Charles Sykes is the author of DUMBING DOWN OUR KIDS. The following is a list he created for high school and college graduates of things he did not learn in school. [Holwick – it has often been falsely attributed to Bill Gates and is usually limited to 11 rules.] In his book he talks about how the \u201csystem\u201d may have created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and set them up for failure in the real world.<\/p>\n
Rule 1: Life is not fair; get used to it.<\/p>\n
Rule 2: The world won\u2019t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.<\/p>\n
Rule 3: You will not make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won\u2019t be a vice president with a car phone until you \u201cearn\u201d both.<\/p>\n
Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn\u2019t have tenure.<\/p>\n
Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger-flipping; they called it opportunity.<\/p>\n
Rule 6: If you screw up, it\u2019s not your parents\u2019 fault so don\u2019t whine about your mistakes. Learn from them.<\/p>\n
Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren\u2019t as boring as they are now. They got that way paying your bills, cleaning your room, and listening to you tell them how idealistic you are. So before you save the rain forest from the blood-sucking parasites of your parents\u2019 generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.<\/p>\n
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades, they\u2019ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.<\/p>\n
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don\u2019t get summers off, and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.<\/p>\n
Rule 10: Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.<\/p>\n
Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you\u2019ll end up working for one.<\/p>\n
Rule 12: Smoking does not make you look cool. It makes you look moronic. Next time you\u2019re out cruising, watch an 11-year-old with a butt in his mouth. That\u2019s what you look like to anyone over 20. Ditto for \u201cexpressing yourself\u201d with purple hair and\/or pierced body parts.<\/p>\n
Rule 13: You are not immortal. (See Rule No. 12.) If you are under the impression that living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse is romantic, you obviously haven\u2019t seen one of your peers at room temperature lately.<\/p>\n
Rule 14: Enjoy this while you can. Sure parents are a pain, school\u2019s a bother, and life is depressing. But someday you\u2019ll realize how wonderful it was to be a kid. Maybe you should start now. You\u2019re welcome.<\/p>\n
________<\/p>\n
DUMBING DOWN OUR KIDS: WHY AMERICAN CHILDREN FEEL GOOD ABOUT THEMSELVES BUT CAN\u2019T READ, WRITE, OR ADD, by Charles J Sykes,.published by St Martins Press (P) (September 1, 1996)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Charles Sykes is the author of DUMBING DOWN OUR KIDS. The following is a list he created for high school and college graduates of things he did not learn in school. [Holwick – it has often been falsely attributed to Bill Gates and is usually limited to 11 rules.] In his book he talks about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[276,27,3287,3286,3288,301,2227,929,438],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5831"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5831\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}