Dear Teachers, Don't Tell Clueless Students To Pursue University
Sincerely, from a student that listened
Following up on my previous article “I Don’t Want To Stop Being A Student,” I discover yet another issue related to being a student that troubles me and one that I have shared amongst friends on many occasions, which finally led me to write about it in here.
As students, we naturally gravitate to our teachers for guidance and to grease the mechanics of our logical reasoning; to unravel the knots of misunderstanding so that we may consolidate our knowledge. If there is any problem concerning studies or university applications, teachers are the ones with the ready answers, aren’t they?
How many times have we been told to listen to the teacher? Listen to them because they know what’s right and what’s best. I certainly do not disregard the profession itself as teachers have undergone years of education to teach their subject of expertise. Not to mention, the daily harassment they face from hyperactive students.
However, something does not sit right with me. Certainly, teachers know more than their students about the subject they teach. However, when it comes to the broader spectrum of life and career, teachers feel the obligation to pass on what they know having lived longer than their students, but that does not necessarily warrant their full credibility to give point-blank answers to students with their varied experiences and dispositions.
Advice given must be tailored to the situation of the person we advise. In their quest to fulfill their role as the spreader of knowledge, teachers may act in good faith to orient their students to the “proper” path or they may do so for the sake of presenting an answer. Both scenarios, more so in the latter, involve a degree of ignorance of students’ needs.
Regardless, it is not the fault of teachers that they do not understand every student’s interests, skills, potential, and inclinations. Even good teachers will never know the real details of a student’s life beyond school. But words are their tools and they can be very powerful in controlling the narrative of selected aspects of life that contain raindrop-sized nuances that teachers are not able to probe into.
If you don’t do well in the public exam, you won’t be able to land a good university.
If you don’t get into university, you’ll struggle later on in life.
These very famous words reiterated to this day by many teachers can instill within students a sense of urgency to occupy a position for the money-making future, regardless of whether they have fully made up their minds about their goals.
Teachers parrot on about the importance of education but in my experience, there have been fewer conversations surrounding students’ uncertainty regarding their future and aspirations. Conversations about aligning your interests to the degree, and the degree to your future job are very commonplace but this approach is automatically flawed once teachers neglect the notion that students are clueless about what they want.
This is not an article about the alternative ways to land your desired job or to denigrate the numbers game of educational advancement, it’s a call out to all the teachers out there to practice being more mindful of their words toward students.
It is highly encouraged in Hong Kong for students to go straight to university after graduating from high school. I speak for those who are uncertain, who are clueless about their future. A head-on strategy to get into a bachelor’s degree program is a recipe for future self-resentment but unfortunately in Hong Kong, not being in a bachelor’s degree program is equated to failure. Although associate and high diploma programs are offered, it says a lot about Hong Kong’s educational culture when news headlines depict students sobbing because they didn’t get a bachelor’s degree offer.
Teachers are not solely to blame for this hyperfocus on academic performance, seeing as they are subsumed into the structure of modern education as manufacturing entities to meet the output demand of placements in Bachelor’s programs. Never mind getting an associate degree or high diploma, a bachelor’s degree is what you want and the real standard of academic achievement.
Despite having reservations to join a program at a lower-ranking university, there was a lot of expectation and pressure on me to get into a high-ranking university.
The problem was I listened to my teachers.
I failed to take into account that I wasn’t certain of my plans for the immediate future following graduation. I was unsure, but I knew what programs I could apply for. I was deliberating between nursing, media and communications, and social science — which my teachers eagerly suggested as an option to get into the top university. It seemed to me that getting into a top university was more of a concern for my teachers than what I wanted. I had an inkling of where my interest lay but I lacked certitude. The advice given to me by my teachers — many of whom repeated the same message — to enroll in university was what ultimately motivated me to make a choice.
It was a choice I regret up to now. People often claim you shouldn’t regret your choices since everything happens for a reason. I disagree because arriving at that conclusion through false platitudes runs counterintuitive to why regrets exist. Two things can be true at the same time. You can regret your decision and you can also accept that what transpired had its purpose. To not regret anything, is to dismiss the mistakes that made us learn. So what are your options in handling this regret? You can move on with a more conscious mentality, carrying the lessons with you, and make wiser decisions going forward or/and you can pass your wisdom down to others so they can avoid the same mistakes you made.
A short detour but back to teachers. Your words can make a difference to a clueless student trying to navigate this sea of “guaranteed future once in university” messages within an education system perpetuating high academic stress and a society laden with rhetorics of formulaic success through university. It is a disservice to their present and future selves to advise them to enroll in university unprepared and unaware. They’ll regret it and realize their mistake and move on, but this cycle for other students will continue.
Hitting pause on your studies at university to think about what you truly want and what grounds you feel secure in, such as whether you want a career that offers upward mobility, a job that you are passionate about, or a combination of both, is not a setback. Don’t rush into university if you’re not sure. These are the words I wish I heard from my teachers.
