At the end of our session, he looked at me and said, "I guess we've been doing it backwards all these years. We've been telling them what to do instead of letting them make their own decisions."
"We" in this case is our country's educators. "Them" is the millions of students whose career paths are indelibly influenced by their educational experiences. No doubt about it: Education as it's now construed contributes as much to inappropriate career decisions as any other factor. For the most part, our schools don't help with career decisions -they program. And many of us spend the rest of our lives either succumbing to or fighting that programming.
Let me be clear that I am not at all opposed to tests and grading systems as means of motivation, encouragement, and discipline, and of ascertaining whether a student has learned the given material. What I am opposed to is that the system in which people who score well on tests in certain areas are automatically pushed to pursue further training and careers in those areas. The problem, of course, is that just about anyone can study hard and do well on a test, regardless of like or dislike of the subject matter. This is especially true of our top students.
In fact, I once worked with a young woman - a high school senior - who was being encouraged by the school to go into math and science because she got straight A's in those subjects, even though they were fields in which she was definitely not interested. She had a flair for these subjects and an ability to score well on related tests, but she also had a strong artistic bent and a people-orientation.
Eventually, her parents asked us to help her examine her interests and feelings. After that, her parents were able to help her counter the school's influence.
The effect was startling. Within weeks, she had laid out what amounted to a plan for her life. Her entire attitude became much more positive.
The next flaw in the system is that teachers in specific areas project their biases to their students. I suppose it is human nature for a teacher to encourage his or her best students to pursue careers in the area that he or she teaches, but that does not make it right. The correct thing is to take into account the individual human factors that are so important in making the right career decisions.
Lastly, there is an ingrained methodology of school guidance that's used because "that's the way it's always been done." It is based on how students perform on psychological and preference tests and how they appear to certain teachers. Perhaps worst of all, it centers around a supposedly empirical assessment of what the "hot" careers are going to be ten years from now. We must face it: It does not matter what the hot careers are going to be in ten years. Someone who was not right for computer programming ten years ago probably still is not right for it today. But you can bet there are a lot of unhappy people in that field who went into it because some guidance counselor somewhere convinced them there was a "great future" in it.
The fact is, any career choice made on the basis of an objective assessment of your talents, needs and desires has a great future in it. Unfortunately, helping students make such an assessment is not something in which our educational system has ever developed its expertise.
And what does all this mean to you? For one thing, I hope you will bear all this in mind when it comes time to talk to your own children about career choices. And students, get all the input you need from those who know you and love you, but make your own decisions based on an objective assessment of your own hopes, aspirations, talents, and values,
It is crucial that everyone, especially those who are experiencing any kind of unhappiness in your career, examine the entire issue of undue influence applied by external forces -perhaps especially those implanted in you by your education.
