Teach Secondary Magazine

Welcome! Chances are, you’ve probably heard some variant of the following sentiments within the past few years: “Kids grow up so fast these days, don’t they?” “They seem to mature so much faster than we
ever did.” “They already know all about [topic] already – I could
never have wrapped my head around it when I was their age…”
Maybe it was a parent, or an off-the-cuff remark from a TV or
radio presenter.

You might have even heard it expressed by a
teacher – a kind of surprised awe at the apparent ease with which children and young people are engaging with the challenges presented by the modern world.

Thing is though, how often were adults saying similar things about the O Level cohorts of 1977 or the GCSE cohorts of 1992? Editing the articles making up this issue’s Health and Wellbeing special (see
p25), has been a stark reminder of how we’ve found ourselves in a strange place, where young people are given all manner of academic pressures to contend with, while having it constantly impressed upon them just how important those GCSE grades are – because if you don’t measure up, how else will you eventually get to one day graduate university in debt to the tune of £53,000? And then we wring our hands and express concern over how ‘sensitive’ children are these days; how our sons and daughters are spending worrying amounts of
time immersed in their online interactions with each other and forging hollow, parasocial relationships with problematic ‘content creators’.