With all the proud parents giving parties for their kids who just graduated high school, I thought that you may be interested in some of my comments on the subject. Remember that these kids are our future and we need to look at what kind of "seeds" that we have planted.
I have been talking to a few of these new graduates and some who had graduated a few years ago and one thing stands out to me. One of the things that many of these high school graduates tell me is how they spent their senior year and what kinds of classes that they took. Many tell me that they had all the credits that they needed to graduate half way thru their senior year so they only went to school part time or took trivial classes. None of these people felt that what they were doing was "stupid". They did not know that high school was the last "cheap" place to learn the things that they would need for the rest of their lives. For some reason, many of these kids and their parents felt that they could coast that senior year in high school and then go on to college and "really" learn what they needed for life. The problem with waiting until college to get focused is that it will cost a lot more to learn the same things that you could have learned in high school for free.
There is no such thing as making up for wasted or lost time. Once lost, it is lost for every. The person will never learn as much in their life as if they had taken the hard classes in high school in the first place. You may disagree, but you have to admit that this is true.
The four years of high school are so important that parents nor administrators should allow the kids to take worthless classes. High school is the place to learn about hard work, it should not all be fun and games. Doing the best that one can in difficult classes is one of the main things that prepares one for life. Taking the easier classes only makes the kid weaker and softer and less able to deal with the hard knocks of real life. Most kids around the world know more when they get out of high school than many of our kids do when they graduate college.
When a kid graduates high school, they don't owe anything so what they earn is pure profit. When most graduate from college they are in debit that some will have zero chance of ever paying off. For them, it can be a very long time before they actually earn a profit. After high school is not the time to figure out what one wants to do in their life. The idea of following one's dream is stupid. Earning one's way is the objective along with paying back the taxes that paid for their high school. Those four years of high school are serious times in one's life and should be viewed from that perspective. I know a lot of parents and students think of high school as the last free chance to have fun before settling down to a working career. The fact is that grades 1 thru 8 is the time for the fun and games.
What we all need to do is to examine why so many of our kids are allowed to goof off during their important senior year of high school and see how we can wake people up to this monumental waste!
