U.S. - Youth Need Not Apply | Cape Cod Daily News

"A young man ain't got nothin' in the world today"

- Mose Allison (popularized by The Who "Young Man's Blues")

When we were young in the 1960s life was easy. There were jobs everywhere. It was better if you were a college graduate, but there were a lot of blue collar jobs, too, some that didn't even require a high school diploma. These work places often came with strong unions who went to bat for you, who made it possible for you, the high-school drop-out, to work and have enough money every week to rent or even buy your own place, get married raise children. If you graduated from high school it was even better. And if you had the college degree, it was best of all. You were really going somewhere. But back then there were places to go.

We have all been witnesses to this lowering of life standards of our children. It is hard to watch. Their public schools are not as good as the ones we attended, even though they cost a lot more. The budgets given to these schools actually amount to very little after they're through paying for the teachers and the special education budgetary needs. We didn't have a lot of those special ed cases in my day. Sure we had some students who required special education, but there were very few. Today, it is a different story. If you have grade problems, because you don't give a crap about school, suddenly, you are a special ed student. We just called them kids who didn't like school and left it at that. Today a lot of money is spent on them, but the outcome is the same. At least, statistically, this money hasn't produced more geniuses.

If you were a wise guy in my school, the principal might give you a tap on the back of the head and tell you to get the hell out of his office. Today, they would put you on behavior modification drugs. Same if you have a tendency to lose interest and look out the window. Well, that just might be attention deficit disorder - which has made literally billions for the drug companies - so now you are a special-ed student. Who knows what percentage of students in a public school are classified special ed and how much that percentage has gone up over the years. I can tell you firsthand that a spokesperson for the State Dept.of Education says it has gone up but won't tell me by how much. His boss will. Leave your number, she'll call you. Sure.

So our schools have become drug distribution points for a significant number of students who apparently do not like public schools. What responsibility does the teacher have for this? From what I can tell, they are most often the person who recommends drugs for students who are in their opinion too hard to teach. Well, this is a new phenomenon when looked at as part of the three centuries of schooling that have taken place in the U.S. We never had these drugs and an expansion of the meaning of special ed as we do today. And with these things, schools actually perform worse academically than they did without them. Much worse. So are we on the correct route? No, we are not.

When a young man or woman is graduated from high school today, they almost have to go to college in order to earn a salary on which they can survive. It was easy 45 years ago when you got out of school to get an apartment with a few friends for $100 a month, get a job and go to college for maybe $850 a semester. (I remember when Harvard was $2,400). I began to pay my way through life - with no help from my parents - when I was 18-years old. And my situation was not the least bit unusual. We went off to college and some of us even began to call our own shots.

Today when a student comes out of high school they can either stop at the high school degree, which is going to severely limit what they accomplish in life. They can attend a "trade" school" for any number of things, computer repair, car mechanics, truck driving school, hairdressing, vet assistant, etc. Having schooling in some of these areas, including nursing, will put you in a better position for independence. The third category is the young adult who attends college. Money is the thing here, money students usually don't have. They need to put a financial package together that includes grants (like the Pell Grant) and loans, and any funds you can get from working for the school. The average American can no longer afford to put a child through four years of college. Private school's are up to $30,000 or more a year, making a four-year degree a $120,000 investment - at least. And state schools can run up to $12 - $16,000 and more a year now.

Worse yet, what does the graduating high schooler do when he or she comes home from the ceremony? Where are they going to live? Where are they going to eat? Apartments today are almost all in the four-figure range and the landlord usually wants first and last month and an extra month for good measure. So unless a young man or woman has saved thousands of dollars, they are probably going to stay with their parents. This usually becomes a problem for both parties, mostly because, as everyone knows, parents and children have a tendency to stress out when trapped in a house together for too long. When those children become young adults, the problem worsens.

Getting a good paying job that would help a young person get an apartment, however, is almost out of the question. Employment out there for the young is even worse than it is for adults - more than twice as bad, with unemployment figures in the twenties. A lot of this is the result of older people working longer to make ends meet in this economy and occupying jobs that would have been available to young people in the past.

What occurs is that high school graduates live much longer with their parents and are supported by them much longer than in the past. These things are not good for a society that stresses individual responsibility. To exercise responsibility one must have opportunities and today's youth has fewer all the time. We have also rung up a large deficit for the Millennium Generation and their children to pay. How are they are going to do that, just as our international status as producers of goods falls away? It is hard to imagine.

Much is expected of this generation, but no one has bothered to prepare them for it. It seems almost like a betrayal of our children. They have been cast off as our parents let us out into the world as well. But they have been thrust into an economy that makes it impossible for them to have the quality of life we had. How does a high school graduate buy a house and raise a family today? It is much more difficult to do that than it used to be. Too many of our youth are going into prisons, especially African American youth.

One young woman described the U.S. to me as a "wasteland," where everything worthwhile has been used up. She has some friends who moved to Spain and became citizens. Now their education is free, their medical insurance, their apartments are subsidized. They don't plan on coming back to the U.S. I quickly looked through the government programs available to young adults in Europe. I was shocked. In Europe, they still take responsibility for their young people. Most colleges are still free. housing prices are low. In most cases the health care is free. There are job problems overseas as there are here.

Young people have to get organized into a political block and pressure this government to give them a break. So far, its only interest in young Americans is how straight they can shoot under combat conditions.