CAMERON WYLLIE

Youngsters face bewildering challenges and choices at what can be a defining period of their lives, writes Cameron Wyllie

Throughout history, commentators, historians and ordinary people have said much the same things about the young – mainly about teenagers. What it basically amounts to is that each generation looks at the next, or the one two below them, and sees them as “lucky”.

They “don’t know what real life’s like,” says your gran, remembering houses without inside toilets, washing machines or central heating (or, as they remember it, no heating at all, frost glistening on the insides of windows as you scrabbled for the orange and the penny at the bottom of your stocking at Christmas). Young people have lots of stuff, they don’t know the value of money, they miss the best part of the day, they are always dressed wrongly and ... pierced, they bury their faces in their phones, and how much did that cost anyway? Of course they are loved and indulged and spoiled because that’s what you do with your children and their kids, that’s what you’re for, to give them all you never had. And yet, and yet, here we are, for the first time ever, with most parents doubting that their children will be as prosperous as they are themselves.

I gave a speech not long ago to a distinguished group of mainly elderly people, who were very gracious as they listened to me maundering on about the state of Scottish education. One woman, a retired psychiatrist, spoke to me at the end and took issue with a phrase I had used when I spoke of “an epidemic of mental illness” which I saw as currently affecting our teenagers. She said: “Mr Wyllie, they are not mentally ill. They are just sad. We should sympathise with their sadness and make it clear we understand why they are sad, but we should not say they are ill.” I’m

sure that her comments could spark plenty of informed debate, but the question is, whether our teenagers are increasingly disposed to being clinically depressed or are just sad – why has it happened?

When I was 17, I did my Highers. My Highers meant I could go to university. In my case, I chose to study English at the University of Edinburgh and I could have got in with three Bs and a C at Higher. These days, I would have to start with 2 As and 2Bs in S5 and get 5 As at Higher by the end of S6 to have a chance. Now, the “We lived in a hole in the ground and ate slugs for our birthday” generation will just say that that’s grade inflation, but it’s not – it’s just more difficult to get in. Also, they aren’t just competing for places with pupils from the school up the road either, but with young people from all over the world, some of them arriving with large cheques.

Then I got my degree and applied for Moray House so I could teach. I did the form, and got in, and even was invited, sight unseen, to do a concurrent Diploma of Education at the university. I could have been completely unsuitable for the classroom (choruses off of “You were, you were”) but, without interview, I fetched up to train as a teacher. These days, the 22-year-old me would not, I suspect, even get to the interview stage of the rigorous process that prospective teaching students undergo.

Then I got my first job – a full-time post teaching English and history (the latter something about which I knew, em, very little) and which was permanent subject to my completing my two probationary years. I should say, and I’m conscious of the pain this might cause young teachers today, that I was offered three jobs in