Michaelhouse School

Two of the most significant challenges facing young people and the schools that are designed to prepare them for the future is career development and drug/alcohol abuse.What people don't fully embrace is how inextricably linked the two are together. Young people have never had more opportunity to express their authentic capabilities and passions through the world of work, yet greater levels of choice often brings complexity, confusion and sheer overwhelm for not only the children but also the parents and schools.

Of the 40,000 odd careers out there, roughly half of them change completely every 10 years. How schools and universities are able to respond to such changes from a curriculum perspective is very interesting indeed. These difficulties can also be experienced by parents who are often seen as the first port of call for career guidance yet when they were making these decisions, there was but a fraction of the choices that confront young people who are expected to change careers 4-5 times in their life time. Navigating these choices brings a huge amount of emotion as young people have to step out of the safety of the tribe and embrace their individuality,values and ideals. This journey can be hugely challenging! Young people confront the conflicting need to conform to the wishes of parents and pressure from peers with the need to embrace one's unique sense of meaning and purpose. The reality is that drugs and alcohol will always be a vehicle that young people use to escape, medicate and rebel against the responsibility that they face. Without any form of rites of passage that helps young people to understand and appreciate the nature of this journey, they often are not able to make effective choices.

Jeremy Behrmann was invited to speak to the Michaelhosue school on their Old Boys day. He has had significant experience in helping people overcome the challenges related to addiction and is also a specialist coach in career and vocation development.His company offers wilderness based rites of passage experiences to young people who need the support to discover their unique purpose.He follows this up with vocation based coaching which supports personal development and academic effectiveness. His philosophy is that the supply of substances will never be eradicated. The only solution is to reduce demand by giving young people an alternative that is more pleasurable than the drugs themselves. Nothing engages young people more than their desire to be accepted socially and to discover their unique personal vision.Often young people take drugs and alcohol for these very reasons- to connect, be accepted, experiment and to explore. The problem with school is that we are given very few opportunities to make our own unique vision and are often told what we can expect from our lives and our careers. We are told that we need to choose 6 subjects, from those subjects we have a choice of tertiary degrees that open doors to specific careers that may not even exist when we graduate, never mind the fact that young people have no experience of these careers when they make these choices.

Through greater awareness we make better choices and often young people abuse drugs because they have no awareness of the potential consequences of their behaviour. Many drug talks often try to scare young people with these consequences but they always make the mistake of underestimating how much stronger the need for acceptance and rebellion can be for young people than their health. At the same time,what schools don't always fully appreciate is how hungry young people are to develop their own self esteem and personal significance. Unfortunately what young people find meaningful and significant is not what schools will always embrace or feel to be in the best interests of a young persons career development.

The truth is that companies themselves are no better at predicting the future than schools themselves. Of all the new products and services that companies offer, only 4% of them are in response to pro-active R&D. The other 96% are in response to culture shocks, global trends and unexpected phenomena that companies could not predict. The people who are often leading these changes are the youth themselves and it appears that schools are trying to educate them out of what they find interesting and into subjects that are mere legacies of the old industrial model. The fact that Facebook is banned in most schools is a classic example of schools not teaching people through a medium that young people can relate too and which will become the dominant platform of the future.

Young people do have to go to school to build a solid foundation and often schools do provide the basic building blocks of personal development. Where they need to be flexible and in tune with is what engages young people and stirs them emotionally. Those little interests,desires and passions are the keys to a personal vision and mission which could be an alternative to abuse. If young people have no empowering vision that is an alternative to the pleasure that young people gain from drugs, how can we expect them to say no when exposed to them? If we can take a risk and embrace young people as being responsible, independent and able to create their own reality, we can also start a conversation where they are emotionally invested in how drugs and alcohol can take them away from a vision that they created and which they take ownership of. 

Comments

[Shirley Sacks]

Excellent understanding.