tonight I’ll be brief, but I want to start a conversation about how well prepared for life we were by the time we left high school…

Q #1
(a) Were the War Babies and the early Boomers inadequately prepared by their high school counsellors and teachers to ask the vital questions leading into adulthood? And,
(b) Have recent eras become any better at this…?
In reflecting back on my high school days, particularly Grade XII, I realize that none of those people tasked with giving us guidance did any such thing. Oh we got the various vocational tests and had the occasional talk about not losing control when on a date (didn’t want to get the girl pregnant — we were before the pill!!). But we never really had a conversation about how choosing a mate might impact our careers, or vice versa. Moreover we didn’t get a thorough analysis of what kinds of schools we should go to after graduation, let alone what different universities might offer.
In my case the guidance counsellor was a Queen’s University graduate and was bound and determined we all should go there if we were going to university at all. Granted it was the closest, but that hardly should have been the criteria. More importantly, McGill University at that time did not require Ontario Grade XIII and so for many of us that would have been a better alternative — not much further down the road, but much more suited to preparing us for leadership roles later in life as we would have become at least partially bilingual. We were never told about that option at all. And, being somewhat obstinate, I was hell-bent not to go to Queen’s but decided U of Toronto would be better (partly I suppose because previous generations had studied there). So I took XIII and then went to U of T and within that year knew that it was not the place for me. And after another summer pre-career assignment in the west, I changed schools by enrolling at the University of Alberta. Was this as good a choice as McGill would have been? Can’t say for certain, but it did greatly facilitate a significant refinement in my leadership skills and I never returned to reside in the east during my primary working life. But more on that later (or maybe tomorrow)!!

At the same time that I was receiving little real guidance in terms of post-secondary education, I also was getting no help for my mostly chaotic dating life. I never considered myself that good looking, but I did think that I was an okay person, with a good sense of humour and some appreciation of the larger world. Yet I seldom got past the third date, and if I did it was unlikely the dating pattern would be successful much beyond the third month. That pattern had to be obvious to the teachers who oversaw our school-based social activities. And even though I was a young leader on most of the sports teams, was a very successful public speaker and acted in numerous school plays, no guidance person or teacher ever asked me to share with them concerning why I was such a poor date. At the end of Grade XII, while serving as the school’s delegate to a Model UN Conference, I met a young woman from another school about an hour away. We dated throughout XIII and the year at U of T before she moved on. Wonderful person, and one who did help me work on my leadership potential and had many a conversation about my potential career choice as a theologian. But being so far away (in those days I only got the car for a date every other week and only for a limited time as my father was a minister) did not lead to regular, frequent weekend dates. It meant that I would often show up at school events without a date or a date of convenience — partly because in XIII I was Students’ Council President and so had to be at numerous social functions as part of that role. Yet again, no one ever queried me if I had thought seriously about the young women I was in school with, as to their potential as regular dates. Grade XII was a particularly dichotomous year — playing sports, acting, public speaking, doing well at academics (after an initially disastrous first few weeks until after the Thanksgiving mid-terms — which required the school to call in my father, but not me strangely enough) but having a very inconsistent and almost disastrous dating life — and for a Grade XII student, definitely demoralizing at times. Yet there never was one conversation between myself and any of the professional educators about my social life or about the correlation between academics, social activities, the development of leadership skills, and long-term career analysis.

Would we have listened? Would we have been willing to have the conversation? These are valid questions, but the answer is impossible because we were never given the opportunity. Why didn’t teachers and/or guidance personnel invite a few of the more academically minded students to round-table conversations on these topics to see if we could become engaged in the subject matter? Perhaps if they had tried it, in groups of no more than four or five they would have found us more than willing to share our fears and our desires and in return they could have shared some insights about their own journeys. After all, some of them were only half-a-dozen years older than we were and so they had a credibility that older staff might not have had initially. And once the ice was broken, they could have tried a variety of groupings, focusing on different themes, continually expanding and revising as there were participants willing to engage.

Moreover, they might have been able to help those of us with mental wellness issues. Obviously mental health was not a big theme or even any kind of real emphasis in that era, but intimate small group settings could have illuminated many issues before they became serious aspects of depression or at least academic disconnection. I raise all this because I wonder whether or not the high rates of divorce, marital abuse, child neglect that seem to have become major characteristics of the boomer generation (as well as the war babies preceding them) may have been a result of inadequate counselling and insufficient conversation at the high school level. We were a very revolutionary group — the mid/late sixties were filled with rage: anti-war, pro-sex, shifting allegiances, new music… but did it lead to a significantly better world? I’m not sure! Maybe if schools had engaged with us, we would have had a clearer vision of how to ensure long-term successes resulting from our revolutionary ideals. Maybe if we had been given better guidance in our dating, we might have made some solid choices near the end of our high school days that would have paired many of us up with true co-equal partners and we would have actually slain some real dragons.

Why I even raise this now is not because of some intense desire to try to relive my high school life, but to ask whether things have changed. Are high schools seriously addressing the questions that young people have about their own leadership ambitions as well as abilities, about the relationship between career success and life partners, about the value of long-range thinking and planning in the midst of momentary excitement of sports and social activities. We know that there are many students who are doing social action in ways far more global than we were even encouraged to consider. We know that there are real entrepreneurs developing their skills and achieving successes while still in high school. But we also have sensed that many college students today are no more mature than we were when we were in high school. And there are a fair number of attendees in universities who have no real sense of what they want to do in life and would be much better off in a technical or trade school setting. Where is the guidance? Where are the teachers who are seriously trying to engage students in the deeply personal, but vitally important for societal success, issues?

This is the conversation we need to have. We need leaders who get as firm a foundation as early as possible. Parents may try, but often a student needs an outside voice to help hone the focus. I had good parents who always made sure I realized that Grade XII was simply a door through which I needed to pass if I was truly going to develop. I got through that door quite easily. But I did not get through that door with anywhere near the skills, knowledge and social awareness that I could have, had those who saw me six hours of every schoolday taken a serious run at bringing me into a conversation about how I could best develop towards getting to better, better as a learner, better as a potential leader, better as a date and ultimately better as a partner.

g.w.