Rethinking School: How To Take Charge of Your Child’s Education
Western modernity has many upsides, but it also has a downside: it channels all students into the same developmental path. That’s not how people actually are. Some of us should not be railroaded into college. We should take alternative paths: toward being stonemasons, shepherds, brewers, artists, costume designers, diesel mechanics, landscapers, weavers, electricians, plumbers. All of these are professions that demand a high level of skill and a great deal of training. They can also pay very well. But the exit lanes that lead from our usual high-school-into-four-year-college interstate toward those alternative destinations are poorly marked, and (too often) littered with road blocks: chief among them, parental disappointment, and social stigma (vo tech as the “stupid” track).