I did know that VCE was about year-through assessments that previous generations didn’t experience. It’s funny how you can “know” something, but because you haven’t experienced it, have never actually “felt” it, it slips to the back of your consciousness. So I have to thank you Alex, because your beautifully vivid description did allow me to “feel” it and understand it better, and I take your point. Strangely, the idea of VCE was to reduce pressure. To spread out that one roll of the dice, that one exam, to better reflect a student’s abilities. Clearly nobody thought through the ramifications.

I have many friends who are teachers, very stressed teachers, because the nett result has been to also make teachers far more accountable, and their work load has grown as much as that of the students, if not more. Neither can be particularly good in encouraging a good education. Stressed teachers confronted by stressed students is, IMHO, a recipe for disaster.

It angers me that they experiment with children’s lives. When I returned from Israel I found myself holding a drink (non-alcoholic *grin*) at an afternoon gathering, and talking with a new acquaintance who was teaching high school English. He was very proud of the fact that he wasn’t teaching the children spelling or grammar. “It’s the ideas that are important”, he said. “But Fred”, I said (I’ll call him “Fred” in case somebody knows him), “the History teacher can be concerned with ideas, the Physics teacher can be concerned with ideas … you’re an English teacher. You should only be concerned with a child’s ability to use the language, even if their ideas are as inane as extraterrestials building the Empire State Building”. But it seems that this was an education policy (read “experiment”) at the time, and, as a result, we have bred an entire generation whose English language skills are abyssmal … and I believe they make up much of our current crop of educators.

You, and a number of other commentators, have used the word “hysteria”, in fact you used it very boldly (excuse pun) and, coincidentally, it is a word that has been occupying my thoughts a lot of late. It very aptly describes a troubling feature of the 21st century. So very many things that we (that’s we, not as individuals, communities, or even nations, but as in we, the world population) have become hysterical about, only to find that they were, quite literally nothing. There was the Y2K bug that was going to drop planes out of the sky and destroy the world as we know it … nothing. Bird flu, more recently Swine flu which has turned out to be one of the most benign flus we have experienced, then there’s AWG. The actual issues aren’t my point, but our propensity to panic and become irrationally hysterical is. I’m not making a statement here, but rather looking for input. Do you think that, at least some of, the VCE hysteria, the drugs and alcohol abuse by people who can’t even be contemplating VCE, might in some way be related to a world so seemingly filled with things to fear and panic about, that even young children are looking to hide and escape?

Alex, I loved that final piece of irony. Thanks for sharing.

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Let me start with your “sense of relativism”. Not everything is … relative that is. One absolute is that young minds are developing and that alcohol and drugs can arrest that development. It’s not a relative thing, it’s a bad thing. The shock of seeing an incredibly beautiful, intelligent, vibrant girl reduced to a barely articulate babbling shell by teenage indulgence in alochol-drugs, at the VCE level, has very much sobered my ideas on the subject, and I don’t rightly care what parents did or didn’t do before they knew better … they now have a duty of care to their children.

Alex says that at a certain age peer influence dominates, and that’s true. That’s not the same as saying that parents should not remain adamant about the values they cherish and wish to convey. Like with Rumspringa, most of the values that a child uses to confront the excesses of peers (that are often no more “evil” than experimentation devoid of the sense of danger that is learnt through the making of many mistakes) are instilled in those important few years when parental influence does dominate.

Then there are the “rebellious years” when peers are all important. But it has been very much my experience, both in my life and the lives of those around me, that, in adulthood, and certainly when it comes to raising children, parental values return big time, and tend to supercede the peer influence of the Rumspringa years. We remember the things that were important to our parents and want to pass them on to our children, because we recognise the intrinsic value of many of those values … which is why, even when it seems futile and unpopular, parents should stick to their moral compass as part of the duty of care of their children. I have seen it happen as starkly as people from a relatively kosher home indulging in pork and seafoods for years, then, when it came to establishing their own families, keeping a kosher home that far-and-away exceeded the efforts of their parents.

Even if we were to accept the relativistic argument, if Boomers were drinking and fornicating in their 20s, how does that make it right for GenY as young teens? If these were choices being made as adults, we would probably not be having this discussion, at least not nearly as passionately. And if GenX was drinking heavily at 14, with kamikaze brain cells abandoning ship in droves, does that now make it mandatory for parents to accept GenY destroying itself? It certainly doesn’t add up to me.

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You know, “time-consuming” doesn’t begin to describe things, when there’s a hot topic. The way I used to answer every single comment literally took time away from things like sleeping and eating.

