We are Going to Run (Ruin?) the World

by Zoe Schiffer

I am thirteen years old, and I am worried.

The world is facing a lot of problems. Is my generation going to be the one that solves them?

Can we?

When I look at my friends, their attitude towards getting work done doesn’t bode well. My friend 8th grader Vera Jirnov told me, “I don’t usually do homework right when I get home. I will say that I’ll do it and then I look at it for a while, but maybe I will do a little bit.”

So many of us simply get nothing done. And what it comes down to is that school is low on our priorities list. Another friend, 7th grader Lea Vann, said “I don’t really have, like, school as a priority, honestly, it’s up there, but not up up there.” This is a problem.   How will we learn enough to make a difference in the world if we don’t apply ourselves to school?

Our attention is elsewhere. When she goes home, Lea said, “I just sit on my phone,” and a third friend, 8th grader Hadley Choate, added ”I go to my room and get on my phone, for a while.” 

Here’s why this is a problem. We are getting too involved in everything but the things that are important. Right now our priorities are about social media and how many followers people have. They should be about education. 

If we can’t change this, we won’t run the world, we’ll ruin it.