There aren't even colleges that are intended for high potential and deep thinking anymore-- that's what we're seeing, anyway.
And...
College is the new high school. Only, new and improved, with additional performance and time pressure, and more complexity than any of us recalls as students.
Yes, yes, yes!
I sound incredibly cynical, and this is a tad of an over generalization, but university is one big anti-intellectual orgy these days. I say this having done grad school at a top-10 global university. Want to think outside the classroom's narrow scope? Better not step on Professor Insecure's toes or disagree with the tunnel vision with which he's wasted the last three decades of his life in some meaningless dalliance in minutiae. Want to get a research grant? Practice your grovelling skills and buy some knee pads! Don't forget that your thesis has to be inextricably linked to the Guvment's Ideogical Whim du Jour and must be beneficial on a narrowly defined cost-benefit framework derived by people who have no perceptible appreciation for the subject you practice in.
Challenges and fulfillment are largely self-created. (Yes, I'm an internal locus of control kind of gal, TYVM.) Everything I've ever done of any value has come from within, and that takes grit and courage. DS isn't going to learn any of that playing intellectual mental masturbation in a room full of people who think he's "being met at his level" by being given an extra digit to add.
He's not someone else's social experiment to mess up, he's my child, who deserves the opportunity to fail and build character in an environment with an appropriate parental safety net. There's no value in his sitting in some dismal office 20 years down the road, doing the same white collar sausage factory garbage day in and day out, resenting the world, never having tested himself or done anything meaningful.
Whew. Do I trust "the system" to help my child build character? A resounding 4-letter-word no, hence my interventionist ethos.
