Career guidance: a unicorn

For the students who belong to families standing at the lower financial strata of society, fate is defined as the availability of proper guidance at the proper time when they stand at the criss-cross of career choices. Parents of upper financial class who are well conversant with the scope and market trends of various professions stand at the vantage point to decide careers for their children or at least in moulding children’s interest to the desired goal right from the early age. On the contrary, the rudderless students end up choosing a career through trial and error. Such students remain unsatisfied with their career and life, fail to exert themselves and constantly gravitate towards their heart’s unmet desire.

In his essay ‘Why Boys Fail in College’, Herbert E Hawkes writes: “A common cause of failure is a mistaken ambition for the boy on the part of his parents.” Where parents hold sway upon the career choice of their children, conflict of interest between parents and children may spoil the professional life of the latter, and prove counterproductive for the former. To burden the children with proxy ambitions is the worst form of child labour wrought by the parents. Most of the parents want to accomplish the aborted or botched ambitions of their own student life through their children. It is infanticide of another kind. Carl Jung says: “The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.”

In middle and lower middle classes, parents without assessing their financial resources set unreal objectives for their children. Given the absence of any external help at the government level, they daydream for their children traditional careers like engineering or medical disciplines. They push their children into the uncharted regions without adorning them with any moral support and financial input. Actually, parents’ lack of knowledge and interest regarding non-traditional careers and their children’s aptitude constitutes parental laissez-faire towards their children’s career choice.

In the absence of resourceful parents around, teachers must fill the gap and provide career counselling to their students objectively. The stress on “objectively” insinuates the professional dishonesty teachers sometimes commit in the sense they restrict the admission quota of a particular discipline. Then they misguide students to other disciplines disregarding students’ flair and aptitude. At secondary level of education, sometimes lack of faculty for a particular discipline leaves the management and teachers with no other option but to herd up all students into one discipline. In some instances, teachers to save their skin lure students away from their subject of interest to an easier subject to enhance the pass percentage of the subject. This is the worst form of ethical turpitude as per Judge Potter Stewart’s words: “Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have the right to do and what is right to do.”

In our country, technical education is not being given due importance. A whole world of technological careers lies untapped. Students from lower middle class, who cannot afford long academic years encumbered with hefty fees, must opt for these subjects. In this way they would become educated skilled workers, a community in great demand both in the developing and the developed countries. Sports is another field which is ignored in our educational institutions. Sportsmen not only win laurels for the country but also contribute to sports economy.

So far, career guidance, formal or informal, is a unicorn particularly for the students of the downtrodden classes. However, such students should stay on the tracks leading to the highway of their destination. Suppose a student is a CSS aspirant, and is forced by his financial constraints to work part-time, the best option would be to sell newspapers or to work at a book shop; to apprentice a doctor would be a wrong choice in this example. Right direction always pays off.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 5^th, 2023.

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