Why are teenagers giving up with education?

In recent years, there has been an evident decline in the amount that younger teenagers care about their education which is due to many factors but the most prominent is definitely peer group status and pressure.

It has now become a social norm to care more about what your friends think about you than paying attention to your future and qualifications. This has become a problem as many are leaving school without the right amount of qualifications because they have spent all of their school years trying to gain as many friends as possible and doing everything they can to have the highest status possible in their friendship group.

The media and social media are definitely not helping this at all as social networking sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat are becoming increasingly popular and with them comes a range of detrimental “challenges” and trends that can only lead to dangers for the easily influenced teens of today’s society. Such as, Kylie Jenner’s lip challenge of 2015 which resulted in many having bruises and overly sized lips and just looking generally ridiculous. Then, of course, how can we forget the fainting challenge of 2014? I’m still not sure why it’s deemed as fun to cause yourself physical harm.

While they are spending all of this time trying to gain pointless likes on Facebook, the homework is being pushed further and further into the bottom of the school bag. Of course, this is not the same for all teenagers but with my experience with them at the age of 13/14, the not caring are certainly not in the minority. It is not unusual for teenagers to spend more time applying their make up and doing their hair for school than actually doing their school work. Then, when it gets to the evenings, it’s all about who is going out tonight rather than studying for a test the next day or catching up on some missed work. You can see why this is going to be a problem when they get to year 11 and they’ve missed the whole GCSE course.

Teenagers are also being exposed to perhaps adult orientated things such as sex, alcohol and smoking at far too early of an age which means that they think that they will gain status and friends if they do these things. The UK have one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in the world and it is not uncommon to see teenagers desperate for a cigarette and standing around outside their school smoking. Tragic.

Sadly, once one person starts rebelling and forming their own subcultures within school, they often have a large crowd following them in doing so as teenagers just do not seem to like doing things by themselves. If one person doesn’t do the work, others will think it’s “cool” not to do it. It’s all about fitting in, having the latest material goods and being suitably Facebook famous. Often, I will walk around the town centre and there will be groups of teenagers that all look identical; same haircut, same clothes, same phones, same everything.

Is society creating clones?