CHARLES J. SKYES (and not Bill Gates, thank you Peter!!! ) talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.
Rule 1 : Life is not fair – get used to it!
Rule 2 : The world doesn’t care about your self-esteem.
The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.Rule 3 : You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.
Rule 4 : If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss
Rule 5 : Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.
Rule 6 : If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault , so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
Rule 7 : Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now.
They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were.
So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.Rule 8 : Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT.
In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer.
This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.Rule 9 : Life is not divided into semesters.
You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF.
Do that on your own time.Rule 10 : Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule 11 : Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.
If you agree, pass it on.
If you don’t agree stick your head in the sand and take a deep breath! More here
These rules are so true and I wish they were announced daily and pounded into the younger generations’ heads. Todays’ youth wants to be prima donnas, not want to work for anything, expect you to give them the answers to everything and not get onto them for making mistakes. Hey, life is tough and you should learn from your mistakes, have drive and ambition to better yourself, make something of yourself.
Here is one more rule to add. I read this quote in a news article about polygamy in France.
“To have children cannot become like having a salary.”
This is a major problem in the United States where single mothers bear children by multiple male partners for the sole reason of collecting welfare (money, subsidence, free or low discount food, lodging, etc) from the federal and state agencies.
In my opinion, this is a major or primary cause of lack of initiaive, drive and ambition in todays’ society.
Ok, so I spread the msg without checking the truth if it was by Bill Gates or not. No, it’s not: the rules are from Charles J Sykes’ book “50 rules kids won’t learn at school”. In the meantime I had some reconsideration about them: school shouldn’t necessarily teach how the world *is* but should transmit an ideal. Otherwise another chance to influence the young to make this world better than it is goes away. That said, it’s clear you have to cope with “reality”, but that doesn’t mean you should not “imagine” a better world.