Here’s some things I think we can all acknowledge:
Neither [no] system is clearly "the best" for every student. Every system creates winners and losers, and they won't necessarily be the same people from one system to the next. The best system might be the one that creates the fewest losers, but that won't make it the best system for a kid who would have been a clear winner under a different system.
The two systems we are discussing often get to the same place by different pathways. My spouse, for example, slid into what has become her main career in her mid 30s. She had already left one potential career for law school, and then law for a position in local government that developed out of volunteer work she had been doing that was very tangentially related to her legal practice. She was hired to work for a foundation in what had then become her area of expertise, except the position also included another area she knew nothing about. That area became her life's work. Paradoxically, one of her two undergraduate majors has been very useful in that field, notwithstanding that she did not use it at all in the first 15 years or so after college.
So, her career is typical of an “American” pattern, emphasizing that what you get out of undergraduate education is critical thinking skills and experience mastering something, not a set of job qualifications. But the rest of the Western world has people who do what she does, too, even though when she was in college there was no “slot” for her main area of expertise. In some cases, those people trained in a related field, and their careers developed naturally to include this area; in other cases, people were trained in something else and slid into the field mid-career, just like she did.
A child in India may decide what her career is going to be when she is 14, but her chemical engineering degree won’t stop her from writing a screenplay on spec when she’s 25.
The two systems aren't completely mutually exclusive, either. The American system will require a child to take a broad range of courses in high school, and to some extent even in college, but it does not stop a 14-year-old from having focused ambitions, or from doing a lot to pursue those ambitions. If a child naturally has that kind of focus, by all means, let her pursue it.
The problem comes up when lots of parents decide their children naturally have that kind of focus mainly because the parents wish they did. But kids can get hurt, too, by parents who try to thwart the kids’ natural inclinations, or who never communicate that focusing someday is a good, even necessary thing.
Even that can be debated. If a system creates few losers, but the losers lose big, is that necessarily a good thing, particularly if there are also few winners or the winners win little?
It can also matter whether the distribution of “win” and “loss” is what people consider to be “fair”. E.g. some people may consider “win” and “loss” by one’s own ability and motivation to be “fair”, while “win” and “loss” by one’s inherited family wealth to be “unfair”, while other people may take the opposite viewpoint.
Yes, I could have said “The best system might be the one that creates the least losses.” I thought about that, but I thought there was inherent cost in people not reaching something like their potential. It hardly matters, though, since it would take more computing power than we have and more human subject experimenting than we can stomach even to begin to calculate the answer to either formula.
As to inherited wealth . . . I suspect the advantage that provides is something of a constant across the systems. Inherited wealth substitutes for formal education quite nicely.
@CValle - Your daughter sounds much like my kid did at 14 and later. He was certainly bound to become a Physics major - especially Astrophysics (I was already trying to figure out how I was going to afford Rice). But he was an incredible programmer and I also thought I’d see him as a CS major (my grad degree was in CS). If I had been a betting person, I’d have laid down money that one of those two areas would be what he’d choose. Imagine our shock when, later in High School, he declared he wanted to go to Film School. He had found his passion!
But my wife and I supported him in that. (It wasn’t really that much of a shock; he had been making little films at 10 years old and the “little films” got more and more ambitious.) He started a film club in high school and brought in not just filmmakers, but actors, technical types, and people who just wanted to be on set and help. We could see how devoted he was to this.
To our huge delight, he chose an incredible honors program in a school that gave him an almost total tuition merit scholarship. He worked with a VERY driven, VERY talented set of people. In college, he gravitated to the computer aspects (visual effects) and became even more passionately involved. He graduated without student loan debt and it took a little over a year before his successes started coming in regularly. He is now very successful, in demand in the industry, and having the time of his life. He is probably making more per year than I was in a CS career after 40 years. You have probably seen his work.
Just sayin’ it does not have to be an either/or situation. I guess I’m coming down with the “follow your passion (WITH PASSION)” side of the argument.
Seems like he is at the top of the game in creating films people want to watch, unlike the numerous starry-eyed film major graduates who never get past the unpaid internships doing menial tasks in the film industry.
There is nothing inherently wrong with following one’s passion. But one has to be good at it in order to earn a living.
Follow your dreams…that’s easy. All the great things in this world have been created by people who did. Chasing money without passion for what you are doing is a path to misery.
On thing I take from @digmedia 's post is the fact that the kid chose a school which allowed him to graduate with no debt. If a kid is able to do that they will probably do OK. Even if they are not ultimately able to earn a living in their dream field.
I know a whole lot of people who work in fields unrelated to their majors (I am one of them). Certainly some people who major in film or other creative/competitive fields will end up doing that. But if they graduate without debt they will be in a decent position to spend some time pursuing their dream career.
What I got from @digmedia 's post was that it’s great to allow a child to organically develop her/his interests and passion (and it’s okay if there is no real passion early on). It’s a great outcome if that is feasible and the parents are supportive, and it is truly wonderful when that happens. But it’s even better when there is no student debt burden to consider because that will allow a great deal more breathing space when choosing employment and career.
