Educate Them! Then Let THEM Decide What They Want to Do.

 The Land of Opportunity. That's what I always considered our country. I was taught that I could be anything I wanted if I was willing to work hard enough. I've made a good living as a blue collar worker--driving a truck and as a chicken farmer. I've also made decent as a teacher in the white collar world. 

As a kid, I never really saw myself going to college. I never thought I'd need it, that I could do whatever I wanted without spending the time and money for school. I went for a year right after high school because a lot of people expected me to, but I only lasted a year. I didn't flunk out, but I spent all my money and as a student I was less-than-stellar enough to lose my tuition scholarship. 

So I went back to what I knew best, hard work. And I was good at it.

After 17 years bouncing around from the Marine Corps to driving a truck to raising chickens and cattle, God made clear to me that He was calling me to teach. I tried to convince Him He was wrong, but failed. I went back to college at 35 years old and became a lot better student than I was at 18. Thankfully, the education I received at North Little Rock Northeast High School was good enough that I remembered a lot and quickly picked up most of what I'd thought I'd forgotten. 

You see, I was one who never thought he needed a college education. But God had a different plan for me than the one I'd made for myself. If I'd have been steered away from college prep classes in high school, I may not have ever survived returning to college after 17 years away from classrooms and textbooks. But my school and my teachers knew what I didn't know...that was how I really had no idea what life had in store for me, even though I thought I knew it all.

Today a lot of schools and a lot of educators seem Hell-bent on deciding for kids what they want to be when they're 15 or 16 and tailoring their school experience to that. In ninth or tenth grade, they're either deciding for the kids whether or not they need to prepare for college or learn to swing a hammer and forget about learning to conjugate verbs and do that ugly math stuff. But who are we to decide a kid's fate when they are so young?

Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against kids going into the trades. I've got just as much respect for a good carpenter as I do a good CEO, and just as little respect for a bad one of either. My problem is that WE are deciding for them, or may as well be. What 16-year-old kids will tell you he or she wants to go to school to design traffic flow systems? Not many I bet, but I know a young lady who just graduated college who is heading to Washington, DC to start a job making $90K as a civil engineer. She started out working as an electrician. 

What if WE had decided for her that she didn't need all that algebra and advanced math to be an electrician when she was in high school? What if we'd have steered her away from those classes into consumer math classes? Would she have had the math background to earn an engineering degree? Would she have had the confidence to weed through all those Greek letters and funny looking mathematical symbols to finish even her first Calculus class?

I'd bet not. 

I heard today that kids don't need Algebra 2. From a teacher. 

All 18 years of my career I've told kids that every subject and every class they take has value. Every class. Every subject. I believe that. There have always been people who don't believe it. Some don't believe English is important. Some math. Some history. Some science. Some electives. But obviously, there are educators who don't believe it either.

I think most people who think it don't understand WHY these things are important. Literature isn't important because you get to read entertaining stories. It's important because the authors of the classics wove so many intricate messages throughout their stories! Classic literature is rich with opportunities to read between the lines, analyze and interpret. Taught and assessed correctly, it develops analytical skills that can be carried to any walk of life.

History isn't important so you can memorize a bunch of dates and facts to impress your friends at trivia parties. It's important to study how policies and events worked together to make things happen. Our own founding fathers crafted our government by taken the best of several great societies and dropping what didn't work for them. The result was the framework for a nation that would rise to become the most powerful in the world, while still in its relative infancy. If our current politicians were true students of history, they wouldn't make near so many mistakes and our nation would be in much greater shape.

And math. People think they never use math because they haven't plugged in numbers to the quadratic formula since they took College Algebra.  But the beauty of teaching and learning the quadratic formula doesn't lie in using it in the future. The value of teaching and learning it is in the process to arrive at it. You start with a generic quadratic equation and solve it, step-by-step. The benefit isn't the ability to remember it, or even use it, but to see how to logically, one step at a time, think through a problem from its introduction to its solution. The reason math matters is that it develops logical thinking and problem solving. 

The importance of science should be self-explanatory--learning how the world works. But beyond that even, it teaches us to question, investigate, and use findings to draw conclusions. You need to know what happens when you throw a lighted match in a puddle of gasoline, but the real value of teaching and learning science is how to use controlled experiments to investigate these things so you can use them for the benefit of you and society at large, or so you can avoid catastrophe in the future. 

All four of what are considered the core subjects in a classical education are taught more to teach students how to think logically than to memorize anything. Therein lies its value. And it's ALL valuable!

If we as schools and educators decide that a 15-year-old kid just can't cut it in math and push him to stop taking it, we not only kill any hope of him taking up a STEM field in the future. We also impede development of his logical reasoning. Wouldn't it be better for the future plumber to be a great problem solver when he faces a previously unseen challenging plumbing task than to be unable to proceed and wait for someone who hopefully has seen it before?

That kid we encouraged to stop taking history classes because he was lazy? He might be your future congressman who will now have no idea what the wrong vote on a bill will cause. The kid we told, "You don't need more science. You already have all the science credits you need," he might have been the one who God put on earth to discover the cure for some dreaded disease. 

And what if they're not. What if every kid we ever discourage from taking more challenging courses goes into the trades? What if? 

They're still all going to face challenging circumstances in their home lives, their work lives, and every facet of their lives. They're all going to face choices that lead to either good or bad outcomes. The better thinkers they are, the better their lives are likely to be. 

If we care about them at all, we'll use our positions as educators to encourage them to get all the education they can, regardless what their future plans are. Why? Because the ability to solve problems and think logically is beneficial no matter how you earn a living!

And if they decide, now or later, that they want to do something that requires education, this will again be their Land of Opportunity, instead of their land of regrets.

Let's get back to educating--really educating--kids! We owe them that.