1.Educational institutions have a responsibility to dissuade students from pursuing fields of study in which they are unlikely to succeed.Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the claim. In developing and sup

A great strength of educational institutions is their ability to allow students to explore different subjects. From a young age, students are encouraged to study material ranging from science to social studies. Encouraging this exploration is not an attempt to get students to find what they’re good at and just continue with that; it is an attempt for students to experience the breadth of learning. It is this breadth that develops a student’s critical thinking and analytical skills, qualities that are fundamental to future success. To curtail such a broad exploration would mean to hinder the ability of students to pick up life skills and further discover their abilities. Hence, educational institutions should not dissuade students from pursuing fields in which they are unlikely to succeed.

It just so happens that a student’s ability to succeed in a particular field is highly correlated with their age. A student that does not excel at Economics in high school, might later become more perceptive to it in college. On the other hand, a student that is good at Math in high-school, may become unable to bear the rigor associated with college level Math. If an institution were to discourage the former student from pursuing Economics in college as a result of their poor Economics acumen in high-school, they would be hindering their ability to discover their future interests and positively contribute towards society in the future. Take a look at Richard Thaler, for example. In his book Misbehaving, he opens up about how as a non-tenured professor, he spent most of his time discovering the field of Behavioral Economics. At the time, Behavioral Economics was a new field and it was risky for him to focus the majority of his time towards this single area of interest. Although he was dissuaded by colleagues to pursue this route, he did not stop. If he had given up, would he have won the Nobel prize today? Thaler might have been able to overcome the dissuasion, but others might not be as impregnable. Dissuading such students might actually be detrimental to their growth and success.

To add to the above argument, one might consider the increasing importance of analytical thinking, perseverance, and determination. If schools dissuade students from pursuing what they might not succeed in, they are setting a precedent for “giving up” in the future. Students will tend to believe that it is okay to give up if they are not excelling at something. This will prevent that from persevering and thinking about ideas that confound them, skills that are extremely relevant to jobs in industry. If schools were to prevent the development of these skills, they would only be contributing to creating a pool of future job candidates that are not equipped with the ability to think about difficult problems and overcome obstacles.

Although I argue that it is necessary for schools to encourage students to explore various fields and serve as a guide in the development of necessary life skills, one might argue that dissuasion could also have positive effects. Let us take Mark Zuckerberg as an example. It was only after he got to Harvard that he realized that school wasn’t for him. He must have excelled at school to get into Harvard, but it took him awhile to realize that it was not within a school environment that he would succeed. If schools were to encourage more people in his situation to follow what they are good at rather than spend more time slogging through what they are not successful at, we might end up with more stories like Zuckerberg’s.

In sum, it is a part of an educational institution’s mission to encourage students to take academic risks and really delve into fields before making a choice to settle within one. If these very institutions were to discourage students from simply learning and instead encourage them to only focus on what they will succeed in, we are likely to end up with future generations that lack the ability to critically think and overcome obstacles. It is important to teach the future workforce the benefits of exploration, perseverance, and hard work, rather than to give them a pass to pursue only what they are strong at.