{"id":16150,"date":"2014-09-03T22:47:30","date_gmt":"2014-09-03T21:47:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=16150"},"modified":"2014-09-03T22:47:30","modified_gmt":"2014-09-03T21:47:30","slug":"young-people-have-nothing-to-live-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=16150","title":{"rendered":"Young People “Have Nothing To Live For”?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This story on the BBC caught my eye<\/a>. It begins:<\/p>\n

As many as three quarters of a million young people in the UK may feel that they have nothing to live for, a study for the Prince’s Trust charity claims.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This makes me angry whenever I read it, but not for the reason you might expect. My reason is based on one of the examples given in the story, where a young male tried to kill himself because he couldn\u2019t get a job. His story begins and ends as follows:<\/p>\n

Excluded from school at the age of 14, [he] had no qualifications…<\/p>\n

…But after attending a course run by the Prince’s Trust, [he] built up his self-confidence and gained new skills and qualifications. Now 23, he works in a residential home for young people and is studying towards a youth worker level 2 qualification.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I seem to be the only one who can see that it is bad behaviour (and whatever caused it) and the subsequent lack of qualifications which was fundamental problem. Once he had sorted himself out and gained some sort of education – which he should have got 10 years earlier – he got a job. Surely there is an obvious lesson to be learnt here?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all very well rattling on about how people who have been unemployed for a long time suffer depression, but much of the time they brought it on themselves by bunking off school (and getting away with God knows what). Childhood isn\u2019t childhood any more. You get 14-year olds who think they\u2019re adults – often egged on by well-meaning but incompetent parents and teachers – who simply refuse to study properly at school. You don\u2019t need 40 GCSE A* passes to get a job, though God knows that\u2019s not difficult these days. Just a handful of Grade Es passes as an education and is more than enough to gain employment. It might not get you into Merchant Banking – you should have got the A*s if you expected that – but it\u2019s certainly a lot better than having a disciplinary record the FBI probably has a copy of.<\/p>\n

Too many kids think they\u2019re grown up at 12 and get away with it. It\u2019s a shame they only seem to actually grow up in their 20s once they\u2019ve realised that the gutter they have crawled into isn\u2019t as cool as it once seemed. Reading between the lines, many of the kids referred to in that article did not have stable family backgrounds (many young girls have got two or three kids of their own by the time they get to his stage). This<\/strong> is where most of the problems stem from.<\/p>\n

The Prince\u2019s Trust says:<\/p>\n

If we fail to act, there is a real danger that these young people will become hopeless, as well as jobless.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As far as I\u2019m concerned, any action needs to be for the generations still at school – to force them to get a bloody basic education instead of pissing about until they\u2019re 20-something then expecting the world to save them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This story on the BBC caught my eye. It begins: As many as three quarters of a million young people in the UK may feel that they have nothing to live for, a study for the Prince’s Trust charity claims. This makes me angry whenever I read it, but not for the reason you might […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[88,87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-related","category-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t