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February 26, 2003
the high school rat race
A day spent frantically working on grant proposals for CIRCLE and the Prince George's Information Commons—three proposals in all. I did have an interesting phone conversation about the degree to which high school students volunteer in order to improve their chances of being admitted to college. This is very common, apparently. I don't necessarily draw cynical conclusions about the kids' characters. Instead, I'd tend to blame an increasingly efficient system of sorting the whole national student body by "merit," which causes everyone to compete on a common scale, whether they aspire to Harvard or the local public college. More and more people know how to play the game of college admission. As a result, I fear that kids are waiting until after high school for their real lives to begin, and much of what they do as adolescents feels hollow.
Posted by peterlevine at February 26, 2003 04:03 PM