Imagine you taking a trip in a car. It's an unknown area. The driver is you . You're heading down an open road. All of a sudden you reach a turning point. There are no road signs and you have no map. Two ways to go. A decision has to be made. The right one will bring you to your destination-joy and happiness, but the wrong one will bring sorrow and disappointment.
Freeze this exact moment, and think of what's going on in the mind of a 17 or 18 year old teenager. If I am not mistaken, it would be the same. The only difference is that you are not alone. There will be people who affect your decision. It might be your friends, or more special friends as girl or boyfriends, teachers and even parents. These above people can make your decision easier, but they can most certainly make it tougher.
Teenage life - a certain turning point in life, where a person can be made or broken, where the right path would take him/her to the best things in life and the wrong bring disaster. Now I would like to discuss the effect the above mentioned people make towards your decision.
First let's take parents the people who have gone through it all. They were once teenagers and they've had teenage feelings especially about the opposite sex, but when they become adults and then parents, they tend to forget those feelings. Then when their children (that's us) reach that age it is they the children who have to suffer. Most of them have been told to stay away from having girl or boyfriends and concentrate on studies. What does this do? It makes the teen more impatient even angry. With this hatred they want to get even. What happens? They have relationships on the sly, get into watching pornographic material, and even getting involved with prostitutes. In the end they end up with nothing. This is a situation where the parents' attitude helps you make the wrong decision. Parents however do most of the time try to help their children make the right one through good advice, but the above mentioned problem does exist.
Now to the friends. All teenagers have their gang of friends or click. These friends play a major role in the life of a teenager. Through good times and bad times they tend to stick with each other. They know all your secrets and personal stuff, and in the time of need they give advice, advice probably even parents wouldn't have thought of. When it comes to decision making, they are the ones who tend to guide you, at least most of the time, although if you're in the wrong click, it's a whole different ballgame. Peer pressure can certainly break a person down to pieces. If they get you into drugs, cigarettes and alcohol it would mean disaster.
There's no stopping it. When you become a teenager you tend to have a liking towards the opposite sex. It's nature's way. At least to have a few friends of the opposite sex is a must in a teen's mind. So many of them have girl or boyfriends, with parental permission or not. How these people affect the decision of a teen is quite complex. So I leave it to those who do have girl or boyfriends to decide for themselves as to how they affect their lives. Be it negatively or positively, admit it they do effect them in a major way.
What is education? Is it just the gathering of information through books and in the process memorizing the facts? I don't think so. To me education means the development of the mind to a certain stage from which a character could be moulded. Education doesn't necessarily have anything to do with studies. It could happen through sports, an area which certainly does test the mind to its limits. The people who guide you through this whole educating process are the teachers. What role does a teacher play in a teen's life? Is it only to tell him/her to study this, memorize that and so on? Hopefully not. A teacher should be able to talk freely with the teen.
They should be able to teach students not only matters in textbooks but subjects like sex education a topic which everyone wants to know about, but are afraid or too shy to talk about. This then brings up the topic of our education system, but if I were to write about that it would be another essay, so I'll leave it there.
Teenage life is such a complex time that I think even the great gurus would find it difficult to figure it out. So, in conclusion I would like to state that if you're a teenager who's reading this, have fun, enjoy the ride, but just think of what I've said above and see if it relates to you as well
N-ko-ra returns
Nishan Shanaka Korala Gamage
Writes to
Spontaneous Combustion
From Srilanka
