Are Teens Mature Enough for College?

                                                                                 

Bridging the gap between the past and the present

     Is it better for graduating high school students to go out and work, first, maybe a job at a fast-food joint, clerk at some business, work in mailroom, input mundane data for an insurance company, sweep floors, fill store racks with produce, or take a job on a skilled trade crew, landscape-maintenance, plumbing, or carpentry, learn what it’s like to start at the bottom. I mean, I don’t know. I’m just asking.

     Unlike my parents’ WWII generation when many students dropped out of high school, my 1960s Baby Boom generation’s graduation rates soared, 65%. Today, most American kids graduate from high school, 80% in Los Angeles and 84% in California, overall. According to reading and math proficiency scores, that doesn’t mean they learned much. I’m sure some did, but if they were like me, my friends, and a lot of high school grads in the 1960s, we weren’t ready for university study.  

     My parents enrolled me in a boys’ Catholic school. I took an entrance exam and passed, barely, ending up in the D group, which at first I thought was a category but later learned it was academic profciency. I knew my parents had to pay tuition, but at fifteen-years of age I didn’t really understand their sacrifice. I would have been happy at the public high school down the street with all my friends, one reason my parents sent me to parochial school. They also sent my four siblings to a Catholic elementary school, thinking we’d all get a better education, and we probably did. I had friends at the public school who could hardly read or write when they graduated.

     It was different being in class with all boys. We horsed around quite a bit and no girls to watch us act stupid. The girls’ school was just across the alley. We could hang out at lunch but didn’t have classes together, except for a few advanced science classes, like Chemistry and Physics. That was because the schools didn’t have enough students of one gender to fill the class and I’m guessing it cost too much money to equip multiple classrooms with lab equipment. Me, I never reached that level of science, so it didn’t matter.

     I was in a group that had to take basic college prep classes, nothing like the kids in the higher-level classes. Groups D and C took Spanish. Groups A and B took Latin and French. We took pre-algebra, algebra, and geometry. They took Algebra 1, 2, trig and calculus. It was pretty clear which groups were college bound. For us in the lower-level classes the good brothers of St. Patrick acted more as disciplinarians than academics encouraging us to continue our studies. They'd slip into their Irish brogue and say things to my friends like, "Michael, you will do well to stay out of prison."

     Even though I could read and write decently and had taken what we called at the time “solid” classes, when I graduated, no way was I ready for college, probably a disappointment to my parents who figured that’s why I was in Catholic school. I can’t put the entire blame on the school or the brothers. I came from a blue-collar culture. My people were tradesmen and stay-at-home-mothers. The most educated person I knew in our neighborhood was the local barber. He had a certificate hanging on his wall. I think my parents hoped private school might change my thinking, turn me into a scholar. It didn’t, not right away, even though I had studied the Bible and the lives of the saints and their writings. I found myself more entrenched in the D group mentality as we all knew who was college bound and who wasn’t.

     The summer after my graduation, it was back to the same routine. My older cousins who had their own gardening businesses would pick me up and take me to work, gardening on the estates of the rich and famous in the hills above L.A. This was before Mexican immigrants monopolized the trade, learning from Japanese and Chicanos who hired them. At the time, all I wanted to do was collect my pay, little as it was, and afterwards, play guitar with my friends then go out at night and ride around looking for parties.

     My parents took my windfall, gifts of money relatives and my godfather had bestowed on me at graduation, and sent me to barber college, subsidizing the remainder of the tuition from their own pockets. “Something to fall back on,” my mom told me. I was okay with that. It was better than pulling weeds on the side of a mountain in ninety-degrees heat.

     At nineteen, I was the youngest person at the barber college, which was a half-block off the famed Hollywood Blvd., where I'd explore cheap souvenier shops, pizza joints, rank cafes, sex stores, etc. during lunch and breaks. A little Jewish man owned a candy store. I’d buy chocolate almond clusters to curb my appetite when I didn’t have the money for a proper lunch. He’d smile, say something in a heavy accent, and hand me a bag of clusters. I was so lame, I didn’t even know why he had a faded tattoo on his lower forearm, not even words like “love,” “Mom,” or “La Vida Loca,” just a line of numbers.

