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Why Do They Do That?

 

All you ever do is criticize!

A shift in education leads to criticism. Over the last few decades there has taken a major shift in the educational model. The educational establishments have changed from teaching according to the ‘didactic method’ to the ‘critical method’. Didactic method teaching is a process through which knowledge that is held by the teacher is passed on to the pupil. Critical method teaching is a process through which students explore, question and formulate truth for themselves. They learn not just simply to accept knowledge from other people but to find it out for themselves, to have their own opinions, to make up their own minds. This is often thought as a modern development. Also this shift from didactic- to critical method could be found in TV programs, magazines, youth groups and churches. The fact is that today’s teenagers have grown up in an educational world that is based upon the critical method. This explains why teenagers are critical, but why are they also cynical? We live now in a ‘post-modern world’. Which is leading to a world of individuals. It is born of pessimism and is maintained by confusion. This means that there are no satisfactory answers that can be given. There is no reliable knowledge that can be found. A post-modern statement is: we are not seekers after truth – what is the point if there is no truth to find?

Dancing with death

Using drugs is not longer for those who are rebellious or those from socially disadvantaged families. This activity has become a regular feature of the youth culture. Even teenagers who are currently affiliated to churches are using drugs. They don’t care about the dangers of drugs. The main reason for taking drugs are boredom, joining their friends or to cope with the pain in their lives. Boredom can lead teenagers into terrible damaging and self-destructive behaviour. Why? When someone grows up in the middle of this exciting world, they tend to develop an expectation that they must always be excited and when people experience a new level of excitement, their excitement threshold tends to increase. If external activities cannot give the rush, why not get it internally? Thus drugs provide the experience of excitement and fulfillment that many teenagers have grown up to expect and yet never seem to find. If the teenagers continue to believe that they must never be bored, and if their excitement threshold continues to be raised, then we should not be surprised if they continue to take drugs.

I feel like giving up

Lately teenagers deal with a lot of pain like divorces, (sexual) abuses etc. One way to deal with them is the relieve they get from drugs. The situation can get so unbearable that they commit suicide. However there teenagers who resort to drugs or suicide, without an obvious reason. Because teenagers are grown up in an anaesthetic age, that many of us absorbed the idea that we should not feel pain. If we do experience any, we will tend to seek to have that pain taken away. Teenagers also live in a sanitized society. The world in which they live tends to give them the idea that they should not experience sickness or death, it is mainly hidden from them. But all teenagers do feel pain. It does seem that the pain they experience is mainly emotional rather than physical. If we have an implicit belief that we should not feel pain and that any experience of pain must be removed rather than endured, then we will tend to apply that belief to emotional pain in the same way we do to physical pain. This is what teenagers do. Nothing seems to get tide of their pain. And nothing will, except death.

Fitting the image

Teenagers think primarily of their external rather than their internal characteristics. This is because of the modern culture is very image conscious – particularly modern youth culture. If we still lived in a culture that encouraged us to seek for God we mind find our spiritual fulfillment in a spiritual realm. But what happens if we grow up in a culture that rejected
God? We still seek images and icons to focus upon, so we look for people whom we can worship and adore, because we have a desire to follow them and be like them. We have rejected the view that we are created by God in his image, with all the significance and value that this entails, that we should worship God and try to develop Gods characteristics in our lives. But many teenagers seek after and idolize other gods, and they find other images in which they wish they were made. This will lead inevitable to problems in their lives – for these gods are inadequate and unfulfilling.

Just do it

Why are so many teenagers sexually active? First it is because of the biological hormones. Secondly it is psychological, it is the curiosity to the new world of sex. And third it is sociological, the desire to be accepted by those around you. We are living in a culture that tells us our behaviour is the result of our genes or their environment. If they have absorbed the idea that their behaviour is determined and they have no real free will, can we expect them to take responsibilities for their actions, or to exercise self-control? The brakes have been taken off and thrown away towards all sorts of sexual activity.

Shut up, granddad

All young people have received a long, book based education. Teenagers don’t need older people anymore which they can learn from. It is not surprising that old people are no longer held in very high regard. Many teenagers today also recognize an emptiness in knowledge without wisdom. They have found that, no matter how much they learn at school or college, this doesn’t seem to help them with the big issues of life itself.

What you gonna do about it?

We have to run alongside and gently nudge them in another direction, we might be able to help them to find another path. We can spend more time listening to teenagers than talking to them and join them in their search for truth. We must help them with the pain they have, not as an experience from which they must run away, but as one they can live through and grow through. We must learn that pain cannot always be taken away, we cannot always run away from it, we have to deal with it. We must help teenagers to see that pain and death can be a source of transformation. First me must recognize that (nihilism, naturalism, determinism and moral relativism in western culture) each of these are founded upon an underlying cultural rejection of God. Second, we must recognize that ideas and information all carry with them a deeper message (values about the nature of authority). We must make sure that what is taught is true and what the implicit beliefs and values that are carried with it are brought  into the open. The most powerful fundamental answer seem to be rooted in the philosophical rejection of God which we can see ultimately play out in the lives of today’s teenagers.

 

P. F. van der Heijden

Halesowen 2001

Summery: Why Do They Do That? By Nick Pollard