Who'd swap places with today's overexamined, insecure, drug-tested, antidepressant-popping schoolchildren?

 

“SO, I BET you can’t wait to finish your GCSEs,” I said to a friend’s daughter this week in that special, patronising voice that adults reserve for children and small pets. “Just think — the whole summer off! You don’t know how lucky you are.”

The instant that the words had left my mouth, of course, I realised that not only were they horribly fogeyish, they were dishonest. Because schoolchildren today are not lucky. I wouldn’t be one of them for all the iPods in Curry’s. The friend’s teenage daughter was quick to remind me why.

 

Far from having a carefree summer, they will be issued with reading lists longer than an Andrex toilet roll for next term, together with even longer lists of dread reasons why “this will be their most important year ever” — just as they were told last year and the year before that. These are children who have been prodded, scrutinised and tested with standard assessment tasks (SATs) and cognitive ability tests (CATs) since the age of 7 — yet even if they get straight As at A level their achievement is belittled. We sneer that “exams are getting easier and easier” and newspapers publish exam papers from the 1970s to parade the difference. If they aim for university degrees (which, incidentally, are also now derided as “ten a penny”) they must saddle themselves with mega-loans that they cannot hope to pay off until middle age.

 

It felt too cruel to point out that after that it gets even worse. Rocketing house prices mean they will struggle for years just to get a toenail on the property ladder. They will have little job security and at the end of it all will have to work until the age of 70 because of the pensions crisis. Recent figures showed that a 25-year-old will be significantly worse off in 25 years’ time than a 50-year-old is today.

 

As an extra kick in the goolies it emerged this week that all schools are set to swab pupils’ mouths randomly in a drugs “crackdown”, magnifying the cloud of suspicion and perpetual surveillance under which they now live. No wonder children want to escape, slouched and uncommunicative, into a fantasy world of computer games.

 

Some adults will have little sympathy, arguing that at least children are not getting rickets or being sent up chimneys anymore and should be thankful and stop bleating. But I wonder how many parents look at their teenaged offspring today and genuinely envy them? True, they don’t make do with a few cheap skittles for Christmas but instead get a slinky mobile phone on which they can access the internet. But would parents really swap the relative freedom of their school years for the hothouses in which their children sweat away their formative years? We strive to make our children happy, yet look what has happened: prescriptions of antidepressants for 16 to 18-year-olds have trebled in the past decade.

 

Sabrina Broadbent, a teacher and novelist, wrote movingly in The Times this week about how she made one of her pupils cry simply by asking what her plans were for next year. The pupil, like her classmates, was miserable, frightened and exhausted by the endless pressure to succeed. They never had any fun. School, they said, was preparing them for a trap: they had to get good grades to get to university to get a job that would allow them to pay off a student loan and crippling mortgage. One pupil told her: “Your generation had better watch out, Miss, because our generation is totally wrecked. We’re so depressed and stressed out that half of us aren’t in a fit state to take care of your lot.”

 

And there’s the problem. By 2050 there will be only two people of working age for each pensioner, so who is going to fund the NHS and everything else? The young have seen the future and it is more of the same — working themselves to a frazzle so that they can support wrinklies who had it easier than them. As David Willetts, the Shadow Education Secretary, said recently, babyboomers who enjoyed free education and affordable housing have shaped an environment that works very well for them: “A young person could be forgiven for believing that the way in which economic and social policy is now conducted is little less than a conspiracy by the middle-aged against the young.”

 

Perhaps we should remember this and not be so surprised when sometimes they want to flee their hi-tech bedrooms and get off their faces on WKD.

 

Carol Midgley. Comment http://www.timesonline.co.uk

I want to cry.

 

It's so true.

Yep, SATS and CATS are pointless, GCSE's are worthless, and A-levels are going the same way, degrees are starting to devalue with addition of pointless subjects.

 

"I have a first degree" said someone to an interviewer

"in what" - interviewer

"Surfing and Playing PS2 games" - Spotty student.

"You have the job as the person who works out tax credits" - interviewer

:( I'm glad that I am not in school in these times!!!