In quieter periods, it’s much less of a problem, and I’m operating on an ad-hoc basis – when I can, I definitely want to be involved in the discussion.

As for VCE – it’s not about which generation did it tougher. It’s much more to do with the attendant pressures that exist now compared with the past.

There just wasn’t the same hysteria. I’m old enough to remember the massive cultural rupture in the community when HSC transformed into VCE.

This is when a number of the Jewish schools took the opportunity to lose their collective marbles and hothouse the kids in ways that were not previously possible because the system was entirely different.

I remember HSC kids being stressed around exam times, but otherwise being relatively unscathed by the experience.

I also remember the white faces of the first year of VCE students as assessment became year long, continual, and teacher driven (rather than operating purely externally).

I remember how the teachers changed.

I remember the missionary zeal that grabbed some of them as their centrality to the assessment process became apparent.

I remember how their careers suddenly hinged in an entirely uprecedented way on the individual performances of the kids.

I remember how teachers in Jewish schools stopped being teachers and transformed into conspirators with the kids, creating an environment of ruthless marks-obsession that had nothing to do with education or genuine measures of students’ performance.

And I remember the parents… My heart easily broke around my kids that I tutored. They were so miserable and vulnerable. But I was surprised because my heart broke just as much for a lot of the parents.

They were so worried for their kids – for their futures (because every Jewish school made it seem that should law/medicine marks not be achieved, the kid didn’t have a lot of other options), for their mental health (how many kids were dperessed or drugging the pressure away? Too many), and for the possibility of intense shame that would come if the kid didn’t get marks for law/med.

Morry, I will never forget when I was in Year 11 at a Jewish school… the VCE had just come in and the principal and teachers had just gone berserk.

I remember seeing on a couple of occasions two of the most senior teachers descend on some unfortunate year 12 kid, who was inevitabley underslept and in a sort of mental shut-down mode from the stress, and just go him/her- screaminng at the poor thing like he’d/she’d committed a horrendous crime, waving their arms, getting in the kid’s face, threatening, being absolutely psychotic.

And the kids onlly real “crimes” were that they weren’t getting high enough marks. Other kids wholooked like they couldn’t get the marks to maintain the school’s stellar averages were just booted from the school completely.

I would watch these teachers do their screaming thing and feel so sick, that when it came time to be taught by them myself, I would rebel and be obnoxious, trying to undermine everything they did. Needless to say, my parents thought it wise to put me in a non-Jewish school for my final year.

Of course, not all the teachers at the Jewish school were so awful. Most of them were quite lovely, and they too suffered under the culture of marks-grabbing. The pressure that came from the top – and from some of the parents – was intense.

A cute coda to this story, Morry:

A couple of years after we’d graduated, a friend was asked to write the speeches that some of these top teachers would give at Speech Night, in which they’d qvell about what wonderful marks they pulled that year.

BUT my friend couldn’t wrangle the bullshit necessary to construct the sort of speeches these teachers wanted!

So she called me in. Heh!

Once again, I was the tutor that tried to patch up the massive disconnect between the Jewish schools’ imagining of a sure-fire marks factory that still manages to “nurture” its kids, and the much messier reality.

I actually sat through the Speech Night, because, as repugnant as the triumphalism was, it was still profoundly satisfying to hear my words come out of the mouths of women who, at school, would have had me strung up and beaten, if it had been legally an option.

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As to the self-destructive behaviour, I’m more than aware that this doesn’t apply to the bulk of teens, but also that it is a growing problem. Alex, the fact that it wasn’t always called “VCE” doesn’t take away that every generation went through the trauma of the final year of school and the need to do well in order to secure a university place in a highly competitive environment. For previous generations HEX wasn’t even a gleam in governmental eyes, so maybe it was tougher. I don’t want to compare … it’s a traumatic experience for all, but dealt with differently by different generations. The Boomer response was far more muted, probably as terrible as spending the summer hanging at the beach. That brings me to your:

As for why the drugs explosion seems to have happened recently (it didn’t, by the way – that was actually a Boomer gescheft.), that really needs a post of its own.

I’m not entirely sure what that means. If it means that Boomers started the drinking/drug thing (I’m relating to Jewish community only here) then you couldn’t be further off the mark. If you’re relating to their role as parents, I’d like to hear more.

