http://www.city-journal.org/2011/eon1122kh.htmlKAY S. HYMOWITZ
Steve Jobs and Other Dirty Hippies
The road to success isn’t always straight.
City Journal
22 November 2011
...
Jobs�s story has several lessons, especially for members of Generation Jobless and those of us who worry about national decline. The first is that studying the so-called STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math) isn�t for everyone�not even Steve Jobs. Nor is it the only route to innovation. The second is that in a complex, diversified, but highly specialized consumer economy like our own, some young people will take predictable career paths and become lawyers, doctors, veterinarians, or biotech researchers�but others will wander in the wilderness as they try to find a way to align their interests with the labor market.
That process is often (and unfortunately) called �following your passion,� and it may seem a pretty dumb thing to do at a time when even recent college grads are facing an 8 percent unemployment rate. But the economic growth of the previous decades gave us a flood of new creative jobs: Web designers, social-media consultants, content strategists, actors in one of the many new regional theaters. I could barely suppress a guffaw when a friend told me that her daughter was going to �circus college� a few years ago. Joke�s on me: the daughter is now a trapeze artist for Cirque du Soleil in Florida. (The company, founded only in the mid-1980s, employs 5,000 people.) Another friend�s son wanted to be a blues singer. Who doesn�t? But after living in the Mississippi Delta for nine months and playing nameless bars for many more, he is now signing record contracts and doing European tours.
<end of excerpt>
My inclinations are more in the Tiger Mom direction, my wife even more so. But even before reading this article I had musings along the lines above. To what extent should one push a child in a direction that seems practical?
