“Are you ready for school, dear?”
Nathaniel stared at his cereal.
“Come on, Nathaniel, eat your breakfast. I don’t want you to be late, and I don’t want to be late for work.”
Nathaniel’s mother scurried around trying to get everything ready. She’d sworn she hadn’t left this much to do the morning of. She had spent so much of her energy this past week getting Fredrick, one of her other children, ready to go off to his boarding school that some of the more regular chores fell by the wayside.
“Mom?”
“Yes, sweetheart, what is it?”
“Why does Fredrick get to go away to school?”
She ruffled the hair on his head playfully as she tried to remember if she had everything. “What, you don’t like spending time with your mother anymore?”
“That’s not what I meant, Mom. I just want to go study too. Why can’t I go to that chemist school you went to?”
“You are going to that chemist school I went to. You have to graduate from there first, love, before you can go to the chemist boarding school I went to.”
“But that’s not until I’m sixteen! Why do physics student get to go at fourteen? It’s not fair!”
“I don’t know, it’s just what physicists decided on. It’s not fair, but that’s the way it is. You’ll go when you’re sixteen. And trust me, you’ll fit in a lot better that way. Physicists’ brains work a bit differently than chemists’ brains, and based on that, those were the ages that were decided on. You can understand that, right?”
Nathaniel folded his arms and slumped down in his chair. “It’s still not fair.”
“You’ll forget about it as soon as you’re deep into your labs. Are you going to finish your breakfast? You want to graduate with honors, don’t you?”
That motivator worked every time. Nathaniel scarfed down his breakfast, grabbed his bag, and was out the door. His mother would never say it, but Nathaniel was her favorite child. Not by a lot, of course, but it was hard to overlook the fact that he took after her.
“So, what are you going to be working on today?”
He scoffed, “I don’t know, Mom. Stuff.”
“I’m sorry, I was just trying to help you get excited about your day.”
“Mom. I don’t need to be excited, this is what I want to do. I just don’t want you bugging me about it. This is why I want to go away for school.”
“Talk about eleven going on seventeen. What’s got you so grumpy this morning?”
But Nathaniel had decided he wasn’t talking anymore, and all she got from him was a “Hmph.”
“Fine, fine, I won’t bother you.” Poor boy. She knew it must be hard being the youngest, when your older siblings are out of the nest, doing what must be very exciting things. She expected he would be much happier when he got home from school.
Although it may appear that Nathaniel was going to a particularly specialized school, this is a different sort of culture. In fact, these were a different sort of people. They are similar to the kind we know personally, but with a lower level of indecision and a higher level of stability of self. In other words, these people are not the type to change majors three times and still not know what they’re doing with their lives. The parents observe their children until a suitable occupation becomes clear, and after a quick diagnostic test, are placed in school to pursue that career. At each school, there are three types of classes. Those directly related to your chosen path, those indirectly related, and for some students, life skills. It’s not a shame to require these classes. The most highly honored students are, depending on the field, often in such classes. It can be seen as a sign that you have so strongly devoted yourself to your path that other life skills have become secondary at best.
Nathaniel, of course, was enrolled in these classes. Surprising no one, he was one of the most promising students. His mother was a leader in the field of chemistry, and everyone always said he was just like her. His father was a formidable physicist in his own right, but not quite the famous figure his mother was. It did however, surprise his teachers to find out that he actually enjoyed these classes quite a bit. To most of the students, they seemed to be tiresome classes that they had been told were necessary. Nathaniel particularly liked his class on people in other fields. Not that he wanted to be anything but a chemist, but he loved to hear about all the other people of the world. They were so different from him. He didn’t understand it, but he wanted to learn how to relate to them, so he could meet them, and maybe become their friends. His classmates weren’t interested in becoming friends with non-chemists. Why would they want to be friends with other sorts of people?
Nathaniel’s teachers were beginning to suspect that he would make a superb chemistry teacher. He could even be the best, considering most of them were either in school to be teachers and found to be at least average at chemistry, or the other way around. Nathaniel looked to be one of the rare children that were exceptional at two paths in life.
Nathaniel’s mother, however, believed that the teachers who had assessed this simply did not understand how brilliant he was at chemistry. This was certainly true, but they suspected it had more to do with not wanting to admit that he may not be a researcher like her. Like all mothers, she wanted the best for him, and didn’t see what he could get out of being a teacher. After all, he told her time and time again how much he wanted to be a chemist, and being a chemistry teacher was not being a chemist. The teachers, in the end, dropped it, and hoped Nathaniel would come to this on his own. For his part, Nathaniel… actually, Nathaniel was not a part of this conversation. He didn’t even know there
was a conversation.
He and his best friends, Mike and Finn, didn’t give much thought to the goings on of their teachers and parents. In their free time, they pretended they were going to become mad scientists like they saw in the movies, which generally consisted of doing experiments or side projects and cackling loudly at random intervals, claiming their experiment would destroy the world. It was a treasured pastime that had been going on since they met at age six.
One time, Nathaniel’s mother stopped and asked if they wanted to know what girl chemists do to play. She had a headache, and was hoping to quiet them down. The headache clouded her judgement on what actually would quiet them down. They quickly chided her, telling her that girls were dumb, and they didn’t want anything to do with them or their games.
“Nathaniel, you know plenty of intelligent girls.”
“You don’t count and Lindsey is...”
“Your sister is not dumb!” Lindsey was his 24 year old sister, an electrical engineer. She wasn’t as gifted as the rest of the family. It was a touchy subject, especially for Mother, who always wanted a genius girl, but instead got Lindsey and then three boys. Lindsey was by no means bad at electrical engineering, but the bar was high in this family.
“Lindsey’s different. She knows how to do fun things. And she has an awesome boyfriend.” (As a side note, sexual maturation occurs in these people at around age 20 on average, a bit older than us.)
“Oh, I see. I’ll leave you to your experiments then.”
Lindsey, was, like her baby brother, interested in other people, non electrical engineers in her case. Unlike her baby brother, and unbeknownst to her parents, she didn’t feel she was properly placed as a child. When she was younger, she didn’t feel like she fit in, and as she got older she came to believe that her best was just not as good as they thought it would be. It wasn’t until she got out into the world that she began to question that. She moved out, got a job, and started interacting from time to time with other people. She began to become friends with people in marketing, which was not uncommon by this age. She started to find schoolbooks on the subject. When she began to show an interest in her friend’s work, they began to feel uneasy with their friendship.
She soon found other ways to meet marketers, people outside her job who wouldn’t know her, or that she was actually an electrical engineer. She wasn’t at their level, but it was clear to her that she was born to do this. For the past four years, she had lead a double life as a marketer and an engineer. She would work with her friends, helping them with their work, and making up scenarios for them to help with. There were no laws about company secrets, there was just a code, which each career type had. Here, it was very easy to blacklist someone, and if someone was blacklisted, they had no career. There was no way to change careers halfway through your life, so being blacklisted meant you had lost your means to live, and had to rely entirely on someone else. The warnings came down through every school in the country. The few that did break the code had no friends, no job, no life. It was well known that if you broke the code, you would be miserable for the rest of your life.
Lindsey felt pretty content with her life as it was. She wished she could change jobs, but there was no path for her to take. It wasn’t until she met her boyfriend that she began to reconsider that. Lindsey’s boyfriend was an advocate for the ability to change your career. He was placed correctly (an astronomer), but he’d seen other people struggle with being placed into the wrong career when they were young. It was not acceptable in society to see it as the “wrong” career, but he wanted to change that. People beginning to find their calling. People whose parents didn’t see their true potential. Lindsey’s parents, of course, didn’t know any of this.
