Your ‘grade’ means shit. It is a digitised collection of pixels that gets printed out to supposedly represent you. An A* student can be praised a thousand times and still not be able to hold a conversion without being awkward. His social skills are reminiscent of the ‘roadmans’ coursework. Society has led us to believe that it is better to be bad at something and become good, rather than be the best in the first place. Eventually all these subcultures blend into everyone trying to pull the best mark they can.

While our country’s leaders bicker in parliament and continuously try to make statistics look better rather than help the people that make up the numbers, our responsibility is to digest pages of information from multiple subjects, balance a social life ensuring our ties with our family are strong, maintain a healthy body and somewhere along the line discover who it is we want to be in the world. A high level answer to the question- What is meant by hypocrisy? You quote Sinatra calling that life, yet you are never truly living.

We had an outburst of young adults unemployed, and because thats decreased, we turn our attention to  the problems outside our borders; Trump, allied wars, etc. I cringe at the news in the morning whenever they’ve shoehorned a “happy” story in, because we are facing actual real problems and we’ve developed a dirty habit of brushing them under the carpet, for it to be pulled out from under us later. The reason why kids join a gang, or get involved in crime is because its easier to make a living off. Its a far simpler hierarchy of progression and allows them to apply other skills like problem working and situational awareness. The contradicting part is, its way less corrupted than our legitimate government.

“80% of our students reached A* – C grades last year”. That 20%. That number that we turn I blind eye to that has a few hundred teenagers behind that had to go home that August, look their parents in the eye and tell them they failed. Its the end of their world and who is it thats accountable.

My first hand experience of witnessing breakdowns, because they missed their pass by a measly 2 marks, after revising a past paper expecting the same grade boundary. A boundary that changes yearly in accordance to whatever percentage is spat out. Students across are being told to keep putting in the effort to reach success, an impossible request when that means working with a broken system. Kiss your place at college, the hopes your family had and everything that was ever expected of you goodbye, all because the higher ups refuse to pull their fingers out.

MY POINTS:

The system is broken

YOU are a number/statistic

Those in charge know its broken but do nothing

There are much more important skills like being street smart, developing situational awareness in short dealing with real world problems. (raising your hand with a question in the real world gets you no further)

COMBATING QUESTIONS

“So can you do better?”

I wouldn’t be in the position in the first place if i weren’t with absolute certainty that i could improve things. Way to many government officials sign documents, forgetting about the responsibilities that come along. I haven’t spent 11 years studying politics, but (in theory), those in charge have, and show that neither they have a clue what they’re doing. But if it were my job, id still probably have to meet some outrages unknown criteria list within the week, one that proves and fixes nothing. In short, id focus on what a teen can do if they’re in a position like spoken about above. what jobs are available and how to pursue what they desire.

“The government has enough to deal with”

I don’t see any of them DEALING with anything. There is still a refugee crisis, an economic crisis, and the only dealing that is done is under the table. or did you refuse to acknowledge that too.

You could blame all of that on previous leaders and brush it under the rug, but you’d be doing the same as what the last generation did.