Kids are cruel. Isn’t this what we say? They lack compassion for misfortune, laugh at weakness and tribe up in groups of peers, playing the acceptance game, which can only be won through rejecting others.
Bloody teenagers! There are so many insults we can throw their way! They lack concentration, they’re ambition is not for personal growth but for glory, fame and adoration. When asked if they wanted world peace, or a piece of the material action in the world, they’ll plum for the latter 9/10. Teenagers are selfish, amoral, and lazy. Isn’t that what we say? Wasn’t that what we were accused of?
A survey taken in a British girls school about 7 years ago asked 30 students what they wanted to be when the grew up. 29 said famous. They did not have ambition to cure cancer, end world debt or poverty, or even discover a new musical octave: they just wanted fame. To be heard of, talked about, recognised.
This was one of the aims of Billy the Kid.
Even teenagers who manage to reach the higher echelons of fame don’t appreciate it when they get it, or at least, this is what our beloved media are hoping every day to prove. Just look at the young football stars rolling out of nightclubs with fifty- pound notes rolled up their nose! Or podgy Jamie Waylett, the 22 year old Harry Potter star who was sent to jail for 2 years for drinking champagne while rioting in London in Summer 2011. We cynical adults love to put shame to youth’s trespasses.
That angry 14-year old mob that looted their capitalist hearts out during the London riots last summer, more than underlined the prevailing belief that teenagers have no appreciation of anything! No value for anything! No concept of money or hard work! Wasn’t this what most people concluded to be the cause of the uprisings in the capital?
Teenagers want everything now. This is the quick fix generation, and if films can’t be downloaded onto their computers faster than pizza can be delivered to their doors, teddies will be hurled out of prams from London to Tokyo!
The music they listen to is either too loud or too fast. You can’t understand the words half of the time. Teenagers are the reason Simon Cowell drives a Bentley. The cultures they create are meaningless and passing, filled with fads and embarrassing haircuts that are destined to plague them for the rest of their lives. Isn’t this our grievance every time we get stuck behind a slow-walking 17-year old boy that still hasn’t found the belt department in his local clothes shop?
Do we really want to put our faith in a generation that believe it is better to wear expensive pants on show then it is to find out their own waste size measurements? Perhaps our present problems will be solved in the future by everyone walking like a penguin constantly referring to everything as either “sick” or “safe”.
But in their defence…
Rejection is an enormous part of teenage life. The innocence of childhood ends almost overnight; the integration of boys and girls divides itself asunder when the shudders of hormones first tremble through our young, awkward bodies.
We go from sand pit to hell pit in one leap. Suddenly the boy next door, who has played with your toys and pulled your hair since you were two, is an alien presence in your life. He has hair on his face, spots, and new discovered deepness to his voice. And you know that whatever you got changing in you, if he is so inclined to notice, is not going unnoticed. Puberty is bloody weird. Adults forget this, mostly because we do all we can to block it from our memories.
As well as this tectonic development in body change, teenagers have school to consider. Social aspect aside, the national curriculum is not designed to educate teenagers on how to know themselves and love themselves unconditionally. It is designed to disorientate and confuse. There is nothing coherent or meaningful at all about the way children are taught.
Do you remember school? Registration followed by a bell that directed you to some arbitrary subject such as Geography. Then, an hour or half hour later, another bell, and off you plunder to some utterly unrelated subject such as English Literature or Art. And on it goes. Can you imagine a trade that could run on these irregularities? From 9-10 you are a painter and decorator until the bell rings, and then you have to present a weather forecast for the BBC? It doesn’t work.
There are so few schools that encourage kids to learn what they wish to learn, or afford them time to pursue it. But those who run schools know that their institutions have very little to do with education, and everything to do with training for meaningless and banal employment. Deskwork.
I have nothing but compassion for teachers who actually want to teach something valuable, and not just stand in front of a class like a mock-boss, encouraging young adults to meet their targets and keep their CV in mind. It is drilled into kids: doing well at school gets you work.
The Curriculum is not there to increase your appetite for knowledge or greater understanding of your place in existence: it is there because it is what has been decided, by extremely misguiding authorities, what kids must learn to fit in to the system of adulthood.
Therefore those who are rebelling against schooling are also rebelling against conformity, banality and brainwashing and that could be admired. Having said that, most of the naughty kids at my school who refused to wear the uniform, were often seen hanging out together wearing identical tracksuits.
Even rebels have regulations.
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