College Prep

The college prep atmosphere in which I've been so thoroughly immersed for such a long time makes me forget what the rest of the world is like. College college college; degrees degrees degrees. My inevitable future education has been squished into my brain, almost like being conditioned as a newborn embryo in Aldous Huxley's A Brave New World. North Hills requires that every student be accepted into at least a 2-year college in order to graduate. It takes a while to adjust into the public school idea of just graduating, of obtaining enough self-control and/or determination to keep from quitting.
I work at a Sonic in Arkansas. I work with people that are 19 and married, not because the women are pregnant, but because they love each other enough. They dated throughout high school. They had time to go on dates, hang out several nights a week, go cruising around town. I do the math and figure that they graduated in 2009, a little more than a year ago. This makes me even more incredulous. They were seniors in high school when I was a sophomore. I've been in plays, gone to dances, gone on dates with people that graduated that same year. But all those kids are in college now, probably (and hopefully) not even thinking about marriage. By the time those kids do get married, the ones that I work with here in Arkansas will have an overlooked advantage on them. Sure, the kids that graduated from North Hills will have esteemed degrees, but they've never truly had to live on their own. They've never had to pay for everything without the help of Mommy&Daddy back home. Sure, these North Hills kids are smart, but these others are wise.
The question is, then, does a rigid curriculum in high school prepare you for living life? It prepares you for a job, a paycheck, for one man's definition of "success". But does it prepare you for balancing a checkbook, for being a mother, for unexpected layoffs from steady jobs? We're being taught an optimistic approach, which can be delightful, but we sometimes forget that there's also a realistic point of view that more of us will come into contact than not.

Later Days
Peace
H