Raafia Jessa

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What do you want to be when you grow up?

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” 
Uff. What a stressful question. 

If you’re been around very young children, you know that they’re all so different. Each has different temperaments, personalities, ways that they deal with things. Each child is born with a particular genetic variation; a variation that determines the way their mind works, the way their body grows, the diseases they are susceptible to. These unique individuals are born - some are shy, some are extremely intelligent, some are really funny - and then every single one is asked this question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Why do we ask this of very young children?

It’s so unfair: “Hello little, beautiful, child. Maybe you’re thinking about wandering in some magical, amazing place where animals talk and the sky is green. But, I want you to stop any kind of beautiful idea you have in your head, stop dreaming, and instead think about how you can be a productive part of the workforce.”

All these beautiful individuals with penchants for different things are put into the school system so that their “worth” can be determined by standardized tests and exams. Forget all the quirks and personality traits that make them individuals, everyone is taught the same things in the same ways and then tested on what they “learnt”.

It’s like asking a monkey, a fish and an elephant to climb a tree and judging their value based on how well they climb that tree.
It does not make sense. 

I’m not saying school is bad. I just find it very distasteful that school doesn’t necessarily mean “education” anymore. Rather, it seems to me, it has become a place to try to align young minds to think of how to become a part of the economy. From a very early age, children are taught to think what profession to choose in order to be profitable.

So, why ask that question? Why make a child think that they have a say in moulding their own future, when in actuality, the answer that they give is heavily monitored and reimagined to be something that will ensure that the child’s future is what is considered “successful”? For example, one day I was drawing on a rather large object, and a six year old child was around, fascinatedly watching what I was doing. I asked her if she liked to draw, her answer: “Yes, I like to draw. But, I don’t want to be an artist. Artists are boring, they just draw stuff and spend time all alone and don’t even make so much money. I want to be an art teacher. That way I can teach stuff and also draw for fun.” 

This example has nothing to do with teachers and artists. It’s more about her unconscious choice of words. I just asked this little girl if she liked to draw, and her answer turned to her future in the workforce. She has been taught that a value of a person is their profession, and so: Memorize your lesson, get high grades, ignore the things that maybe you like to do in order to do the things that will make you a productive part of society.

You don’t go to school to get an education, you go to school to learn a very specific thing — a thing that will become the definition of who you will be for the rest of your life. The less dreaming you do, the more focused you are on learning and excelling at the one thing that you will then spend most of your entire life doing - waiting for the day you can retire and finally released to live your life a little. But, at that point, your life is almost over.  Maybe, you have a bit of time to see the world a little, maybe learn a “hobby” to keep yourself occupied and then you die.

Learning things not for knowledge or enjoyment but rather to achieve an average, flat life.
Seems like the waste of a life.

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