I don’t regret going to the techy selective high school…I enjoyed my time and made some lifelong friends. However in hindsight, I don’t think the school offered opportunities that were going to encourage me in ‘my’ direction.

All schools teach selectively

No school can teach everything well. So schools end up focusing on areas, often dependent on the skills and interests of staff and also the resources the school has acquired over the years.  I used to work as a High School teacher, so I’ve seen this first hand.  So the question really is about what ‘selection’ will benefit your child. Consequently you need to know your child well to make a decision that will more likely benefit them.

You see there’s little point sending a child who clearly loves literature or the arts to a selective high school that focuses on the math and techy stuff. That child is better off at a more general high school where they value other things than the nerds who want to write computer code.

A painful case study

I remember my English teacher in Year 7 begging me to represent the class in a public speaking challenge. I reluctantly agreed, after all, arty stuff was so gay right? Well folks it was back then and especially so at a techy selective high. My mum helped me prepare a pretty good speech. All seven classes competed and at the end the teachers who were judging reviewed all the speakers. Except one. Me. It was like I didn’t exist. Afterwards in the play ground students I didn’t even hang out with kept coming up and saying, ‘hey great speech, why didn’t they say anything about your one?’ My teacher just said ‘sorry’. So that was the arts for me, screw that.  No more gay boy arty farty stuff for me, I’m at the techy school and techy is me.

But it wasn’t and it isn’t.  I’ve come out. No, not like that. I’ve realised over years that I enjoy the arts much more than the techy. I’m good at the techy, but not super good.  Arty farty is my tribe.

So back to our pursuit of the selective high, I think we need to ask, ‘what does it say about us?’  Your child is unlikely to own your decision…but they will have to.  What are we actually foistering upon them? What yoke will they spend years disentangling and casting off?

You find all kinds of professionals doing highly paid jobs but without a soul for it. You look up on the wall and see a painting hanging in their office and say ‘hey that’s cool!’ They say, ‘oh, that, you like it? That’s one of mine’.  Out comes the passion; the soul breatheth. I read in the paper the other day that some lawyer had cast of law to make artisan chocolate.  Loves it, couldn’t be happier. But you don’t hear too many people saying ‘Woe is me, if only I’d gone to a selective high school I wouldn’t be a painter instead I could have been an…accountant!’

I actually don’t think it matters that much where you go to high school. It’s just education. Life is much more than education. Plus as the New Testament letter to the church in Colossae points out, it’s not what work you perform but how you perform it, that ‘maketh the man’:

“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not people” (Colossians 4:23)

So it’s not the what that matters, it’s the how.

I thought that the techy school was me.  But it was really my dad.  It takes a long time to unravel a career emphasis that is suggested upon you by your parents and reinforced by your school. Now, my parents didn’t make a bad or wrong decision. Lots of high schools did little for the arts back then. All I’m saying is be careful what you are wishing for your kids. It may not be them.