Louise Roberts: Kids deserve their rites of passage
Schoolies, formals, graduations and other rituals that mark the passage to adulthood have been cancelled in COVID-plagued 2020, but surely we can do more to offer teens these rewards safely, writes Louise Roberts.
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As a mother I can’t believe I’m writing this, but bring back Schoolies. Not the nangs, the dicing with death balcony lunacy, the drugs or the booze or any of the other questionable behaviour.
It’s the rite of passage scenarios which we have denied these kids and if anyone needs them in 2020 they certainly do.
The kids who are crazy at school are the ones who go nuclear at events like Schoolies, a former attendee told me, and that’s because their hard-earned brand is one of running amok.
Yes, we live in pandemic times. But we must also remember this.
These Year 12 students have run a mental marathon this year and must continue to climb over the carcasses of their broken dreams to surge ahead towards the exam finishing line.
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Instead we’ve cancelled our kids — their formals, graduation ceremonies, competitive sports, choir and theatre performances, the valedictorian dinners and the exhibitions of major works by art and design students.
The concerts, where the band played and the young singers sounded like angels.
And all of those other critical milestones that are there to mark the moment when they wind up childhood and become, officially, young men and women.
Think back to your own Year 12.
That final year of secondary school isn’t really about the exams. Yes we remember them but not the details and barely the marks.
It’s about jostling for space in the wonderful rush towards adulthood.
Is it fair to deny them these pivotal moments because of a disease that barely affects them?
Especially as we are working so hard, particularly in NSW, to get on with other areas of life.
Wednesday’s news that Premier Gladys Berejiklian had launched a task force to secure major NSW events like the V8s in Bathurst and the NRL Grand Final was a breath of fresh air.
Surely this shows us that we can be cautious without being cancellers.
And as Tony Abbott said this week: “Now that each one of us has had six months to consider this pandemic and to make our own judgments about it, surely it’s time to relax the rules, so that individuals can take more personal responsibility and make more of their own decisions about the risks they’re prepared to run.”
Yes something like Schoolies might seem to fly in the face of all the COVID safety messages that have become so familiar to us they are like breathing.
But I find my heart breaking for the thousands of school leavers who will mark the end of one of the most significant eras of their lives with little more than a whisper.
Anyone who thinks these kids have been on a level playing field all year is ruefully ignorant. Those students in families fortunate enough to afford private tutors and extra study sessions are at a distinct advantage. I’m not for a second begrudging them these opportunities, but if HSC results and ATARs have a scaling component to them, it hardly seems fair to compare the student who had all these things, with the student who had to muddle along on their own, or even the student who was unable to study because their household could not afford internet.
And that’s just the academic side of the ledger.
Cast your mind back to your final year of school.
There were so many rites of passage along the way that by the time you walked out of the gates for the last time, you felt that you were closing an important chapter and starting a new one full of promise and your friends around you, many of whom would go on to be friends for life.
All through that last year there were social milestones to reach — 18th birthdays, young romances starting and finishing, driving lessons and tests, staying out late, breaking the rules, drinking with pals all night long, staying up to watch the sunrise before having a beach barbecue with 40 of your friends and living for the moment.
How many of these milestones did our teenagers have to leave behind this year?
Too many. Probably most of them.
On binning the annual Gold Coast event, Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk explained that it was a difficult decision.
“It poses high risk. High risk, not only the people who attend, all of the young people, but also all of the people they come in contact with, and of course their families and their friends and their grandparents,” she said.
With social distancing rules in force and the fear of COVID weighing on everyone’s minds, it has been near impossible to have fun.
No meaningful life experiences other than avoiding getting sick, or getting others sick.
I realise it is impossible to consider the types of mass crowds seen in places like Surfers Paradise in years gone by.
But that doesn’t mean we have to abandon the tradition completely.
Next year is fast approaching — in four months’ time it will be 2021.
And the stroke of midnight will not bring a happy ending to this COVID nightmare.
In Sydney, authorities are already preparing us for the cancellation of New Year’s Eve fireworks. It will be the second year running for such warnings, with last year’s almost canned on account of bushfires.
So the question is, do we choose to wait, or do we as parents and communities decide to find a meaningful way to farewell their school days and to celebrate safely and with freedom?
We can create a new breed of Schoolies, so at least our young adults will have something to look back on, rather than the Year 12 jersey gathering dust in the corner or the year book they will get — if they are lucky
If we can have major events, surely we should be allowed to have minor ones too.
Originally published as Louise Roberts: Kids deserve their rites of passage
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