http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/is-your-first-grader-college-ready/ar-AA8YxWy
Are we “robbing children of childhood by talking about college and career so early in life”?
Yes, so ironic, while talking to kids about college in first grade, then we do NOT prepare them for college academically in the next 12 years. It would make a perfect sense to stop talking non-sense and start preparing them for what is ahead by overhouling the k-12, which is much more efficient 1 - 10 in mnay other educational systems abroad where kids have no problem staying in engineering programs at college and they do not take any remedail courses as none are available, they are not needed!!
Yes, we are.
I think we don’t do enough to terrify small children about future events they have minimal control over at the age of 6. Have you impressed upon your 3-year old the importance of a diversified stock portfolio? Does your infant daughter understand the importance of periodic mammograms? I need all parents of infants/very young children to go home right now and explain to their kids how, if they don’t enroll in the right number of AP classes in 15 years (too few and you are a slacker, too many and you are not “well-rounded”), they will wind up living on the streets and fighting to the death with stray dogs over the contents of a Chinese restaurant’s dumpster.
In all seriousness, instead of focusing so much on college shouldn’t we be encouraging children to value learning and education instead? The whole notion of a “straight line” between kindergarten and college doesn’t need to even be brought up at that age. Not everyone needs to go to college, not everyone goes to college on the same schedule.
We get dozens of threads a day about or from people who probably didn’t even want to go to college to begin with but felt forced to because it’s just what people in their social class do after high school. There was a thread just the other day by someone who was looking into master’s programs for no discernible reason. We might be better off if college was something that people attended because they saw value in it rather than just a ‘check the box’ kind of thing that is more about stress and anxiety than about learning, a job, or whatever it is that the student really wants.
Since they are now forbidden to stay home alone, cross the street alone, go to the park alone, or trick-or-treat after dark – what else are they going to do with their time?
Anyone remember the Tracey Ullman show skit where she was coaching her preschooler how to answer questions for her preschool interview? It is a classic…hilarious. What vegetable? Okra…
She was the only preschooler at the interview who didn’t play a violin concerto!
As usual, @compmom beat me to it! This (the article, not compmom’s efficiency) just nauseates me.
I didn’t see the Tracey Ullman skit, but I did see a family friend about 20 years ago coaching her preschooler for such an interview. She had flash cards and was asking questions like “what does a cow say?” I was shocked! My friend was living in NYC at the time and said that this is what everyone had to do to get their kids into the “right” preschool.
I liked the article. It might seem strange to us, but it seemed to me that the point of all this early talk about college is to catch up those who don’t have any exposure to the idea of college otherwise. My parents were college graduates, so any stories about themselves in their late teens or early 20s involved college. I had older cousins that were going to college. My dad was a professor, so I would spend many days with him on campus. So the idea that I might someday go to college was familiar to me. But if you’re in a family where no one has gone to college, or no one has graduated from high school, then that’s not the case. That’s the point of these middle school trips, to give others the same familiarity I got just by being born to my family.
And the issue of middle school courses deciding what high school courses you can take is a big one. In my school district, you couldn’t take calculus if you did poorly on a test in 6th grade. So how well you did on a test in 6th grade had an affect on your college application, and maybe a significant one too given how many threads there are about taking calculus in high school.
My parents didn’t go to college. College wasn’t heavily pushed in my household. I didn’t have stories about my parents going to college but I had plenty about their other experiences- working at 15, traveling the world, etc.
I still did just fine in college 
I think the article is mixing up a couple of different things. For first-graders in most of America, a field trip to a local college is not much different from a field trip to the sewage treatment plant. It’s really no big deal. They’ll talk about college on the day that they have the lesson, and forget about it for the rest of the time. This is not the same as the intense paranoia about this that is exhibited in limited circles in New York City and a few other places. So I think this is kind of a bogus trend story.
“I think we don’t do enough to terrify small children about future events they have minimal control over at the age of 6. Have you impressed upon your 3-year old the importance of a diversified stock portfolio? Does your infant daughter understand the importance of periodic mammograms? I need all parents of infants/very young children to go home right now and explain to their kids how, if they don’t enroll in the right number of AP classes in 15 years (too few and you are a slacker, too many and you are not “well-rounded”), they will wind up living on the streets and fighting to the death with stray dogs over the contents of a Chinese restaurant’s dumpster.”
I think you won the interwebz today.
Ah yes…field trips. I’ve often said…really all the schools need to do is rent a coach bus with bathrooms, and drive up and down the highway. Then stop at a gift shop. Usually that’s all the little kids remember about the field trips anyway.
I think that some of this in the article was a bit too contrived, too specific, too early. But do think of the advantage those kids whose parents take them to their college reunions, take part in activities on college campuses, are taking courses them selves have over those whose families have nothing to do with colleges, no mention of them.
My kids grew up spending time at colleges for this program or the other and while DH or I had things to do there. It was a very familiar thing to them. They’d use the facilities from classrooms, fields, eateries just automatically. I never set foot on a campus until I was taking college courses. Big difference.
