When Your Child Says “I Don’t Think I’ll Be Able to Get an Education”: What a High School Teacher Learned
Last period on a rainy Friday in October, I was stacking progress notes by my desk when Javi lingered by the classroom door, one shoulder propped against the cinder block, scuffing the linoleum with his worn work boot. Most kids had bolted for the bus, the vending machine down the hall clanging every time someone grabbed a soda before the weekend. He crumpled his math test in one hand—he’d gotten a D, the third that semester—and mumbled so quiet I almost missed it: “I don’t think I’ll be able to get an education.”
I invited him to sit in the extra chair by my desk, and he slumped down, kicking the leg of my filing cabinet once before repeating the line louder. I’ve heard this phrase from dozens of students in my 12 years as a high school resource teacher, and I used to react the way most people do: rush in with quick reassurance, “Of course you can, you just have to try harder, we’ll get you a tutor, it’s going to work out.” But that never helps. It just brushes off what the kid is actually trying to tell you. So this time I leaned back in my chair and asked, “What does getting an education mean to you, right now?”
He blinked, like he’d never been asked that before. “What everyone says it means, right? Graduate high school in four years, go to college, get a degree, get a good job. That’s what my grandma says, that’s what the counselor says, that’s what all the college assemblies talk about. I can’t even get through a chapter of history without mixing up half the words, I’m two credits behind already, I’ll never get there.”
Javi has dyslexia that he’s been accommodated for since third grade, works 20 hours a week at his cousin’s motorcycle shop after school, and missed six weeks of school last year when his grandma had heart surgery and no one else could drive her to appointments. He’s good with engines—can take apart a carburetor and put it back together blindfolded, his cousin told me once—but traditional school has always felt like trying to shove a square peg into a round hole.
I pulled a blank sheet of printer paper from my drawer, drew a straight line down the middle. I wrote “What school says an education needs” at the top of the left column, “What you want an education for” at the top of the right, and handed him my pen. He filled out the left column in 30 seconds flat: 22 credits, 3.0 GPA, graduate on time, 4-year college, bachelor’s degree. Then he stared at the right column for a full minute, tapped the pen against the paper a few times, and wrote slow: Fix motorcycles. Read owner manuals without asking cousin. Order parts online without messing up. Open my own shop one day. Make enough money to pay grandma back for all the rent she’s let me slide on.
That’s when the shift happened. I pointed out that none of the things he wrote on the right required a bachelor’s degree. The community college 20 minutes from town has a 12-month motorcycle repair certification program that only requires a high school diploma or GED, no minimum GPA, doesn’t care how many extra years you take to finish high school. He’d never even heard of the program. All he’d ever heard was that education equals a four-year degree, so if he couldn’t do that, he couldn’t have an education at all.
That’s the lesson I carry with me now, that I share with parents who reach out after their kid says the same line. When a kid says they don’t think they can get an education, they’re not usually giving up. They’re telling you they’ve bought into the narrow definition of education we’ve been shoving at them, and they can already see they don’t fit the mold. Rushing to reassure them doesn’t fix the problem, because it doesn’t change the definition.
The first concrete step anyone can try is exactly what I did with Javi: don’t lead with “you can do it.” Lead with “What does getting an education mean to you?” It takes 10 seconds, and it opens up a conversation instead of shutting it down with empty encouragement. After that talk with Javi, we made small, specific changes that didn’t require any big budget or special program. We talked to his counselor, dropped two honors classes he didn’t need for his certification, switched him into work study so he gets elective credit for the hours he already works at the bike shop. We worked with his English teacher to let him do book reports on motorcycle repair manuals instead of the novels the rest of the class reads, which lets him practice reading comprehension on something he actually cares about.
Six months later, Javi still struggles. He got a D on his last algebra test, he still misses a day of school here and there when his grandma needs a ride, he gets frustrated when a paragraph of text takes him 20 minutes to get through. He hasn’t said that line again, though. Last week he texted me a photo of a 1998 Yamaha 600 he just rebuilt, painted the gas tank navy blue, said he’s selling it for $1800, putting all the money aside for his certification tuition. He’s on track to finish his required credits for graduation in five years instead of four, and if that falls through, he’s already looked into the requirements for a GED that he can do while he works full time at the shop.
We don’t know what’s going to happen. He might not open his own shop five years from now, he might change his mind and decide he wants to go to a four-year college after all, or he might get the certification and work at a local dealership for someone else. None of that matters right now. What matters is he stopped believing that education was something only for people who fit the box the system built. The hardest thing for most of us as parents and teachers is letting go of the idea that education has to look a certain way. But when a kid says they don’t think they can get one, that’s almost always what they need: someone to help them build one that fits them, not the other way around.
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