CSotD: Doonesbury: Special Back-to-School edition
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Doonesbury continues to explore the gap between the privileged kids who head off to private, four-year colleges after high school, and the working class stiffs who end up in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and trailer parks.
Alex should be embarrassed over her lack of empathy for Leo when it comes to goals, but I wouldn't be too hard on her for her own attitude towards school. Fact is, Americans have no real sense of what college does or why people should go there, and we simply shovel our kids in one end and hope they stick long enough to emerge at the other end with some kind of document showing they've been there.
School administrators announce at graduation the percentage of kids who are headed straight to college, but I've never heard one say, "And, of the kids in last year's class who went straight to college, nearly 60 percent are still there, while 32 percent of the previous year's college enrollees remain in class as we speak."
Nor do they have much to say about the kids like Leo, who get out of school and go into the service, where they pick up some maturity, some job training and some sense of what they want out of life.
This isn't all that new. As it happens, my father dropped out of Alex's alma mater to go fight in World War II and came back to finish up his degree as a married vet with a kid. He told me he thought that, in many ways, he and his cohorts put a damper on the college experience for the traditional students because they were so focused and serious. But, on the documentary program "Our World," cohost Ray Gandolf waxed rhapsodic about those returning GIs, because he said they brought valuable real world experience into a roomful of college-aged kids like him.
But it goes back farther than that. In the 1861 sequel to "Tom Brown's Schooldays," "Tom Brown at Oxford," our young protagonist finds himself adrift amid the spendthrift rich kids, only to be pulled back to reason by a poor student whose father was a naval pensioner and who is working his way through school as a waiter. This theme was stolen, mostly intact, in 1912 for Owen Johnson's "Stover at Yale," which Fitzgerald called "the textbook of his generation."
For my part, I heard the drumbeat about getting into "the college of your choice" and it seemed a wonderful goal, but, once I had gotten into the college of my choice, I was like Robert Redford's famous newly-elected Senator: What do we do now? After three years of not much, I dropped out, spent a year in the real world and returned as a married student to find that my grades went up about a point and a half and I actually cared about what we were studying.
My elder son only needed a year of college, mostly spent drinking beer and going to hockey games, to convince him that "getting into the college of your choice" was a pointless goal. But, after five years in the navy, he got the two-year degree he wanted, with honors, and embarked on a solid, successful career.
To be fair, there are plenty of kids — my other son and my stepdaughter among them — who head straight to college with a level-headed view of why they are there and what they want from it, and who pass through those four years with focus and purpose and joy.
But this notion that the only respectable educational path leads to college is senseless, and not just because the historical record stands so strongly against it. It's not just the collective cultural experience of Tom Brown and Dink Stover and the Greatest Generation that makes this so clearly wrong-headed.
At the same time we have shifted high school curricula away from technical and career prep and into college-for-all mode, we fret that our schools are not as good at preparing our kids for the future as the schools in Germany and Japan and other countries where they most certainly do not look down upon kids whose goals don't include sitting in classrooms parsing Shakespeare and Wordsworth.
Those nations whose students achieve so much are nations that support giving kids what they want and need, nurturing their talents and interests rather than mindlessly shoehorning them into an educational path in which a significant portion will fail, or, at least, fail to learn anything valuable. If we want their educational results, we need to mimic their educational philosophy.
A nation that does not respect and support its Leos doesn't deserve them.
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