mandatory parenting licences

Sometimes I think various non-human species have it right: as soon as their offspring are vaguely ambulatory and don't need to have their food actually regurgitated for them, push them the hell out of the nest, to eat or be eaten in the big wide world entirely on their own merits. This prevents the kind of scenario I often have to deal with in curriculum advice, viz. innocent first-years dragging their feet into a degree because their parents, far from pushing them out of the nest, are pushing them into being a replica of the parents themselves, or into some imagined notion of competitiveness in the big wide world, regardless of whether this is directly opposed to the inclinations of the individual concerned. This is the kind of thing, she says darkly, which leads to a three-year academic record with a string of fails and absents for, say, engineering, followed by a year of firsts for English or Religious Studies. You can register a student for anything you like, but you can't make 'em think. The intelligent ones in particular are very good at Dumb Insolence. I can only say that it's poetic justice that the parents should have to pay for it all.

Today's example was particularly egregious. The student had applied, and been accepted for, one of the Fine Arts degrees, which I know is horribly competitive and demands actual talent as well as stellar Matric results, and which is also pretty darned useful in the job market. She was not only accepted, she was awarded a bursary. Except that she was asking me to sign off on a standard Humanities curriculum, no fine art in sight. Reason: her mother had vetoed the art degree, wanting darling daughter to major, and go on to postgrad, in a particular Humanities subject for no other reason than because the rest of the family - both parents and two other siblings - had done it. The subject, may I add, was one in which the student herself had no interest at all.

This student was a well-brung-up child who dutifully registered for the mandated courses in the face of all my subversive attempts to make her defy the hell out of her parents. I hope she wasn't too disconcerted by the way her curriculum adviser was frothing at the mouth, and that she plucks up the courage to grab her own life in both hands at some stage in her university career.

But I am forced to return to my oft-repeated mantra: "The more I see of other people's parents, the more I realise how incredibly lucky I am with mine." Word.