Awakening Aspirations of Primary School Students: Where Will Your Dreams Take You?

Abstract

This article posits that when children are encouraged to aspire, they can become aware of a new world of choices and opportunities. Children should be supported to aspire in all areas of their lives. Of interest is children’s capacity to aspire to attend tertiary education. Literature shows that children cannot aspire to attend higher education when they have no knowledge of the opportunities nor realise its purpose. To support this argument, we discuss a project involving primary school students from areas that have been identified as having a low socio-economic status. The results show that as a consequence of students participating in the My Tertiary Eductaion (MyTED) program they developed the capacity to aspire to attend tertiary education.“Alicia would look up at the starry sky and dream”(Bright Star, Crew, 1997, p.5)