      Barber college was a kick but more work than I thought. The cutting hair part was cool once I got the hang of it, especially collecting the tips. Having to buckle down and study “theory” was difficult, like taking a biology class, focusing on the neck up, memorizing all the bones, muscles, and nerve endings in the scalp and the chemical composition of the various lotions and potions. My classmates were hucksters, playboys, gangsters, ex-cons, second-chancers, a lesbian, and a prostitute who had no problem soliciting her trade from the barber college pay phone. I was the kid, and that’s how they saw me, like a little brother, always giving me advice on what not to do in life.

     I had no burning desire to be a barber. I had no burning desire to do anything but play my guitar and hang out with my friends. Shakespeare got it right in Hamlet, “To be or not to be.” That was me, just “let me be.”

     The draft wasn’t on my radar, not in ’65, the early years of the war. I didn’t know anybody getting scooped up in the military lottery. Strange, though, I didn’t once consider college, not even community college. Since I didn’t know anything about it or anybody who had gone, I thought of it as four more years of high school. Forget that.

     I was a doer. If I worked at something, I wanted to see the results right away, nothing abstract, like vague notions of  “education” and “knowledge.” What were those? I knew guys who could tear down a 327 Chevy engine and put it back together, drive tractors, turn a desolate backyard into a magical Eden, or stucco an entire building in three days. That was knowledge. Real men worked outdoors. They used heavy equipment and got dirty. They didn’t wear shirts and ties and sit in offices.

     If I read a book, it might be a biography, like Babe Ruth or Lou Gherig. I spent a lot of time outside playing sports, hardly even time for television. In L.A., we had year-round good weather, outdoor weather, going to the beach in December. A little cold water never hurt anybody. I couldn’t see myself sitting in a classroom and dozing to Sila Marner.

     So, seven years later, armed with a Golden Glove championship fight, the military and life experience, including more than one existential punch in the face, I had a desire to learn and started college, taking classes at night and working by day. It took six-years to finish, but I was in no hurry. I wasn’t looking for a job but for answers.

     I was hungry for education, for the abstract, the vague, which meant to struggle, decipher, and comprehend the words of giants like Shakespeare, Milton, Marlow, Goethe, Sr. Juana de La Cruz, James, Eliot, the Bronte sisters, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Dreiser, Lewis, Castellanos, Paz, Fuentes, Marquez, and Hemingway, who wrote for adults and not for children. Though I still had to work at it, I couldn’t get enough of it. After graduation, I stayed to get a master’s degree but more for the fulfillment of advanced study than for the degree.

     Through contacts and good timing, I found work as a university administrator then in the classroom, ironically as a teacher, a professor at a community college, looking over my class of mostly, eighteen-and-nineteen-year-olds. Some wanted to transfer to a university but many wanted to finish and find a job, one of the high-paying jobs the promoters of higher education promised.

     I knew from experience for many education was a hustle, for some a battle, and for others an obligation. Many tried to pass by doing the least amount of work or no work at all. Much of the material, even at that level was over their heads. Then there were the one-percenters, the shining stars who worked hard and earned top grades, always prepared, but even they, as intelligent as they were, hadn’t lived enough life to grasp the elevated concepts manifested in any of the disciplines, even though they learned to recite the correct answers and move onward to major universities.

     Sometimes the smartest, the ones who got the best grades in high school had learned how to play the game, flipped out when I returned their written papers with a C grade. They’d never received anything lower than an A in high school. Oh, they could write, grammatically, but they hadn’t understood or absorbed the material, giving me the CliffsNotes version, or outright plagiarizing. The one-percenters nailed the source material, picked up on both the one-and-three dimensional aspects of a writer’s intent but still lacked the experience to truly engage the material on a deeply personal level.

     In English literature classes, teachers assigned articles, essays, and books by master writers intended for older, mature, sophisticated adult readers. After a reading, students would sit in class and look at me as if I’d assigned a book in Chinese. I’d try to bridge the gap between my students’ world and the writer’s world. It wasn’t easy but they often got it, on a superficial level. 

      When critics asked Joseph Conrad about his book Heart of Darkness, he’d answered something like, “This book contains too much meat for the average reader.”

     Well, then, what did all these words mean to modern American students, eighteen-and-nineteen-year-olds who could relate to what Macbeth said after learning of his wife’s death, “Words, words, words signifying nothing,”?

     Anyway, I will still try convincing the youth, “It is worth it if you are ready to work, to see yourself as a scholar, as a seeker of truth. At least try it. If you aren’t ready, get a job, wait a few years, and try agian.”