It's Spring ... Now What? #2

A characteristic of our egalitarian American way of life is the opportunity for everyone to attend college. This is true.

Those of us of a certain age (indeed nothing has really changed) will remember our high school counselor calling us into the office in the spring of tenth grade for advice (practice essay writing, take difficult courses and ~ by all means ~ stay involved in as many extra-curricular activities as possible). At the close of this short meeting the counselor would hand us the holy grail of his profession ~ the timeline: ominous registration dates for SATs and Achievement Tests, do-or-die admission deadlines, obscure post-mark threats and the like.

A lifetime later (spring of grade 12) you had as few or as many college acceptances in your pocket directly proportionate to how well you followed the counselor’s advice. For example, the morning of my first SAT exam (a warm and springy Saturday in New England) was also the morning of my first hangover which might explain my dodgy academic career. You took your chances.

Anyway, it was off to college.

Now Professor X ~ writing in the June, 2008 edition of The Atlantic magazine (The Basement of the Ivory Tower) ~ proffers the very un-American thought that college might not be for everyone. It is worth reading ~ not the least because he/she can’t risk signing the article for fear of losing his/her job.

Here are a few quotes: “no one is thinking about the larger implications, let alone the morality, of admitting so many students to classes they cannot possibly pass.”

“Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it. Government is all for it. The media applauds it ~ try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea.”

“Yet [writes the anonymous Professor X – he/she of English 101 fame] for I who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required, they are in some cases barely literate, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, the very bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school ~ much less for college”.

Well, oh dear. This is heavy sailing. The letters to the editor on this subject should make for good reading.

More on this later.