Being a parent involves a bunch of activities that you would never get to do otherwise. There are those tasks at the beginning that include poop, power and pee but they get better as time goes along. Or do they?
Making decisions on behalf of your child has to be one of the toughest. The pre-school we select will determine the first friends your child makes as well as the first educational foundation. Get this wrong and you will have an under-achiever in education for the rest of your life. Then it is the primary school followed by which high school to select. But it is not the way it was when I was young when you just went o the nearest school and that was that. Today there is a selection process, interviews, written portfolios and money up front before selection.
One of the schools we looked at only take applications for Grade 1 after the second trimester of pregnancy and with an R10k non-refundable deposit: Flip, how insane is this?
Each decision for schooling has an effect and either limit or opens the choices they have later in the education and career funnel. Get this wrong at pre-school and sorry-for-you you reap the choices of the bad decision for years to come.
I am at the stage with my son now after many choices, of having to select what to do after Matric. He finishes up with school this time next year and in 2020 he will enter his next phase of education.
So where do we begin to ensure that any progress made thus far is capitalised on to ensure some form of success in his future? We have the gap year, College, University, Tech, Learnerships, or a number of private colleges. Each one offers what they describe as an education for the future, but I am sure all they are thinking about is filling their quota and paying their bills way before they are thinking of their student’s futures.
The correct choice comes from pounding the pavements and going to open days, unpacking the often complex handbooks and websites and doing a full comparative analysis on what is best for a future that no one knows and that will contain jobs that have not yet been invented using education geared for jobs that will no longer exist.
But what about being an Entrepreneur? This is my first choice today, but it took me 5 career changes to find my niche and today I have a job that did not exist when I was in school. After all this, my conclusion is that education does not or may not be an indicator of the job you spend most of your life doing. But it does give you an advantage of being selected for the job you will want. And a good education will only teach you to learn and then embark on a lifelong journey of continuous learning that will lead you to the perfect job and income protection.
Watch this space and we embark on making the future a reality.
