Major-ly bad idea

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is throwing his weight behind a recommendation from a state high school task force. With Bush's support, the Florida State House of Representatives just passed a bill that would require incoming freshmen to declare a major. \nDoesn't seem like a big deal, does it? Well, these students are freshmen ... in high school. Now does that have your attention? \nOnly the Florida State Senate currently stands in the way of this bill becoming a law. Bush says that requiring high school students to declare a major would better prepare them for college and vocational trades while lowering dropout rates, presumably because students would be more interested in the classes they take. \nThis idea is terrible and should be thrown out of the state legislature. For starters, it is as impractical as any law I've come across. It might be admirable to encourage students to focus on their career aspirations, but these kids are not even 15 years old. When I was in their position, I would have enthusiastically signed on for some sort of pre-law/government track. Today I study biochemistry and am certain to become a research scientist. People change. A tremendous number of college students change their majors. Surely the frequency with which high schoolers, a full four years younger, would change their majors would render the entire ordeal meaningless and useless. \nBut there is a second, more important reason to oppose this law. Students already have enough pressure focusing on the next steps of their lives, whatever that might be. We work hard in hopes of landing that acceptance into college, or the top graduate school, or the selective summer internship, or the well-paying job right out of college. All of us must eventually make important choices regarding these issues, but isn't high school too early to make career-related decisions? \nA CNN article uses an example of children who would supposedly benefit from this law: two students who want to become an engineer and video game designer. Perhaps these students think that studying the history of the Roman Empire is a waste of their time. And sure, it's probably true that they might never need knowledge of Marcus Aurelius to succeed in their chosen professions. But the process of studying history itself is likely to be far more important than whatever subject a history class happens to focus on. High schools should be places to teach people how to think, not vocational trade schools. \nA former professor I had, the late Austin Caswell, used to lament the trend in higher education toward specialization and "practical" pre-professional educational tracks. It's easy to imagine what he would think if he heard that this form of thinking has spread like a virus to an earlier level of education. \nWhere will it ever stop? Taken to its logical conclusion, parents will someday hire counselors to help their grade school children decide what to do with their lives. Invariably, the same parents will have to pay a different set of counselors to attend to the students who crack from having to do too much too soon.