What for an education?

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?