Once, "they came, they strove, they conquered" was an attitude toward growing up, but no more. That old elitist-sounding Shakespearian-Roman literary stuff is totally out of date -- especially in schools.
Among secondary school students a large proportion (compared to earlier generations) self-identify as disabled. They call themselves stressed, traumatized by life, neuro-variant, or "marginalized" and "challenged" by substance use. (Since schools have been medicating students for behaviour problems for years, it's no surprise if drug-taking comes naturally to them in adulthood.)
Do these students, falling back on the picturesque rainbow of disablement in all its shapes and forms, experience what we might call "failure to strive", a condition analogous to infants' "failure to thrive"? As they approach adulthood do some remain infantile? We're told there's an epidemic of drug use among them. This used to be called "substance abuse" but is now called "people experiencing addiction", as if the experience just happened by itself, like the weather.
Striving used to be considered a requisite for success. Now, in schools it is considered elitist, maybe even colonialist, and has been replaced by counselling, alternative medication, and lowering of academic standards so that no one fails. Striving is demanding. Contemporary education often is not.
The latest demand of teens approaching graduation, or those "aging out of care", is for a universal minimum income. No striving needed for that. Is the problem not true disablement, but that we are producing a generation of people-not-experiencing-adulthood?
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