by Kaiya Jones, Year 13 Student, Kaipara College
Kia Ora, Reader, Slight switch up this time.
As the school year has come to an end, and thus my schooling career with it, I find myself confronted with the cold, hard facts of the world. ‘Tis an odd thing to know that I must now step away from the comfort of routine, to make decisions that could impact the course of my life, and find the values around which I define myself. At the ripe ol’ age of seventeen. What a life.
I am fortunate enough to have plans to travel to Canada to work at a summer camp in the near future, and if that doesn’t turn out, I suppose it’s back to the books for me. However, I find it irking that society can be astonishingly hard for newbies like myself to step into, when school is supposed to have prepared us for everything up until this point.
Allow me a query: Have you ever heard of a ‘financial literacy’ class in high school? ‘Emotion regulation 101’? ‘Guidance on staying enlightened, relevant, and balanced for noobs’? I’d take a gamble as to say probably not. And before you protest that ‘everyone goes through the difficult transition from school to the wider world’, I hear you. And perhaps you are correct. But had you considered that the rapid change and modernisation of our world accounts for factors unseen before now? Newer generations are surrounded by challenges and choices which simply weren’t there previously. And sometimes too much choice is a burden. Along with too much choice we have to compete with AI, constantly debating the likelihood of a chosen career being overtaken by Artificial Intelligence. It’s a hard thing indeed to compete with something which never sleeps, never eats, and never makes mistakes. We also compete with the connectivity of the world. How can the average person compete with a trilingual, well travelled, and experienced individual? On top of this, how do you fight through a recession which has the potential to be worse than the Great Depression…as a student?
Tell ya what, I couldn’t tell you the first thing about budgeting, homeownership, taxes, all the important things hovering over young people’s heads like the headman’s axe. I couldn’t tell you the appropriate ‘savings / funds for pleasure’ ratio. I couldn’t tell you how to look someone in the eye when they are saying the fowlest of things, and find the strength to walk away knowing that their opinion is just that - an opinion. One of little consequence and not worth the mental bandwidth it takes to pick apart every little part of yourself which their words may apply to. I also can’t tell you how to find a work life balance. School, as a general rule, enforces the mindset of working far past the hours which we are contracted to, and to ignore personal needs to meet unrealistic deadlines. School kills curiosity. Now, I don’t mean to lecture you, Reader, but I’m sure you can see how the lack of flexibility in the curriculum would leave many academic careers six feet under, long before they had time to bloom. Not only this, but I find it odd — an odd thing indeed — that CHILDREN, are told to be more ‘adult’. To ‘grow up’. To vote, drink, and decide our futures, when science has repeatedly told us we are not yet mature enough to be considered so! Surely there is a better way to go about guiding us into our futures? A path where we have been provided all the necessary guidance instead of having our time and energy wasted on analysing Shakespeare. Shakespeare is dead. And it almost feels like the society we’re supposed to rely on, to contribute to and nurture, is setting us up for failure.
As always, I hope life treats you well, Reader. Be safe through the holiday season. And I hope you take away a smidgen of an idea, the thoughts which plague the average kid just striving to do well in the modern world.
