Scotch Reports Issue 164 (December 2015)

Principal's
Report
01 02
Meet the golden generation
"Youth is wasted on the Young."
George Bernard Shaw
Frankly, I disagree. Give me my time again and
I will still spend too much time playing sport,
watching TV and dealing with my teenage
existentialist issues, and not spend it reading
great literature and wowing about Mahler.
In fact, it is an even crueler statement than
that. Not only do we envy the young for their
possibilities, their freedoms, their capacity
to say whatever they want and their ability
to wear clothes that half our middle-aged
bodies could not slip into, but we have also
given them a really bum deal, as the future is
bleaker for them than ever it was for us.
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It will be harder to get a mortgage. It will be
harder to get sufficient funds into a pension.
School and University fees are going north,
not south. Our youth will have to work longer
and harder. The Asian century will bring more
short termism, more defined contracts and
fewer employment protections.
`Thanks, dad,’ I hear my kids saying, as I
feebly try and defend the parlous shambles
that the GFC has left behind.
The bad news is that life for us was, relatively
speaking, a walk in the proverbial park. The
worse news is that the word is out, as our
young people know this and gleefully send it
back our way at Sunday lunch whilst we are
asking for a bigger grip on homework and
horn practice.
We had free University education.
We can dream, not unreasonably,
of retiring at 60 or 65, not 70 or
75. We did not have the social
pressures that social media bring.
We had less pressure to go on
to higher education. A job in
one company for a lifetime, with
a neatly placed upward ladder,
meant stability and a reasonable
prospect of advancement within
known parameters.
Admittedly, we did not have as
much access to joys such as the
Full Moon party on a beach in
Thailand, cheaper airfares or an
endless diet of AFL on Fox, but