Both of my kids have decided not to go to college.
I was not a great high school student in my day. I only did really well in English, especially my senior year Advanced Comp class. I loved my Advanced Comp teacher, Mrs. Dunn. She was a hard-ass, the strictest teacher in school, who tried to beat using the passive voice and vague pronouns out of us. She saw in me a talent for writing I did not know I had. She named the writer in me way back then. But I practically failed Trig and Algebra 2; and I argued too much with my science teacher, the unfortunately named Mr. Purvis, for only presenting us with evolution as a way to talk about how the universe came to be— mostly for the fun of getting his overgrown eyebrows twitching above his outraged beady eyes rather than out of any sense of true conviction on my part. I was a bit of a punk in those days. Honestly, whether I was good or bad as a student really came down to how much I liked a teacher or not. I have seen this in both of my sons as high school students. They both have had a couple of dud English teachers who they refused to perform for, and ended up with lower grades than I, with a BA in English and MFA in Creative Writing, would have liked. My younger son seems to be following in my very footsteps, barely holding a C in Pre-Calc and always complaining about his Chemistry teacher.
Hmmm, punks beget punks, I suppose.
I’d like to say that in college I matured a lot. (Duh.) My mind developed the ability to think more deeply about spiritual and philosophical and academic and cultural ideas. How could it not, with all of the practice of thinking deeply and verbally processing things with other students and faculty who were there for the same reason. The humanities courses that were forced on us all opened my eyes to the connections between history and literature and art and music and philosophy, showed how they affected and were affected by times of war and times of peace, meagerness vs. abundance. In high school, nothing about education had been connected— disconnected patches of things were hurled at us haphazardly and there was no way most of us could see what the point of it all was. Those college humanities courses, and the thoughtfulness of the English and History professors who engaged me in class discussions, made me learn to love education. What I learned and how I was taught in college was so much different than high school that it made me want to homeschool my kids so I could give that to them in earlier years— a better education and academics but also, I hoped, the love of learning to last their whole lives. That was almost the entire reason we decided to homeschool. So that’s what we did until high school. For each of their own reasons, both kids needed to go to a more traditional high school, and I do not completely regret this, though I did and do grieve no longer teaching them in this way anymore. I loved teaching them.
In one way, my kids deciding to not go to college, is a bit of a gut punch— I could take it that way.
COVID shutdown in 2020 convinced Seb, a junior at the time, that college was not for him. He had had plans of getting recruited somewhere for rowing (he was a badass coxswain on his high school rowing team, and his boat won medals regularly at regional and sometimes at national events), but COVID halted that long enough for him to reconsider. He decided college was going to be too expensive when he really didn’t know what he’d want to study and the rowing-thing was not a given. He couldn’t bear to have that taken away, so instead he set it down himself. Weigh ‘nough! in coxing lingo. His whole world had capsized, so to speak, and it taught him that he wanted to get on with his life and work with his hands. No more sitting at desks.
Brian and I didn’t argue with his reasoning too much. We pushed back enough to make sure he knew what he wanted. We made him take the SAT and apply to one school, which I’m not sure ever happened, actually. We understood his decision not to go and applauded his ability to see past what all of his classmates were still preparing for. These past few years we have been reading so much about how higher education is crumbling, that the liberal arts are being gutted, and students aren’t being taught how to think for themselves or where we have come from so that they can avoid making the mistakes of the past all over again. We have been reading about how mentally unhealthy large swaths of college students are at the moment, how depression and suicide rates are on the rise. We are happy to stay out of all that for now, out of the rat race of finding, visiting, and applying to a college with the stress and hoopla and test taking that comes along with it. Homeschooling at the very least taught my kids to hate test taking. I am reminded of, when Seb turned two and still could barely talk, and I was pregnant with Oren, families in our playgroup starting to apply to and visit preschools for their toddlers. I was so turned off by it all. And that was the moment Brian and I earnestly started to talk about homeschooling as a concrete reality and not just a half-baked dream.
I’m sure there are healthy college kids out there who love being in school and probably would argue with everything in the above paragraph. Just yesterday I had a really great conversation at the climbing gym with a young climber who is a freshman at Carnegie Mellon University this year— as a Gen Zer, she sure was personable, held good eye contact, and was able to set her phone aside!— and she is thriving in her program and loves school. She said she knows that in saying that, she sounds like a nerd. To which I replied, “Nerds are cool!” She talked about how different college is from high school, so much better, how it’s both so much more intense and fast-paced but also leaves more breathing room to actually learn and digest. I found myself thinking, Yes, that’s true! I wish my kids could know that and maybe it would change their minds.
So here I am, saying, I do struggle with my kids not wanting to go to college, and I still kind of want them to.
Oren has his own reasons for not wanting to go to college, but I’m going to name just one of them: High school has killed his joy of learning. I have watched it happen, and it makes me really sad. He’s wanted to go to the public school he now attends for so many years, and this is the first year he is there as a junior. He is in a Career and Technical Education program, learning HVAC so that he can get a good job after he graduates. The school is one of the best in the Pittsburgh Public School system, and yet we’ve been really disappointed with the academics and the caliber of teaching and just the chaotic mess that is public education in general. There are teachers who make Oren want to scratch his eyeballs out of his head, and there are teachers who he is happy to sit for— but so far none of them are convincing him that more schooling is the way to go. I can’t convince him either.
Instead of considering all this a failure, I have decided to think about their continuing education differently: school was never the only place to go to get one. This is a familiar idea, one that we lived out while we were homeschoolers. We are also familiar with going against the norm, swimming upstream, doing things that most people around us were not. We liked it that way for a while then. And now here we are again.
