Thoughts

High School, the future, and Thackeray's "Vanity Fair"

So… I think

Perhaps it’s just recent revelations in my life… things like someone who’s very close to me telling me that she’s pregnant… or maybe it’s the things I’ve always seen, that make me doubt the future.

I’m beginning to wonder: what will the world be like by the time I get old? What will high school be like when my kids or grandkids are freshmen?

Will there be any academics left, or will we have given up on teachers, and started using schools merely as places to lock students away for 8 or 9 hours? It seems to me that so many students have given up on learning. It seems that school has become the place to find “Mr/Mrs Right” (don’t get me started on that tangent), a place to act crazy and wild, or a place to go and cheat, in the hopes that it’ll make ‘em rich one day, by getting an Ivy League degree.

It makes me think of Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair”. Becky Sharp did everything she could to get to the top of the social ladder. She started out from humble and less than satisfactory beginnings, and she was poised to have so much… but her greed and her deceit were her downfall. Amelia had everything, suffered tragedy, and ended up finding a modicum of happiness at the end.

I hate to think of it like this, but frankly, there are a whole lot of Becky Sharp’s running around these days… people who are willing to lie, cheat, backstab, break hearts, do ANYTHING in order to get a little bit of happiness.

And that greed will be their downfall.

Don’t take it from me, take it from Thackeray.