The through-the-looking-glass admisisons game
Monday, October 1, 2007Written by: Alan Gottlieb
As Mike Booth points out in today’s excellent Denver Post story, the college admissions game has – needlessly — become a major distraction and source of stress for high school seniors and their parents. While this may be a topic that applies primarily to more affluent families, the degree to which admissions mania has spun out of control says something more global about our education system.
Probe under the surface and what you’ll find is that it’s those dreaded “helicopter parents” who are creating the absurd level of stress and anxiety that has infected the entire system, from preschool forward. And to what end?
The September 10 edition of the HeadFirst Colorado e-newsletter (subscribe on the magazine’s homepage) summarized an article on this topic that
The gist of Rona’s argument is that the tail is wagging the dog:
The selective college curriculum, which shapes college entrance requirements, which…shapes all of K-12 education (and even preschools) is devised by a very small group of people (tenured and near tenured faculty) whose focus is on theories and abstractions, analysis and synthesis, library or laboratory-based research, exegetical reading and painstakingly careful writing about topics which typically don’t have direct application outside the academy.
And yet, Rona’s argument continues, our public, pre-K-12 education system, prompted by high-powered, influential parents, acts as though this abstract-thinking-based elite education is what we should be pushing all students toward:
Unwittingly, we have built a universal public educational system aimed at a college curriculum whose unspoken, but underlying rationale is the selection and training of prospective college professors and academic researchers who constitute approximately one percent of the labor force.
It’s little wonder, Rona, says, that so many kids, who either aren’t wired or prepared for this type of career, check out at a relatively age and find school boring and pointless:
Many of these undesirable student behaviors would not exist if we didn’t have schooling as we know it, but ironically teachers perceive these behaviors as inherent in the child, not as reactions to the patterns of schooling itself.
Finally, Rona offers the following suggestion:
But unless we change the purpose of schooling from a focus on de-contextualized academic learning to the explicit teaching of the knowledge and skills needed to collaboratively solve complex, undefined, and value-laden problems in a continually changing world, we would have fallen short of the stated goal of all reformers: to prepare students for leadership and success in the global economy and society.
While those of us have enjoyed the process and the fruits of a liberal arts education want something similar for our children, Rona’s probably right that it’s nonsensical to structure our entire P-20 system to push everyone down this one, narrow path. It clogs the pipeline and creates the kind of pressure build-up the Post article accurately decides.
I should know. I suffered through the process last year with my daughter. She’s happily ensconced in a college that suits her: I’m still recovering.
