School,
books, grades, these are some of the things that haunt and stress 78% of youth
in the study today. Most of the youth today are pushed by their parents in
order to succeed in school and “there has also been great concern that parents' unrealistic expectations
create pressure and foster performance anxiety in their children”. Students also constantly stress over
unemployment and money as well as school debts. We tend to think to ourselves
“How am I going to get a decent job without a decent diploma?” This is why most
of us stress and strive to achieve in school and really think about the future,
which therefore causes us to stress about it frequently. Compared to youth in
the 1960’s with a dropout rate of 27.2%, our dropout rate has decreased to 7.4%
in 2010. That is a huge difference comparing our youth today and youth in the
1960’s.
In the 1960’s, jobs were a lot more available to people of any age in comparison to today
where we fear unemployment and job salaries. Youth in the 1960’s did not
necessarily need a high level diploma to get a job, a simple high school
diploma would be enough to get a decent job. Today,
higher levels of education diplomas are demanded everywhere whereas in the 1960’s
“no matter what you did in life, you could fall back on a
factory job that would pay you a strong enough wage that you could make it”. In the 60’s the
fact that they had “better job security,
comfortable pensions and a clockon, clock off approach to the world of work
made life easier 40 years ago, as did a better housing market and the absence
of high interest loans and credit cards”.
My friends and I all stress about school and employment
constantly. We tend to always think about whether or not we will succeed, and
whether or not we will even find a decent job in the future. We stress over
school and grades and as for me, the loans I will need to be borrowing once entering
university. This is something that will continue for years to come and we will
not stop worrying about it until we actually graduate and get a job.
Being a hippie was very popular in the 1960’s. Hippies were
part of a counterculture movement where they believed that happiness should
come above all and not caring about the consequences of their actions. With a
high dropout rate of 27.2%, it is clear that many of the youth in the 1960’s
didn’t think that it was school that promoted ultimate happiness. Hippies were “dissatisfied with what their parents had built for them, a
rather strange belief given that their parents had built the greatest booming
economy the world had ever seen”. The youth in the 1960’s had different ideas
and values then their parents did which is why schooling for most of them did
not come first, as it was happiness and freedom above all.
Whether
you’d be a hippie or not, the youth in the 1960’s were not as stressed about
school as we are. Most of the youth today stress about school, grades, loans
and jobs, and that will not change until we all reach a level of satisfaction
in each of those categories.
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