EDITORIAL
For the past few weeks, the media have covered graduation ceremonies of local schoolchildren. At these events, guest speakers at are pains to share wise platitudes that graduates should endeavour to follow. However, there is a disconnect somewhere along the way where some of our youth are moving through life deviating from the hope and pride present at their primary and secondary schools graduation ceremonies.
At some point in their lives, youth stop adopting a positive mentality or dreaming big. Instead, a few become disillusioned and disenchanted with education, choosing to turn to deviant activity. Or we see photographs of some children making gun salutes, posing with actual guns in viral posts or following a ‘bashment’ culture that only advocates partying until the next party.
One can point to the environment in which some children live, where there is a glorification of ‘bashment’ or violent culture, where they have no real role models on how to behave or how to live beyond the next viral post. It is unfortunate, because clearly there is an underestimation of just how important positive role models are, especially when some youth enter secondary school for the first time unsure of their passage to a new environment that may not have been their first choice of school, while on the cusp of making life-altering decisions for themselves.
One-off speeches are not enough, not when some youth live a daily existence filled of hopelessness. These children need to hear repeated positive messages affirming their worth, their importance and that they are within their rights to have aspirational goals for themselves. If that doesn’t happen, unfortunately we get the kind of society we see flashes of – that which is disengaged, marginalised, disenchanted with school and/or home and follows a life of deviance.
It is our view that all children in this country are supremely talented in many areas. We adults have a responsibility to encourage their wishes and train them to believe that they can achieve. It is a story of hope, something that has been denied to some of our children, and without hope it is a slow kind of death an individual faces.
How can we give them hope? One area is through extra-curricular activities, which can be a point of contact for discipline, goal-setting and working through the limits, where the adults in their lives can push and motivate them to always try harder. It is instructive to use real life examples of popular figures who have overcome all odds to make it big. As such, the Williams sisters come to mind. As young children, they lived in a city more famous for gangs, poverty and drugs, but through the coaching and mentorship of their father, they put in hard work and dedication to succeed in the tennis world.
A future Nobel Laureate, robotics engineer or renowned photographer could right now be a child who is feeling discouraged or hopeless. The least we can do is to push and inspire all of youth so they may be fulfilled and exhibit their truest potential. It is, after all, everything that we stand for as a country, and which we have built an entire motto on – Pride and Industry.