Resignation of the Pope, bombs being tested in Korea, discussions over budget cuts and several other events are plastered all over newspapers and news channels across the country. Unfortunately, the world is filled with multiple issues that need solving, but in a country where ignorance is bliss, how important are these events in reality, especially to teenagers?
Ignorance seems to surround the minds of a lot of people when it comes to knowledge over current events, but it shows more when it comes to high school students. In general, people want to turn away from the T.V. screen showing images of shootings, wars and other crises that people deal with today. People should not push away the events going on throughout the world, though, or it will teach teenagers to do the exact same thing.
There is not enough effort put forth in the world today to prepare the next generation for the responsibilities they will be taking over. Focus is placed on putting students through college so they can come out on the other side and get a job. Most are being taught to mainly think about themselves and where they will be in the world.
There is hardly any thought to what they can do to solve the different problems that affect everyone. Instead it seems as if people are more focused on entertainment-based news and what goes on in celebrities’ lives. Hundreds of people watched the Grammys and the Oscars, but when the evening news is on there is little to no interest. Some news channels even bring up entertainment news themselves when the focus needs to be on the events that actually affect the lives of the viewers.
Preparation for the burden of the crises those students will take over is hardly even there. That is why paying attention to current events is so important for high school students (check out pages 8&9 for more). Some effort was put in by schools in the past to make students more aware of world events by having us watch CNN or Channel 1 everyday.
In high school, that has changed. There is no longer a requirement for students to watch newscasts and the main exposure to current events comes from social studies classes that decide to teach them as part of their curriculum such as current events class. But students who do not take those classes are not exposed to the same amount of events that the ones who do take the classes are.
Even so, it is not the school’s responsibility to make us aware of current events. It is our own. School is here to educate us for our future career. We must educate ourselves on the world we will be entering and the problems we will have to face in the near future.
Typically, world events do not directly affect high school students, but we need to start making them more prevalent in our lives. That is the world that every single student in this school will be entering soon enough. Without knowledge of the problems that plague the world, no one is going to be able to come up with a solution. Issues seen today, such as the national budget, are going to rest on our shoulders to take care of when we enter the world as adults which, contrary to popular belief, is a lot closer than it seems.
People cannot live in ignorance for their whole lives even when we live in a country that maybe does not face problems as severe as other countries. Having a focus on just our lives and just our problems will not help our future as a country. Something as simple as turning on the nightly news or reading a few stories on the internet can expand the knowledge of one individual. It takes a little initiative and just a small amount of time in order to be up to date on the news.
