"Schools and parents should encourage young people to be realistic rather than idealistic about their career goals." This quote is an incredibly loaded question that pertains the deeper-seated question of how high should we push our youth? Should we just accept the fact that they're not brilliant enough to reach for a high position? Should we baby them and blindly encourage them to reach for an unattainable goal? One might even argue that the reason why the American dream is failing us is because of a failure to raise our youth up in the right way. Should we give them school of hard knocks instead? I heartily disagree with this question because it implies that we are telling kids to give up their dreams.
My personal belief is that we as schools and parents should not only encourage people to be idealistic for their careers, but not just give blind words and actually equip the kids. If an athlete tells his or her coach that their goal is to be the best in the world, the coach's role is to do everything they can to help attain this goal. The athlete who wants to attain this goal needs to put their work into it and with the coach pushing him, he may or may not attain this goal. If he fails to reach it he will still finish much higher than the "realistic" idea about their career goal.
However, there is a large caveat when it comes to being idealistic in their encouragement. It would be prudent to encourage the young people to be bold with their ideas and work hard at their goals rather than telling them they can achieve anything but not emphasize the proper work ethic and the knowledge that would be required behind it. Pragmatism is the true encouragement behind the idealism of a career goal. If say a child says, "I want to develop an idea into a start-up." The pragmatic response to promote their idealistic career goal would be, these are the tools that you will need to put this idea into play. You need to learn how to code in several languages, how to write a resume, how to get a venture capitalist to invest in you idea, how to market your product. These are all real world useful skills that can be used in the real world. (Study, 2015)
To summarize, we should encourage young people to reach for the stars. Pragmatically.
Pragmatism: Overview & Practical Teaching Examples. (2014). Retrieved December 8, 2015, from http://study.com
/academy/lesson/pragmatism-overview-practical-teaching-examples.html
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