“College and Career Ready”It isn’t that “College and Career Readiness” is irrelevant in education—it’s part of what school is for—but it’s only part, and far from the most important part. Like most teachers, I teach living, breathing students how to live the life they’re in right now and the life they imagine for themselves someday, and not just or even primarily “skills” to prepare them for “college and career.” To me, my students are not “future college students” or “future employees"—they are so much more—and I serve the whole child, not university deans or employer-exploiters.
When“College and Career Ready” become the primary focus in school, it demoralizes teachers, but more importantly, it marginalizes students.
Let me explain. Schoolchildren are…well, they’re children. When they’re very young, their career ambitions are simple: when I was a young boy, I wanted to be a firefighter, then a cowboy, then an astronaut, then a spy. My ambitions were informed by what was current in my life, by what was sufficiently newsworthy to fascinate the adults around me, and by what I saw in movies. “When I grow up” was a fantasy to me; I had no real idea even what that meant, and my “When I grow up” ambitions were stories I told about what was happening around me at that moment in time. The stories changed as I grew older and saw more, but even as a teenager and young adult, they were still stories.
The thing is, kids ought to tell those stories. They’re important. And kids can’t help but live in the moment—they know (as we sometimes forget) that the future isn’t real—and therein is found one problem with “College and Career Ready.”
For most students, college and career are in that unreal territory called the future. Too heavy an emphasis on college and career deprecates the only territory they know, the here and now. They have lives now, they have minds now, they have interests and passions now, they have challenges and struggles now. For school to be meaningful to them, it needs to be relevant to where they are right now, and if all we talk about is the future and how these “skills” are going to get them ready for “college and career,” we unwittingly send the message that what they’re going through now is unimportant.
Furthermore, we don’t even really know just what specific skills will be required for “College and Career Readiness” in the coming years. Things change faster and faster, and today’s must-have skill might be tomorrow’s “calligraphy” (don’t get me wrong—I admire good calligraphy—but it’s hardly a must-have job skill any more, is it?). It’s entirely possible that the world will soon shift to a largely post-employment paradigm, with automation taking over many jobs and most people living lives of leisure.
What we can do is what I and many of my colleagues try to do in our classrooms—we can coach students in creativity and empathy and critical thinking and divergent thinking and sound reasoning and powerful argument and curiosity and skepticism and enthusiasm and reflection and collaboration and discovery and imagining—and trust that that (together with nuts-and-bolts skills like reading and writing and speaking and listening and math computation and objective observation), will empower them to learn to do whatever else it is they need to do to have the life they want.
Instead of preparing them specifically for pie-in-the-sky by-and-by “college and career,” we can equip them for rich, full, reflective, meaningful, critically-examined life and engage them in that right now. We can kindle in them curiosity and skepticism and enthusiasm—for understanding and learning and discovery—and they will learn anything else they need to learn in the process of scratching that curiosity bump and answering that skepticism and responding to that enthusiasm. Do that, and they will be “College and Career Ready,” but they won’t have had to wait until college or employment to begin applying what they’ve learned; they can put those intangible principles and practices to work in their own lives starting now.
I did not become a teacher to make students compliant citizens or obedient employees. I became a teacher because the life of the mind is rich and satisfying and awesome, and I want as many people as possible to discover those same satisfactions, each in their own way. I do not work for corporations who need workers or governments who want “good citizens” or even for the Department of Education—they may employ me, but I serve my students, and they are not best served by thoughtless compliance or mindless labor.
They are best served if I can help them find their passions and coach them in pursuing them, if I can teach them not what to do, but how to decide what to do, if I can foster in them thoughtful habits and practices, if I can persuade them to be more than spectators, more than passengers, more than puppets. They are best served if they are taught how to live, and not just get by.
And I am tired of being told to do more of what is less—to teach not kids but skills, not finding meaning but reciting facts, not true appreciation but mere analysis—so when “they” tell me that I just smile and nod and (metaphorically) close my classroom door…and I teach the whole child.
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