What was SGA thinking?

By Brian Beck
Staff Writer

How many of you remember the parent-teacher conferences that the majority of students were subjected to through their primary and secondary school years? If you were a good student, you looked forward to them; if you were not-so-good, you dreaded them.

Well, now students will again be subjected to these conferences if board of trustees member Breeden Blackwell has his way. He made a proposal to the SGA on Sept. 29, which SGA senators decided to endorse on Oct. 6. Blackwell's motivation behind this proposal is to increase retention among UNCP students.

I can understand the motivation behind this proposal. UNCP is attempting to increase enrollment, which will be difficult to accomplish if students are leaving the university for one reason or another.

This proposal, though, is flawed. First and foremost, you have that pesky little Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act. This states that student grades may not be shared with parents or legal guardians without written consent of the student.

When you are 18 years old, you're considered a legal adult. You gain the right to smoke, the right to a full driver's license, the right to vote, and other smaller rights. Part of the responsibility of being an adult is making the proper decisions that need to be made to be successful in life.

The goal of college education is just that - a way for you to get a proper education so you can be successful. The thing is, you don't just gain book knowledge from college, but also learn other valuable lessons such as discipline, personal interaction skills and how to deal with problems in your life.

Allowing parents to remain a part of their young adult's education process may seem beneficial - the student may get better grades. The problem is that they won't learn how to handle their own life. This lesson is just as valuable to a student as knowing how to solve an equation in calculus class.

Parents cannot hold the hand of their young adult throughout his or her life. If the student makes bad grades at the college level, he or she needs to be able to deal with the consequences and move on, not have mommy and daddy threaten to spank them when they come home for fall break.

Another glaring flaw with the proposal: what student will want to go to a school where they aren't truly independent? Part of the attraction of college includes just that - freedom and the ability to make your own decisions. While this whole idea may help to keep current students, enro-llment could drop as students see that they are not truly independent at UNCP.

I can understand where Blackwell comes from, and understand that he has good intentions for UNCP's future. Students are not going to learn, though, if their parents continue to hold their hand at the college level. Other ideas to promote student retention need to be explored, and this idea needs to be buried.