When you were little, did you ever imagine yourself as a doctor? How about a lawyer? An astronaut? A pro athlete? Why did you imagine yourself as those things? When I was about five years old, I told my mother that I wanted to be a mitten maker. In my five-year-old head, cutting out mitten shapes from pieces of paper and taping them together (come on, I was five! Do you really my mother would have even let me near knitting needles to make real mittens?) seemed like a the perfect career for me. After all, I loved making paper mittens, and shouldn’t your job be something that you love to do, in an area of study about which you love to learn?
Flash forward eighteen years. I have both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree under my belt in areas not even remotely related to making mittens, and I teach at a learning center. I ask a class of sixth graders to discuss their future goals with me, and the responses I receive are more than a bit startling.
“I want to be a doctor because my parents told me it’s the only respectable job there is.”
“I want to go into science because that’s what all of my friends are doing.”
“I want to someday go to a school in the Ivy League because that’s what my parents say that my friend’s parents are making him do. I’m smarter than him, so if he can do it, I can do it.”
“I want to be an engineer because I want to show people that I’m smart enough to be successful.”
Excuse me, what? Why are these students’ career goals so strongly influenced by parent and peer pressure? Initially, I figured that maybe some of these answers came about by the fact that these kids are probably a little too young to have thought much about their career goals. Instead of actually thinking about what they wanted to do, they settled for the jobs that either their parents had or that their parents were perhaps encouraging them to do. Then, however, I made a very startling connection.
I have many friends from high school and college who are currently in either medical school, law school, or another doctorate program. The rigor of these programs is brutal, and it takes a certain strong work ethic and self discipline to get through them. Certainly, I once assumed, any person who opts to enroll in such a program must be very passionate about what he is doing. Upon talking to many of my friends in these programs, however, I’m noticing a very scary trend.
“I don’t want to do this. My parents pushed me into it.”
“I’m not really interested in this; I’m just doing it so my friends, peers, and family will view me as successful.”
“I want to live in a big house some day, so I’m going to get through this program.”
Okay, really? You are in these programs that eat up years of your life so that you can impress others? So you can create a certain "image" for yourself that may not be true to who you really are? So that you can live in a big house? Why do these responses, given to me by people with about thirteen more years of life experience, so closely parallel those given to me by the sixth graders?
What happened to learning for the sake of learning? To going outside and asking questions about why the leaves are changing color, just to satisfy your curiosity? To asking your father where the sun goes at night time because you want to understand why the world turns so dark? To figuring out why the tiny snowman you brought in the house a few minutes ago is now a puddle of water? What happened to being a doctor or a lawyer so you can help people? Why not be an engineer for the love of creating and operating things? Where's the heart in your job? Why are students – who eventually become adults with a similar mindset – so greatly motivated by pressure from others or the desire to show other people up that they forget that learning can be enjoyable? Most importantly for me, what can I do as a teacher to bring a passion for learning, the acquisition of knowledge for the sake of simply understanding more about our world, back into my classroom?
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