by When things get tough financially and especially when you see your child not really caring about his future and getting a basic education, it can be very daunting for parent. Luckily, most parents today understand how important education is for living a fulfilled life and a life that reaches a full potential (or something near that.) Before I say anything further, I am just going to say that education shouldn’t be thought of something that will provide you with a job. Let’s imagine you can’t get a job with education skills. Would you still do it?
Here’s the thing, in older days people thought that education was kind of a luxury. However the way society has progressed and we are somewhat a little bit more peaceful between us, that all relies and owes to education. If you look through history, you will see that the farther back you go (where education wasn’t given to everyone) the more violence, the more aggressive acts and the more bad things people did to one another. You look at what was happening during mid-evil times and it’s just frighting. Even if you look at the 2 world wars, both of them had supporters people that had little to no education. The way the Nazi movement progressed was through uneducated arrogant people that resulted in killing so many (among which, 6 million Jews.)
So if we want to live our lives having peace of mind regarding upcoming generations and that our children won’t be fighting unneeded wars, we need to teach them that now. As I said before, education should worry the least about getting a job. Most jobs that pay well (if you’re smart) you don’t even need good education. I mean jobs won’t make anyone wealthy, so that is a beautiful lie produced by all Universities that want you to send your children there. Having said that though, getting a good education is essential. In Greece they say that someone who isn’t educated, is like a tree that hasn’t been landscaped and got its smaller and useless branches chopped of. In other words, it’s just a wild bush. The truth is, people that have no or little education, are usually a lot more impolite and all those images an uneducated person brings to you. Of course there should be no discrimination based on education. I am just saying that educated people are more civilized and have some basic manners. Not everyone is going to get into the aristocratic class of things, but we can at least all have a goal to aim for and improve our behaviors.
Now having said all this, there a lot of crappy Universities and education programs in which you will just throw a bunch of money away for no good reason. You need to be smart of this and weed those out. Go visit campuses and meet with staff and the students there. Pretty much, if you want to have one main indicator of how good of an education the school provides, just talk with its students. Offer to take a student out for lunch with your son and daughter to discuss about the college he/she is in. Then you should be able to understand by the ideas he/she offers you, how good of a job does that college actually do. It’s not that much that he will have had the time to become educated in a couple of years…it doesn’t work like that. However colleges generally speaking (the good ones) won’t accept that people that aren’t that well educated. So if you find one of them in there, it means that they aren’t screening people correctly to meet the demanding grades to enter the school. Keep in mind that a lot of the education your son or daughter will get, will be from fellow students. Your child isn’t going to be spending time in class 24/7. In fact most schools provide lectures for about 8 hours. Then you got another 8 hours during which your child will want to hang out with people. Of those people are bad influence and not very well rounded people, you could end up having a child that at the end of his 4 year studies, became worse than what he actually was, when going in.
Who said having children will be a peace of cake? There is a bunch of research and work you need to put into this. And don’t let your child be the lazy one that is waiting for you to get all the answers. If he/she is that interested in their future, they will be going online, participating in forums or threads similar like this, and do their own research. Most applicants are generally smart about selecting schools. So don’t try to do everything. Things have changed since you were looking for schools 30 years ago.
Also, don’t be afraid to get some kind of consultant, and even speak with consultants in these schools. If you politely explain to them the goals your child has (or your goals as a parent) then they should be able to guide you. The main thing you want to make sure you are getting from them, is honest. All the rest is graving on top.
Hopefully you’ve found some gold nuggets here since I know application season is approaching. Best of luck, and feel free to ask me anything!
Later today I will be posting a lot more information – especially about the whole purpose of this site. Stay connected!
