What Happens Next?
What is it that we’re teaching and preparing students for when they leave the halls of our local high schools? Are we sending them off to academia where their minds will be stimulated by learned professors, where they will lounge around philosophizing like the characters in “Dead Poets’ Society,” where their every concern is about making the grade?
I think we all know the answer to that question. Students are leaving their parents’ homes and communities to enter into some sort of strange parent-less land, a land of few boundaries, a land of exploration…a land unlike any other. College is a time of exploration and of “finding oneself,” but to what extent? And why does it seem to be centered around sex?
An April 4th article in the Wall Street Journal, entitled, “Sex Education,” decries the failure of the “hook up” culture present on most college campuses. (A “hook up” is an ambiguous term employed when two people get together without a relationship attachment, and engage in some sort of physical sexual activity, which can range from “making out” to intercourse.) According to this article, students can now relax on the weekends by attending theme parties. These parties are not what you might expect; where else can young people attend a “CEO’s and Office Ho’s,” or “Millionaires and Maids” party? Apparently, at our institutions of higher learning.