Imagine the contrary outcome if two parents who are both physicians, lawyers, engineers, accountants, CS professionals, musicians, chefs or (fill in the blank) can conceive of no other option for their child except the paths they know and trod It can be spectacularly dismal for the kid.
Unfortunately, many parents are constrained by their own educational or cultural backgrounds, not to mention financial worries, from allowing a more free-ranging educational experience for their children.
@CValle, you are providing a good counterweight to your H’s perspective.
My son taught himself programming by using “Visual Basic for Dummies” when he was in elementary school. He learned Java at a summer camp. He fooled around a bit with MIT’s Open Sourceware. Taught himself C++. Got interested in Linux through computer fora I think. And learned SQL during a summer job. A kid who is interested in computer science can teach themselves a lot.
brantly, for what it’s worth, I have no problem with being an English major, but those jobs for English majors tend to require specific locations. My sil ended up in NH with an English degree from Harvard - where opportunities for jobs for her skill set were pretty slim.
All that said, I think 14 is far too young to be worried about college majors, but not so young that you should cut yourself off. My math kid took 4 science classes and 3 AP science classes. (One hs level science was offered in 8th grade and one he took in the summer to avoid some scheduling issues, he took an extra science as a senior as an elective. My non science kid took 3 science classes, plus 2 AP science classes.
As for how to work out the two cultures I think the OP is already doing a pretty good job. At this point you don’t want to cut off options. So I would suggest that the OP’s daughter take science and math every year at her level of ability. Then apply to appropriate programs/colleges when she is a senior. If at that point engineering or comp sci look attractive, some colleges will want her to declare her major, others won’t. That said, some (especially engineering type) majors will be hard hard to complete in four years if you don’t take the right courses as a freshman.
Thank you all for your advice. DH and I have agreed to a moratorium on college admissions and major talk for one year. That should take the pressure off everyone for a while! We have time and hopefully when we get back to this discussion we have a little clearer perspective.
Would it be possible for your daughter to enroll in a school that offers AP classes, rather than the IB curriculum, and thus give her the opportunity of more flexibility… and putting less stress on your spouse to plan for the IB HL/SL courses? In addition, most American colleges tend to be more flexible for AP classes, whereas they only grant credit for HL exams. (A good strategy is to take AP exams that correlate with GCSE/preIB classes if the student is very strong, and definitely if they correlate with the SL classes.)
Regarding reassuring your husband that she doesn’t need a heavy load of several sciences each year :
With 2 levels (years) and 4 hours each week of each level of Physics, Chemistry, and Biology, your daughter has already almost completely met the most stringent requirement for top schools. She only needs 1-2 more years of one science, or 1 year of 2 sciences, to be considered way ahead. With 1SL or HL science, she’s good for any college he can think of.
(In the US, 5 periods = about 4hours, because one period is never 60mn; in American terms, she’s got 6 units of science already, when only 4 are required!)
Your husband is surrounded by people who live with Indian values. It’s normal he wants the best for his daughter as it is expressed there. The difficulty is in proving that American culture doesn’t work like this and if your daughter is to attend a “good fit” your family will have to adapt to what American culture wants.
This may help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgN20O3VYgQ http://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/frank-bruni/where-you-go-is-not-who-youll-be/9781455532704/ http://www.amazon.com/The-Gatekeepers-Admissions-Process-Premier/dp/0142003085 http://www.amazon.com/Acceptance-Legendary-Counselor-Colleges-Themselves/dp/0143117645
We first spoke to a private counselor about our first child when she was nearly done with 8th grade. She had been getting straight A’s and we had two questions. 1. How strong of a student is she really? 2. Based on that information, and our daughter’s interests, could he help our daughter plan a reasonable freshman high school schedule?
We didn’t want to be one of those parent whose middle schooler has straight A’s and immediately thinks that Harvard is the next stop. We wanted information.
The first thing he wanted was for her take a practice SAT, PSAT, or ACT. I got two PSAT tests and she took them at the dining room table a week apart, and I timed her and scored it. We then sent him the results to review.
He felt that it was really too early to have a clear picture, but thought that the test clarified where she was currently, and that a lot would depend on her performance in high school. He told her that she had a very good score, but he had seen many better, and that if she wanted to try to reach a top 10 school/Ivy league school, she had a chance, but she would need to take a difficult course load (all honors/ AP) at our high school and do well. Alternatively, she could pursue a somewhat less difficult course load (mix of Honors/AP and regular), and have a good chance to get into very good schools but probably not top 10. She has always liked a challenge and chose the more difficult route herself.
We told her she did not have to go that way if she did not want to. She thought for a second, and then asked whether we believed she could do it? She wasn’t really asking for our opinion. She wanted to know whether we believed in her. I said I thought she could do anything she put her mind to. She said that in that case, she wanted to do it.
That was basically the beginning of the college journey for us.
Oh yes, I agree. Was just responding to the question of why we don’t pursue a more flexible curriculum. We are lucky to have the great international school she attends and it is IB. We wouldn’t consider anything else here.