Most young people today - like me and those around me - struggle with choosing their next stop in the ladder of education. In fact, more often than not education doesn't feel like a ladder, but is instead a labyrinth with dead ends, zigzags and shortcuts. This is almost impossible to navigate without some sort of idea of where you want to end up and a good sense of direction. In my case, and in the cases of many of my friends, we have neither.
In Denmark, high school classes are sorted by which subjects they study, like a college. There are subjects that everyone has to study - Danish and history for at least three years, English and a second foreign language for two years, a scientific subject (including math) for two years and lastly there are other subjects that everyone has for at least one year. Apart from that, Danish high school students have the freedom to choose what they want to focus on. Generally there are four categories - Science, Language, Social Science and Artistic studies.
For young Danes, choosing between these categories is problematic even though they are offered by the same school, demand the same amount of work and have the same compulsory subjects. There is a world apart from having English for two years or three. This is because choosing their school and category is an action of choosing the person they want to be.
Nowadays most adults find their identity in their profession. When meeting a new person for the first time, the first question after exchanging names is "What do you do?" It's no coincidence that workplace and job position is the first thing on Facebook descriptions, with relationship status last. And when people are presented on TV, the first thing you learn about them is what their job is. What you do is what you are. The same applies to high school students, although here the jobs are replaced by their school and choice of subjects.
In my high school, every class has a stereotype. People who study physics at a high level are said to be bookworms who want to do well in school and if you study music you are a hippie, for example. Even other high schools have stereotypes. It's strange how we can assume that a whole school or a whole class is alike. Most stereotypes don't exist, but we still have them. We deal a specific identity to a school or a category, even though they aren't fundamentally that different from us.
Why do we do this? Because in our minds, what we do is what you are. And starting with our high school and set of subjects, our choice of education leads to our career options, steering into a job, defining a identity, which ends up in the first line of our Facebook description. This chain is what makes it so hard to choose an education and later taking it. It practically means that choices you make when you are fifteen determines your future with no possibility of looking back. It suggests that the first step you take in the labyrinth has an influence on what you are going to find in the end. Most dangerously, it suggests that you can't retrace that first step, let alone your next ones.
Assuming this is wrong. A labyrinth doesn't go in a straight line, but has zigzags and shortcuts and detours. If you stumble on a dead end, you go back and try again. This is possible. There is no reason to fear the labyrinth and all its choices, but every reason to embrace it. And what's more, the longer you spend in the labyrinth the better your sense of direction gets. But that is only something you can learn by being in it.
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