The idea of 'college prep' courses and schools is stupid and unhealthy.
Never mind the social stratification that stems from the cost and availability of such programs and schools, never mind that tutors take pressure off mainstream/public schools to actually teach the expected material; it's the idea of preparing for college itself that rankles. We impose several artificial discontinuities on children already: treating physical activity and restlessness as problems outside of gym class, reducing music and visual arts' stature in schools, treating 'teenagers' as distinct from slightly younger but equally sexually (im)mature creatures, literally locking children up in featureless beige boxes for seven hours a day, etc. The high school/college discontinuity is difficult for parents and often jarring for students in part because we treat it as a border, a finale, rather than a milepost. Moreover, we set expectations for college - which allegedly 'teaches you how to think' - in such a way that high school seems even more trivial and time-wasting than it already, almost inevitably is.
Any skill or practice that prepares students for college prepares them for the rest of their lives, and vice versa.
The real stuff, the deep stuff, clearly differs from what we teach students as 'college prep.' Good advice is always good: Caring about your SAT score is tacky and only gets moreso after you've been admitted to college; wanting to demonstrate your skills is admirable and will get you places in life. Knowing how to seem intelligent in a classroom makes you a skilled deceiver; knowing how to ask clear questions and keep a dialogue going will win you entry into heaven. A good book - or a good time reading - has nothing to do with a good book report. Don't focus on 'study skills' as if studying textbooks were some unique field unto itself; learn how to focus on tasks for long periods of time, how to recharge your batteries, when and how to take a break, how to treat other people with respect and bring out the best in collaborators, how to evaluate your own mental state, how to organize yourself for work. And don't mislead people about your abilities - continue to improve them and take pride in mastery of all kinds. 'Practice' doesn't mean 'warmups,' it means activity. It means doing, living. Good life is good practice; and vice (of course) versa.
We teach children to think of school as something separate from life, and the awesome irresponsibility of the 'typical' college experience would seem to back up this lesson. But most 'rites of passage' are collective fantasies of identity rather than development and continuity - high school graduation, bat mitzvah, job promotion, first confession, and the Hallowed Wonderful Wedding Day should each in theory mark the culmination and consolidation of a period of development and steady growth, but we pretend that they inaugurate brand new chapters in life, as if there were such a thing as a 'chapter' in life, as if we could put away whom we've been. The past isn't dead; it's not even past. If we teach our children disposable skills such as what passes for 'college prep' - collections of trivia and arbitrary numerical measures you're not supposed to cling to and use throughout life but to show off to admissions boards like the coat and mane of a prize horse - we devalue their experiences, their differences, the stuff of their lives. You either do or don't 'become a worthwhile adult' - and what the blazing hell could that possibly mean? 'College prep' is like 'age 12 prep': it impoverishes the present on behalf of a fantasy future. It's irresponsible.
So enough with 'prep school' and 'college prep' and 'study skills.' Enough pretending that doing well in school is (and, grotesquely, should be) different from, unrelated to, growing and living well. These are symptoms of our deeper cultural problem, which is this: high school and college prepare us only incidentally or accidentally for the world when they prepare us at all, partly because we treat them as worlds unto themselves. Which is part of our debilitating collective fantasy that children are something separate from us - which is itself only the flip side of our even more self-serving fantasy, namely that we are a different sort of being from our children, and from the children we once were.
