The November 1st deadline for early-decision college applications is fast approaching. Thankfully, the two remaining teen people — Irish twins — who live in our home and for some odd reason keep calling us Mom and Dad have both completed their college essays and supplemental information, and have turned everything in with eight days to spare. In terms of earthly miracles, and setting aside the ten plagues visited upon Pharaoh, that’s on par with the parting of the Red Sea by Moses himself. Getting something done and sent in before the deadline is, for a teenager, the equivalent of a Herculean sprint. Now, however, is the real test: the mad marathon to hurry up and wait for the finish line — the acceptance letters. Which, of course, in reality, represents only the starting gate for their respective futures.
And what a process it is. There are the AP course exams, the PSAT testing, the SAT test and the SAT subject tests. Then there is the CommonApp (which this year was replete with blood-pressure-busting techno-errors), the general essays, the specific university essays, arranging for teacher and academic counselor recommendation letters, and on and on and on. The last few months of their lives have been utterly consumed with drafts, rewrites, computer glitches, Office Depot runs, and the requisite Starbucks pit-stops to refuel. This was all in addition to their regular senior workloads, hospital volunteer work for one, portfolio accumulation for the other, club fund-raising, babysitting, and tutoring gigs, with a bi-weekly or so reminder to us of their respective names, since they were spotted upright only on rare late-night refrigerator raids. Our teenaged daughter actually gets less sleep than I do, and I hardly get any, so I have no real understanding of how she manages to get the grades she does and cram all of the activities and commitments she has into her conscious hours without keeling over; this is apparently the province of the young and hormonally over-endowed.
Such is the final year of the early-21st-century high school senior—incredibly busy, neurotically competitive, and a more than a bit chaotic. My husband and I have often commented on how much more insane it is now then when we were approaching the end of high school back in the dark ages, long before cell phones, computers, and social media invaded our universe. (For those of you under 30 and wondering how we survived, I had a behemoth IBM Correcting Selectric — the very mother of all electric typewriters—and my husband, who is still today is a proud two-fingered typist, had a Dictaphone and a perpetual roll of dimes for the payphone!)
Now it also seems that the idea of college discovery and the fostering of one’s passion has been replaced with the concept that a student’s passion must already be fully developed and, as a practical matter, wholly realized before he or she even gets to university. How can that be? How on earth can a 17-year-old possibly know, much less be absolutely resolute about, what precisely is his or her calling? When did things change so drastically?
I suppose I will really sound like a T. rex here, but it used to be that the whole point of going off to university was to uncover, discover, and polish what it was that floated your boat. Not so any more. With the competition as fierce as it is, high-school seniors today not only have to have their personal road maps and necessary prerequisites firmly in place, but also have to compete with kids who have discovered new diagnostic methods for pancreatic cancer screenings (as seen last week on 60 Minutes), climbed Kilimanjaro earning the trip’s expenses through massive on-line fundraising via kickstarter, or spent the last four years manning (or rather womaning) the telephones at a community rape crisis center.
These are all, of course, wonderful and commendable, but it seems that something has gotten lost along the way. Sometimes you need to just be, to explore and question in order to find your real passion and your place. To take courses in foreign languages because they tickle your tongue’s fancy, to study literature because it feeds your soul, to learn history because as a society we make the same damned mistakes over and over and over again anyway, to understand world religions so one can grasp the genesis of so many of those mistakes, to study ethics so we can think about the vexing problems we face, and of course to study the arts so we can fully appreciate humanity’s enormous contributions to the beauty that surrounds us, despite the gargantuan problems that plague us.
As a parent I am hopeful (okay—on my knees, lost in resolute prayer) that these two remaining at home are competitive enough so that they will get into one of their top choice schools (if for no other reason than to end the seemingly never-ending conversation on the topic that threatens the very vestiges of what remains of my sanity).
Then, of course, will come the next huge hurdle: getting a job.
The anemic job market these young people will probably face when it comes time for them to seek employment means that the markets will disproportionately recompense those who graduate in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math). There are countless studies reminding us practically daily of how far and how fast we in America are falling behind our counterparts in Europe and Asia in these arenas. I don’t doubt this, especially given the state of many public schools in the U.S., and the over all standardized test scores seem to prove it.
As a parent who wishes the front door of our home to be open for meals, holidays, and family gatherings, I also wish not to manage a perpetual boarding house into my own retirement at the ripe young age of 106. So of course I wish for them to find rewarding jobs after university that will not only feed their souls, but also pay their mortgages (and hefty student loans). So while medicine, business, and computers will probably do the latter, I truly hope they will have a shot at the former by having the opportunity to study the humanities in depth while at university. What is sometimes lost in the translation of the books-for-bucks mentality is that the humanities provide an essential context for students’ understanding of and participation in the world. The next generation of leaders in a world connected at virtually the push of a button will require not just a desire to be part of the shared common experience, but also a worldly perspective born of curiosity, intelligence and sensitivity. Those traits come from, among other things, the ability to think and express those ideas by connecting with one another emotionally, and by grasping and understanding cultures, histories, languages, and stories different from our own. And without a thorough study of the humanities and the balance those studies provide to the STEM fields, we will all be poorer, even if the mortgage gets paid.
So while one of the Irish twins hopes to be a physician, and the other a business-oriented computer maven, this parent hopes that the humanities will be explored with the same fervor as the mad race for the dwindling possibility of the proverbial brass ring. Cogito, ergo sum.
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