What’s wrong with ‘college and careers’?

Or, content-free goals

So, what’s wrong with setting ‘college and career readiness’ as our schools’ primary goal? If I were like some smart-mouth middle school students I know, I would just write ‘everything’ and be done with it. I’m sure my non-existent readers are glad that I’m not like that at all.

The primary problem with setting ‘college and career readiness’ as our guiding star is that no one ever tries to specify – is, in fact, very careful not to specify—which colleges and which careers we mean. That omission is probably, like most questionable DOE policies, overflowing with good intentions. We couldn’t possibly try to predict what sort of colleges any student or cohort of students might want to attend – could we? That’s up to the students, after all. If we tried to prepare them for a local community college when they wanted to go to Harvard, we would be sending them a discouraging message about their capabilities. If we went the other way, and tried to prepare them for Harvard when they planned on attending a local community college, we would be sending a discouraging message about their hopes for the future, subtly implying that their goals didn’t live up to our standards. Either way, we would be committing the cardinal educational sin of teaching our students things like ‘values’ and ‘priorities’. We can’t have that. Instead, we try to prepare our students for an imaginary, generic college and an equally imaginary, generic career.

The trouble is that colleges and careers aren’t all the same, and I am emphatically not talking about the pure g-loaded cognitive demands of different courses of study at different institutions. I do not doubt that courses in HVAC repair at a technical school are likely to be more cognitively demanding than Grievance Studies at a baby Ivy. I’m talking, instead, about those messy values and priorities that we don’t teach (see my previous post). I’m talking about what might be best described as habits of mind, which would include one’s beliefs on the purpose of learning and overall life goals. I’m saying that different colleges and careers require wildly different habits of mind.

Consider, for example, St. John’s College, widely known for its Great Books curriculum and seminar-style teaching. There, students don’t have traditional majors. Instead, they all learn ancient Greek grammar. They all engage with music and the arts, and they all learn about history, law, philosophy, and theology. What habits of mind would a student need to succeed at such an institution? He would likely need a deep-seated belief that learning is valuable for its own sake, whether or not it is directly and tangibly connected to any particular career. Considering the wide range of subjects studied, he would likely need to believe that all domains of knowledge are or can be interesting. He would probably need to be unusually comfortable with diving into subjects that are entirely new. What habits of mind would a student need to succeed in seminar-style classes? Perhaps he would need a genuine love for intellectual conversation. Perhaps he would need an openness to correction and challenge.

Now, let’s think about that above-referenced HVAC program at a local community college. What would a student need to succeed there? That student might need exceptional patience, suitable for engaging in detailed and potentially tricky tasks. That student might need to be methodical and observant. That student might need to find satisfaction in performing his work well, whether or not other people recognized its real significance. He might need to derive enjoyment from tangible, observable results.

What about something more in the middle of this spectrum, like business administration at a mid-ranked state school? What would that student need, other than avarice? He would probably need a very definite opinion that the purpose of higher education is to build a comfortable lifestyle and socially-respectable career. He would probably need an ability to ‘network’ (which really shouldn’t be a verb). He would need to embrace the idea that man is an economic animal, who responds predictably to rational incentives – embrace it enough to act on it, even if he was too smart to really believe it. He would need to believe (or at least hope) that his courses will enable him to walk into a corporate environment and know exactly what he’s doing. He would need to believe that increased productivity is good in and of itself, and he would need to believe that sometimes-dreary work was worth a paycheck that might be long in coming.

None of these habits of mind are the same, and no one student can acquire all of them. Some of them are even contradictory. They are, however, just as important to college and career readiness as any of the academic skills that our classes purport to teach and our tests purport to measure. A student with a business administration mindset is likely to miserable and unsuccessful at St. John’s College – and vice versa.

The question for K-12 teacher then becomes, which of these habits of mind should we teach? The answer, at least in NYC, is none. We can’t or won’t try to predict what sort of studies might be best for our students, so we fool ourselves into thinking that all students can be simultaneously prepared for everything, and that so-called skills without values will allow them all to succeed at some non-existent, value-neutral college. Since no such place exists, we can’t prepare them for it. In our desire to prepare our students for everywhere, we end up preparing them for nowhere.