Makes Me Go Hmm...(1)

My friends have had very interesting things to say over the past few days, and I've come across some interesting ideas. I want to take some time to encourage you, bloggity-followers, to think as well, and so I'll be posting paragraphs about things that made me think.

Disillusionment of teenagers:
A friend of mine, who, like me, is ranked at the top of his class, asked me Sunday night "How did we get like this?", meaning "How did all of us, in the top of the class, end up so sarcastic and resentful and apathetic?". I don't know, exactly, but I think the public school system with its beaureacracy and competition and petty rules has so supressed our creative spirits that we gave up on it. Now, as seniors, we are more like outside observers, the cynics of the world of secondary school. We're jaded, not in the romantic sense, but in a life sense. At seventeen or eighteen years old, we're already tired. We can't have the same positivity and youthfulness that we entered high school with because it's been sucked out of us. Our innocent love of learning has been subdued over and over by a system designed not to encourage us to foster that love, but to encourage us to be quiet and respectful and subservient. I have hope, though. I think that upon entrance into the university system, we'll remember that spark we've always had within us. Our "flame for learning" will be rekindled and we'll lose the apathy and resentment that has so built up in us. Or, at least, this is the idealist vision I have of the greater world of academia. If it is flawed, I don't want to know.