Looking for love in all the wrong places

Had an interesting discussion with my spouse-who-is-much-smarter-than-me this morning. A scientist turned teacher, she always has great insights into how and what our youth are thinking (or not).

 

We were discussing how so many kids in our neighborhood were encouraged to go to school to learn music, theater, physical training, art, athletics, dancing…educations, in other words, that may land them great jobs as waiters and barristas but not, except for a tiny few, jobs with clear-cut career paths. Today, many of the kids in my own kids’ peer group are living back home with Mom and Dad with no idea of what to do next.

 

I was wondering why the parents, especially, would fork out so much money for educations designed to turn kids into rock stars, movie starlets, stage actors, professional athletes, opera stars and what-not when the crying demand in our society is for STEM (science, technology, engineering and math). I thought that the reason was that the STEM degrees are hard and these kids were just following the paths of least resistance by going after the “fun hobby” degrees. My spouse disagreed.

 

“Don’t you understand?” she said. “These kids want desperately to be adored and their parents want desperately to be able to live vicariously through their kids’ adoration”.

 

Hmmm. What do you think?

 

If true, that’s a really, really sad commentary on the state of our society.