I wish schools would also talk up trades, jobs that don’t require college. Those who cannot do college for whatever reason really do feel inferior, even if they manage a job that pays well. Our culture is just so saturated with college talk.
DmitriR, I vote for you to write the next article on this. I was depressed and your post cheered me up. Dumpster food indeed. Thumper, love the idea of field trips with bus driving up and down the highway. The kids can signal truck drivers to blow their horn and wave at cars below them, have a snack and return to school happy as can be.
I never said a word to either of my kids about college until they started high school. They are doing just fine. Of course neither of them is going to HYPS so maybe I did screw them horribly.
When I was in school, outside of my first gd teacher asking about what the children " wanted to do when they grew up", ( & shooting down my idea of a non traditional career- something that wasn’t being a nurse, secretary or a teacher), after high school graduation wasn’t discussed.
Perhaps why I didn’t see the point of finishing high school.
However both H & I planned that our kids were going to be encouraged to attend college and we started early.
@thumper1 Ahhh all those field trips I chaperoned. All I can remember are the bumpy bus rides as well. Oh and wishing we had a coach with a bathroom!!!
I thought I had made a comment in this thread, but it appears the Internet ate it, lol.
Anyway, for the most part I agree that this is ridiculous (and I’ve read a couple of articles about New York parents coaching their kids for preschool interviews, yeesh), but like @warbrain suggested, I think the context is different if we’re talking about kids from disadvantaged backgrounds who have never been exposed to the idea of college before. Some of you may say you never mentioned college to your kids before they were in high school, but a kid absorbs what he’s around - and if kids are around a bunch of college-educated parents who might discuss reunions, or researches jobs and realizes that all of his friends’ parents have jobs that require a college education, or hears about his best friend’s big sister going off to college one fall…it’s about the milieu you’re raised in. Or like @warbrain says; any stories from your late teens or early 20s are going to involve college in some way, even just as a passing reference. It’s just like that study that shows that children from high-income families have way bigger vocabularies than children from poor families, even when the parents don’t deliberately set out to teach their kids more words. Just by virtue of being around more highly-educated parents with access to more resources, the kids learn more.
It resonated with me in particular because until middle school I was raised in the opposite kind of milieu - a working-class environment where neither my parents nor any of the adults I knew went to college. It’s not that I thought I would never go - it’s that the idea to go never crossed my mind. I just literally never thought about it, because I knew zero about it - I just assumed that, like my mom and dad and all of the adults in my life, I would get a job right after high school. When I moved to Atlanta in middle school my parents moved to a more middle-class/mixed income neighborhood (movin’ on up like the Jeffersons, lol) and I started meeting people who went to college - and started having classmates who assumed it as a given - and that’s when I started finding out more.
It’s like that with the low-income kids in the story. They may know literally zero about college before they are taken on a field trip, then they see a pretty campus and hear awesome stuff and then they start formulating ideas in their mind about what it might be like to be a college student. And maybe it’s a positive outside motivator - “well, if I do better in school, maybe someday I can go to college!”
And yeah, I was really skeptical but when I got to the bottom of the article when they talked about how elementary determined middle classes and middle school classes determined what you took in high school…they’re so right. In my school district, only students who were in the Magnet high achievers program or who placed into one of a few advanced slots took algebra in seventh and eighth grade; everyone else took…I don’t even know what. But if you didn’t take algebra in seventh and eighth grade, then you couldn’t take geometry in ninth, algebra II in tenth, pre-cal in eleventh and calculus in twelfth. The placements were determined by - yeah, you guessed it - a standardized test.
Her point about the languages was well-placed, too (and hit home, ouch, lol!) I picked French precisely because it “sounded pretty” and it was different from what everyone else was doing (Spanish and German - German because in Magnet we had to start taking it in seventh grade; we could switch in ninth, but by then people kept going out of sheer momentum). What do you know, by senior year AP French language conflicted with AP American government, and I really wanted to take American government…so I think I only took three years of French in high school. It ended up not really mattering, but you know. Yes, Spanish and German were offered a lot more often.
Our state identifies “Gifted” children in 1st grade. Identified children are then put in special classes that give them advanced lessons. Both of my children were so identified (top 5% statewide), and so yes, we talked about college from an early age. If our children had been more average, I’m not sure we would have pushed college that early if at all. Both of them asked lots of questions about college, and we simply answered, never pushed. Things got more real in middle school when they were able to take practice SAT tests. We have always told them that we would support them NOT going to college if they had something else they wanted to pursue. So far both are interested in college and our oldest begins college in the fall, and she can’t wait.
I will disagree with the poster who said we aren’t doing enough to prepare students for college. I suppose it depends on the school district you are in, but our district is very good, and college preparation is the way for the vast majority of the students, and they are adequately prepared. Are there districts that need to do better? Yes. Can you find the good school districts and even be able to move into one? Yes.