Early last month I was scrolling through social media and saw a post of students exploring careers. The kicker here though is that they were elementary school students. Frankly, this caught me off guard. I remember in middle school we had a career day, but that was it. We never talked about careers in elementary school besides the simple "I want to be a firefighter" or "I want to be a doctor" statements we'd make.
Never would I have thought that children under the age of 12 would be learning about careers. This honestly makes me slightly nervous for my future kids. I understand the importance of preparing students for careers, and their plans after high school. However, there is problem when we push the learning curve too much and at too early of a stage.
We've all heard it before, "you'll have the rest of your life to work, so enjoy your time now." Well guess what, when you start pushing careers- something kids need not worry about for at least 6 years- it greatly affects their growth. You take away some of their time to play with each other, or read books. When you teach them about careers you are taking away the critical time in their life where they build their social skills and creativity. A kid needs time to play and learn the basics.
When I was in high school, all sophomores had to take a career education class. Don't get me wrong it was a beneficial class, but that's when it put pressure on me that I need to figure out my career. I know the class wasn't meant to pressure me into choosing a career, but the teachers don't realize that some students can take it seriously and feel pressured by it.
Going into college, I felt like I needed to choose my major and I needed to have my life/career all figured out. I realized (especially this past year) that you won't have it all figured out, and it's O.K. to change career paths.
Looking back, I wish the career education class was required for juniors or seniors, not sophomores.
It will definitely benefit students on assessing their strengths, weaknesses, things they enjoy, and don't. It would help them to start somewhere, but it shouldn't make them feel pressured into figuring it all out at that point in time.
I understand that schools want to encourage learning and growth within their students, but by presenting them careers more and more at younger ages will just negatively affect them. Students can miss out on crucial growth and learning skills. Rather than having students figure out their career we should help them to figure out their ambitions for after graduation. We should teach younger students how to socialize and how to be creative.
I believe there are a lot more important things we need to teach students before putting a pressure on them to chose a career. We need to remember that these are children and not young adults. In the blink of an eye our childhood was over. We need to remember that our kids, too, will be all grown up before we know it. Let's let them be children again.