social engineering

By Todd Stadler · Tuesday, May 1, 2001 8:59pm

So this whole "job leaving" thing has got me thinking. No, really.

See, my whole life, I've been on this engineer track, as it were. I was smart in high school, good at science and math and computers.

When I got to Rice, I firmed up my decision to stay in the technical field and eventually found myself majoring in computer engineering. I liked some of the classes well enough, but mainly I had discovered I didn't like pure physics, pure computer science, or even the circuitry part of electrical engineering.

During the summers, I got internships at several high-tech corporations. The jobs were fairly boring, and I rarely did anything important, but I was building a resume, right?

When I started looking for jobs at the end of college, I only had two offers. One from AMD, and the other from Intel. Seeing as I didn't want to live in Sunnyvale or be a product engineer, I went with the Intel job.

Of course, I was just happy to have a job out of college, and a prestigious one that payed well, at that. But over time, it became apparent that I wasn't always enjoying my job. Some days it was good, some days it was bad.

I came to question why I was in this position. What made me think I was an engineer? I noticed that I had never really asked myself that honestly up until that point. I had just trudged along. After all, engineers make money. Engineering is a good, respectable field. And so on.

But my point isn't so much what happened to me. Rather, I've been thinking a lot lately about current trends in child rearing.

I think this was brought out by a recent trip to Toys 'R' Us. While pondering buying a really cheap electronic drum set, I noticed that they were selling some goofy "Mozart for Babies" CD. It turns out that there are all sorts of stupid recordings like that.

And it bothers me. Not only because someone is trying to make a quick buck by repackaging the same old recordings, or, worse, making new ones on "baby-safe" instruments like the glockenspiel or vibraphone.

No, I am simply bothered by this push to turn our children into baby geniuses. Can't you people see that's an awful idea!

Somehow, parents have gotten it into their minds that their children must be raised to their full potential, and that can only be achieved if the parents cram lots of stuff into their children's heads, like it or not. So goodbye unstructured playtime, it's time for more edutainment.

So what's my point with all this? My point is that this is all futile. I fancy myself a fairly intelligent guy. I always got good grades, did well on my SATs, got into a good college, ... all the things that these overbearing parents want for their children.

(Heck, while I think my parents did a bang-up job of raising me, they certainly did it wrong by today's standards. No playdates, no educational products foisted upon me, and lots of unstructured time. Just lots of Legos and listening to popular music. My poor, naive parents.)

And yet, here I am, many years down the road, and I realized that the path that I had chosen wasn't what I wanted. That was hard enough to decide without my parents pressuring me. I can only imagine how difficult it would be to change paths if my parents had built up my entire childhood to see me become the next Einstein.

(As a side note, Einstein is the only legitimate scientific genius, just like Mozart is the only classical music that will help your baby become an Einstein. Nobody seems to care much about has-beens like Feynman or Hindemith.)

I guess I just fear for all these children being raised in such high pressure atmospheres. Will they ever learn to follow their hearts, to do what it is that brings them the most joy? Will they ever learn to be creative and think differently? Or are we just raising a crop of intelligent robots?