Dialogue: A few things our kids need to hear

If we are going to reclaim some of the moral and ethical core values that we need to put some backbone back into our society, we will have to start with our children. And even if we start now, it will take at least one and probably two generations before we begin to see any results.

The difficulty, of course, is that it will be hard to find people - parents, teachers or anyone else - who are prepared to set our kids on the right track, for it is many of them who have undersold our children for years now on what life is really all about.

Some people, though, are already trying and among them is the world's richest man, Microsoft's Bill Gates, who, I'm told, had an ordinary childhood in an ordinary home. Some time back Mr Gates gave an address at a high school in which he spoke about some of the things children no longer learn at school. He talked about how feel-good, politically correct teaching had created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.

These are the children we have to get to if we are to achieve our goal of restoring our society to what we know it can be. How we are to do it I don't know, but here are some of the rules of life according to Bill Gates, which have been lightly edited for space reasons.

Rule No 1: Life is not fair. Get used to it. You got that idea from your parents, who said it so often you decided they must be the most idealistic generation ever. When they started hearing it from their own children, they realised Rule No 1.

Rule No 2: The real world won't care as much about your self-esteem as your school does. It will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself. Usually, when inflated self-esteem meets reality, children complain that it's not fair.

Rule No 3: You won't make $40,000 a year right out of high school. And you won't be a vice-president or have a carphone either. You may even have to wear a uniform that doesn't have a designer label.

Rule No 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait until you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure, so he tends to be a bit edgier. When you screw up, he's not going to ask you how you feel about it.

Rule No 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping - they called it opportunity. They weren't embarrassed making the minimum wage, either; they would have been embarrassed to be unemployed.

Rule No 6: It's not your parents' fault. If you screw up, you are responsible. This is the flip side of "It's my life" and "You're not the boss of me" and other eloquent proclamations of your generation. When you turn 18, it's all on your head.

Rule No 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way paying your bills, cleaning up your room and listening to you tell them how idealistic you are. So before you save the rainforest from the blood-sucking parasites of your parents' generation, try delousing the closet in your bedroom.

Rule No 8: Your school might have done away with winners and losers - life hasn't. In some schools, they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. Failing grades and classroom and sporting winners have been abolished lest anyone's feelings be hurt, and they tell you that effort is as important as results. This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.

Rule No 9: Life is not divided into terms and you don't get summers off, not even Easter. They expect you to show up every day - for eight hours. And you don't get a break every 10 weeks; it just goes on and on. And very few employers are interested in fostering your self-expression or helping you to find yourself. Fewer jobs still lead to self-realisation.

Rule No 10: Television is not real life. Your life is not a sitcom. Your problems will not all be solved in 30 minutes, minus time for commercials. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop to go to jobs. Your friends will not be as perky or pliable as Jennifer Aniston.

Rule No 11: Be nice to nerds. You may end up working for them.

Rule No 12: Smoking does not make you look cool, it makes you look moronic. Ditto for "expressing yourself" with purple hair and/or pierced body parts.

Rule No 13: You are not immortal. If you are under the impression that living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse is romantic, you obviously haven't seen a teenage corpse.

Isn't it a shame that there are probably not enough parents and schoolteachers left in this country who even understand what he's saying?

* Garth George is taking a break for the next three weeks.

Herald Online feature: Common core values

We invite to you to contribute to the debate on core values. E-mail dialogue@herald.co.nz.