Every reason to be an angry teenager
HERE’S a question that I bet you haven’t been asked before – any idea what the Cantril Ladder is? No? Me neither.
Hey, Google? Ah! Turns out it’s a device used to measure levels of life satisfaction. And, sadly, it has found that the mental wellbeing of our youngsters is among the worst of all developed countries.
We’re in the bottom three. Only two other nations, Japan and Turkey, rank worse for children’s life satisfaction. How depressingly sad is that?
And even more chilling – yes there’s more – is the fact that our youngsters’ mental welfare has deteriorated further under lockdown.
All that, combined with the disastrous exam grades mess that ensued following the U- turn on awarding grades via algorithms rather than teachers’ assessments, and it’s a wonder teenagers have any belief left in the system at all. Maybe they didn’t in the first place.
Certainly those who took their A-levels and received grades lower
than expected during Michael Gove’s messedup, ever-changing tenure will surely have lost faith in the system long ago.
And if youngsters didn’t believe the system was stacked against them before lockdown, then they must surely be cloaked in disillusionment by now.
As if it wasn’t horrible enough already, it’s a truly horrible time to be a teenager. I’ve got one still at home, disillusioned with education, disillusioned with the fact that job applications don’t even merit the courtesy of a reply, and angry that he was led to believe that excellent GCSE grades meant something.
Why should he and his fellow students bother when the people in charge, most of them having been cloistered away in private, privileged schools for the majority of their education, constantly mess-up, due to a lack of real-world experience, but are allowed to exhibit jaw- dropping incompetence and still flourish? And they still accept meaningless titles, praised only by the innocent and the ill-informed.
No one ever world was fair.
But nor did they tell you that serial incompetence, being economical with the truth, paired with a sense of humour and a sprinkle of sexual incontinence, might well be the true road to success.
Youngsters must be cloaked in disillusionment by now
said the