I have no statistics beyond my own experiences with a few generations in this community, and am happy to be corrected if my experiences don’t reflect the general reality. Whilst alcohol first crept into Boomer parties in their very late teens with almost no excesses (drunkenness) and even mild drugs like marijuana were virtually unknown, in the next generation it was mid-teens and drunkenness at parties quite common. It was on hearing of Scopus parties involving alcohol-consuming 9 year olds that I was truly shocked. Drugs at Scopus was also new for me. My sense, whether right or wrong, is of more and more alcohol and drug consumption and younger and younger consumers.

Lastly, you are absolutely right … we are entirely responsible for the children, especially those as young as 12, or younger. In writing my comment, the picture in my mind was of the youth movement environment where I flourished, and where 9 year olds related well to 16 year old madrichim, in ways they never would to adults. The point I made, poorly, is that if we were to extend that structure, provide funding and resources for the older teens with social community awareness to help guide and educate the youngsters through interesting and innovative activities, we would have the makings of a very healthy community … IMHO.

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The above blog might be of interest as well on the topic raised here,very good insights i think!!

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The holocaust baggage has also attributed to the many points you raised above…….saw it at university.

The issue is there are other problems with some of these individuals where their emotional intelligence,empathy is lacking along with no life experience at all in extreme cases…they are sad individuals sorry to say …

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Despite our divergences of viewpoint, i certainly agree with you about the disintegration of the Jewish community. Bare in mind that a number of other religious, political and cultural communities are also falling apart due to the same destructive influences, born from the underlying philosophies of our time.

In essence, it seems that the post-modern denial of objective truth has left the individuals of many western societies without common threads to bind their communities together. We search within ourselves, digging the trenches between us deeper and deeper, because we are denied the foundations of community. By foundations, i refer to the value systems through which we can collectively endow life with meaning.

Consider that the term fundamentalist has negative connotations in contemporary discourse. It derives it’s meaning from the word fundamental; foundation, the grounds of beliefs. The opposition is couched in the understanding that an undisputed understanding of reality is immoral. We can conclude that the condemner inhabits a world without a concrete doctrine, in which values are transient and subjectively defined.

We are experiencing a shift from collective, fundamental truths to the overpowering contention that one can only rightfully seek within ones self to discern the facts. And hence, we shy away from the Zionistic doctrines of our parents and the religious doctrines of our ancestors. This is the inevitable outcome of a world that has graduated (and in a sense regressed) from religion to science and beyond.

Most western communities that are founded on formal doctrines of belief (political, religious etc) are suffering as a result. This is the source of apathy. This is the tide that those who value the Jewish community must swim against.

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“It is up to PARENTS, not the community set boundaries, make rules, and ensure that their children follow them.”

It is pretty much the consensus among child psychs and social workers that parental influence ceases to be the dominant influence after a certain age. There, the peer group takes over. The data has been in on this one for a while.

If the peer group is exhibiting destructive behaviours, the individual youth is in a far more perrilous position than if the peer group were oriented towards constructive and creative activity.

And the boundaries between the indiviual and the community/nation are never quite so starkly drawn. The individual impacts on the group and vice versa. The individual works on behalf of the group and in an ideal environment, this would be reciprocated.

Right now, Melbourne Jewry is suffering a fracture in which individuals are disinclined to work for the community, and the community has not very much to offer even if people were willimg to volunteer.

Only in an idealised Ayn Randian conception of the individual can one actually exist without external supports and structures. In the real world, hyper-individualism leads to pathology both on the individual, and group levels.

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Honestly, I do not believe that their is any evidence for causation between our repurtation for scholarship and VCE madness.

This “scholarly” tendency is a nice palimpsest to superimpose on what is nothing more than a hyper-competitive hot house that destroys far more than it creates. Some of our best/brightest that make it into law actually graduate and practice. But I don’t know very many of them – I know many, many more that either dropped out of law or graduated and did something else entirely.

So how does wasting a couple of years on something one hates, mired in an abject misery that prevents constructive behaviour, actually contribute to the well-being of the individual or the community?

Whatever positives we see from young people are often borne of unnecessary anguish.

I couldn’t care less whether we are perceived by outsiders as scholarly at a group level. There is absolutely no metric for measuring this amorphous success you refer to.

If, however, there were ever the funding and the inclination, there are plenty of metrics and concrete criteria that would confirm what I – and pretty much every other Gen X/Y I’ve spoken to, – believe is a disintegration of the Jewish youth environment.

And should we have one or two shining examples of success that emerge from the current system, that cannot in any way ameliorate the concerns for the vast majority who do not have this experience.

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