Higher education too high a priority for some

By Kate Mason

It was the annual eighth grade vo-tech field trip: a day off to play with make-up and call it cosmetology, and all you had to do was pretend you were interested in possibly pursuing a career in the "vocational arts." Although everyone in my upper-middle-class suburban public school system had been decidedly and unquestionably "college-bound" since birth, few of us had qualms about heading off to be pampered and recruited by a group of men and women trying futilely to do what no adult had ever thought to do before--to gear us away from the books and towards the ratchets.

Vocational education was a joke in my school. Everyone knew that making things out of wood was only useful for building tree houses, that styling hair was only for slumber parties, and that plumbing was, well, for the plumber. The pursuit of "higher education" (i.e. attending college) was an established norm--an obligatory tier of the educational scale that did not end with high school, but continued right up through age 21, at least. In a community where the majority of parents were doctors, lawyers, professors, and other highly educated professionals, a child's failure to attend college was almost as scorned as a failure to graduate high school.

Even those students who barely stumbled through high school, who despised all their classes and could not wait for the day when their diploma would reach their hands; even they were shuffled off to a community college to suffer their way through two more years of watching the clock and mindlessly doodling in notebooks.

The idea was that somehow all people, despite their intellectual ability, drive, or interest, could reach an acceptable level in society if they just had one more diploma. People could only be truly valuable if they had spent several thousands of dollars and four years of their lives staring at books. Parents informed their children of this fact, and the school, expediently placing the naïve desires of the tax-paying adults above the best interests of the child, rarely offered other options. College was indeed the Promised Land.

What both parents and educators failed to realize was that the term "talent" is not restricted to an ability to write poetically or to solve complex math problems, and that "success" can be accomplished without tests or papers. Our society's presumption that people can only be respectable if they have college degrees is harmful and painfully shortsighted.

Why is a person with a degree in philosophy who writes essays on the ubiquity of the metaphysical spirits of pine trees appreciated more in popular American society than a skilled wood-worker who builds houses for people to live in, or a mechanic who makes it possible for thousands of other people to get to work everyday? Why were the dozens of "underachievers" in my high school written off as hopeless cases and pushed grudgingly through years of useless schooling without anyone's bothering to investigate their potential in the multitude of skilled crafts and services that everyone requires but no one appreciates? Why do we assume that all students who do show an aptitude for the more "respectable" arts of reading, writing, and arithmetic must pursue these venues, even if they do not enjoy them?

I learned the answers to most of these questions the day that I spent giggling at plumbing students and munching on hot dogs supplied to me by perhaps the most realistic and the most useful school in my neighborhood. The negative stigma attached to non-academic pursuits of excellence was so deeply ingrained in my young mind that I already thought at age 13 that I was going to college, and that anyone who wasn't doing the same was not worth as much as I was. Luckily for me, I do enjoy academic pursuits and am not sorry that I followed the path that I did. Yet, as I spend hours reading about the socially constructed gender roles of nineteenth-century Victorian lesbian poets, I can't help but wonder why a society so dependent on cars, toilets, and shelter is more supportive of my study of the diamagnetic properties of carbon isotopes than it is of the electrician who provided my light.

Kate Mason is a freshman in Ezra Stiles.

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