The Social Stigma of Not Going to College

It’s not uncommon for parents to worry if their children will find work worth doing as they get older but the catch-all answer to that is often to send the child to college in the hope that something there will lead them to their life’s work. However, people have been questioning the value of a college degree for employment since I went to college in the 1970s, such as Education and Jobs: The Great Training Robbery by Ivar E. Berg, The Question is College by Herb Kohl, and the research I cited in my last blog post about how little of what we learn in school or college classes can be transferred to the world of work.

This essay by an unschooling mom from GWS 122 appeared in 1998 but still has resonance today.

Others Criticize No-College Choice

Ruth Matilsky (NJ) writes:

Everyone in our community seems to be deeply concerned about whether Sarabeth, my oldest, is going to college. What’s particularly annoying is people’s refusal to recognize that Going to College does not equal being educated. Or even going to high school. I was at a party recently where a woman said she felt three years of foreign language should be part of a high school curriculum. There were four of us sitting together at this point and I said, “Well, we’re all high school graduates who took a language. How good was it for us?” Each of us recounted our years of language training and the fact that those years had not prepared us for foreign travel. Each of us said that when we spent time in a country we found it much easier to learn the language, but the classroom years just hadn’t done the trick. And yet, the two women involved in the conversation insisted that three years of a language should be required. Even though we had all told how useless it had been! This was just contrary to what they had been programmed to believe. (The man in the group admitted that language classes hadn’t done him any good.)

To tell the truth, I find this frightening. After years of forced memorization and regurgitation, people swallow the party line and can’t process conflicting information. Yet why didn’t this happen to me? Never for a moment did I doubt that my kids could learn outside of a school environment. Why did some of us escape the brainwashing?

Maybe I didn’t completely escape it, though. There are times when someone, especially if it’s someone in authority, will say something that makes absolutely no sense, something that I know isn’t true, and if it’s said authoritatively enough or assuredly enough, I will question myself or back down from my own beliefs. I’m working on this.

Anyway, people do seem very concerned about Sarabeth’s choices these days. An acquaintance walked into our food co-op the other day, a perfectly nice, friendly person, and she looked me straight in the eye and said, “Well, Ruth, is Sarabeth going to college?” I swear, she said it just like that. As though I were on television and this was the $64,000 question. I guess even though the homeschooling movement is growing, there aren’t all that many homeschooled teenagers around here and people have been curious for years about what is going to happen to Sara, our poor guinea pig. I will admit I wonder myself sometimes.

So far Sara has done better than me at every stage of life. But some members of this family are not the greatest spellers in the world and I wonder what that will mean. What saves me here is that a friend from high school got a Ph.D. in business and makes pots of money and gets asked to speak all over the world and can’t spell at all. As a grown man, he spelled goat “gote.” And my husband Terry, who works at Rutgers University, tells me about well-paid faculty there who absolutely can’t spell. So there you are. But it’s strange to face actual hostility from others about Sara’s not wanting to go to college. When I told one woman that she was going with friends on a cycling trip through Europe next year, the woman said, “Well! Don’t we all want to spend ten months in Europe!” I don’t understand this hostility. Sara says it’s because people have to face up to the fact that they would have liked to spend ten months in Europe and never did and here she is doing what she wants to do instead of what the usual prescription calls for. I guess that’s it.