For those who aspire to tertiary study, there are few
more stressful moments in life than looking up the newspaper on the day
university offers are announced. If it’s not bad enough that your
entire future seems attached to the 5 digit course code clinging to the
back of your surname, there’s also the fact that the whole thing
is going on in an alarmingly small font. Throw in some substandard eyesight
and a common surname and the ordeal can be transformed into a 3 hour thriller.
In terms of great life transitions, it’s the next big one after
kindergarten to primary school, and this time there’s a brutal competitiveness
about. At aged 4, it would be unseemly to think that a government department
was hovering over our shoulders telling primary schools whether to accept
those of us in a certain finger painting percentile, but by 17, we’re
deemed ready. Dr Brendan Nelson this week likened the experience to salmon
fighting their way upstream, and for me in 1991, that’s what it
felt like. Opening the newspaper and hoping that none of the other salmon
had understood Giuseppe di Lampadusa’s The Leopard either.
On Tuesday, the education minister focused on tired salmon, salmon that
are experiencing ‘disillusionment and disengagement’ and how
it should be considered okay for these salmon to drop out of the run,
to find their own ‘quiet pond’.
The problem with this is that at 17, it’s difficult for a disillusioned
salmon to know whether it is having a problem with the run itself, or
is just depressed because the good looking salmon in Maths Methods looks
like going off and spawning with someone else. ‘Quiet ponds’
might be easy enough to find, but if priorities change, without higher
education they can be tough to get out of.
For those who do want to continue the swim upstream, reduced federal
funding for tertiary places this week meant higher entry scores, and thousands
missing out on either their chosen course. Of course funding is not the
only reason people missed out (there was also that massive night at The
Metro in April) but it’s certainly one worth dwelling on, especially
if the alternative is blaming yourself.
In any event, there are plenty of disillusioned salmon that have paused
midstream this week. Because of the way the end of school is marketed
to us by teachers and parents: ‘this is your whole life your know
… you don’t get a second chance at this … do you want
to end up cleaning my car? … really?… oh stop being ridiculous
… you hate cleaning the car’ failure in VCE is laid down as
permanent failure.
The reality is of course that you can’t be a permanent success
or a permanent failure at the age of 17 or 18. It’s only if you’re
19 that you have cause to panic. If you’re not a runaway success
by the age of 19, you have clearly learnt nothing from the example of
Mozart or Brett Lee.
There are tens of thousands of possible jobs in the world and they can
present themselves anywhere, anytime, at any stage of life. If I could
try my hand at careers counseling, pick up the Yellow Pages, skip over
the infuriating Telstra promotional material, and open up randomly on
any page. If you get ‘Medical practitioners’ or ‘Lawyers’,
that doesn’t make my point very well, so I’d ask you to do
it again. Do it until you find something that you didn’t know people
do. A career that wasn’t sold to you by the careers counselor at
school. I eventually got ‘carcass removal’ on page 75.
VCE isn’t your whole life, even if it feels like it for one year
and a few weeks in January. And so to all the despondent salmon out there,
keep swimming and chasing the dream (which I think we agreed in the last
paragraph was carcass removal) To all the happy salmon, keep swimming
because currents change quickly and when it’s least expected. To
Dr Nelson, keep swimming, and we could do with some money for the spawning
grounds. And to the big black bear plucking the salmon out of the river
and feeding them to its young, what the hell do you think you’re
doing?
