Recent riots in the Dublin suburb of Finglas and a teenage double suicide in my own county underline the responsibility we all have to help our young people grow up to become responsible, productive, and happy citizens. (Meanwhile, in my old home of Las Vegas, the radio station where I worked was hit by bullets following a post-school fracas across the street.)
The kids are not alright. An essay by Paul Graham examines adolescent unhappiness: his thesis, in a nutshell, is that because of the way we organize Western societies now teenagers are denied the experience of real and meaningful work in their teens. Money quote:
If life seems awful to kids, it’s neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It’s because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do.
But the problem is not that we choose to institutionally educate our children: the problem is how we teach them.
The trick is to teach our young their subjects as meaningful tools to live a better life. Literacy, numeracy, history, geography, and creativity can all be taught in a practical and useful way that has (and is perceived by the children themselves to have) direct benefits for themselves and their community.
Would the children of Finglas be so quick to destroy their environment if they had actually worked, through school, to determine it, say by planting trees or contributing to planning decisions? I do not think they would.
Paul Graham: Why Nerds are Unpopular: paulgraham.com, Feb, 2003
Image: ‘Halt’ by New York Observer on Flickr
