes the number of graduate schools to choose from very limited, indeed.
So in many ways deciding what you want to do in graduate school is a lot more difficult then going out and getting a job or career path that you have the ability to change if you wish to. And many of you at 21 or 23 could not have answered all, if any of these questions? I know people who are in their 50's and 60's who, after 30 years, still couldn't answer these questions that an aspiring graduate school is asked to decided in a matter of months.
Coming back to the point of this whole mess of writing is, how does our education prepare us for such decisions? How can someone so young be expected to know for certain the answer to questions that take a life time to discover? I guess what I am trying to say is that perhaps what we should be doing in school is discovering what our strengths are, not being forced to learn things that are of little or no use to us just because they happen to someones idea of what we should be good at or what we should know.
If you are good at art, no matter what kind and you enjoy doing it, pursue that dream. If you are a gift musician do not let anyone tell you that you will never make anything of yourself by going to school to learn about music. You will never be truly happy in your career unless you are doing what you love to do. My grandmother love to fly airplanes. She told me that when she was younger she would spend all her time down at the jet way just hanging out with the guys and trying to find a way to learn how to fly one. When WWII hit the US, she signed up to fly planes as part of the WASP, the Women Air force Service Pilots, who would tow targets at the back of their planes for the boys to practice shoot at, among other things. After that she became a flight instructor and taught Navy boys how to fly planes. When she retired she raced air planes with some of her friends. She traveled and saw the world. If she were alive today and you asked her she would tell you that she loved flying more than anything and that she may not have made a ton of money but she was always happy when she was in a plane, and that is the only thing that matters. Sometimes, if we just allow our hearts to guide us and stop using our heads to rationalize away our dreams, something far more beautiful comes out of it. It can turn an ordinary life into a master piece without you even knowing it has happened. Sometimes fighting for what you truly want and love to do is worth the pain that it takes to get you there, because the place you end up in exceeds any expectation that you could have ever had of it.
