Ravejelly Guest Post!

Today we are presenting our very first guest post! The author is a fellow lad from Great Britain who instantly fell in love with our blog, our dream and our question, Can The World Hear Me? Part of our goal is also for the the world to hear other people too that have a strong message but don’t have a blog yet or currently no strong means to reach out to the 6 billion people out there. By having a contact in Britain, that means we are also going international

Now without further ado, presenting “Seb Huckle, RaveJelly (Coming soon…)”

Do I want the right job?

When I leave school, I will want a job. In fact I could do with one right now. But what kind of job do I want? Probably not the right one…

At school, it is drummed into us how important a high paying job will be in the future. The more effort we put into our schooling, they say, the higher we will be paid in later life. Is this really true? Imagine your average student at 16 years old, considering their options.

They have just received their GCSE results and have an assortment of grades – an A, quite a few Bs and the odd C. These results would allow them to get a place in sixth form, where you study A levels that allow you to go to university, but they could equally go and start a career.

Most people choose to do A levels, but what kind of a career could that student expect to walk into if they did choose to enter the world of work? Probably not what they imagined. It is my belief that schools give pupils a rose-tinted view of the world, almost certainly without meaning to. Our student would likely end up in some kind of service industry – perhaps a waiter or stacking shelves. Not their ideal career.

I also believe that schools are less about teaching us skills for life but are instead there to make us feel inadequate; we are never good enough as we are and must always go one better. Educators often say the best way to get the most from kids is to stretch them – to give them a task a little too hard for them to be comfortable doing on their own.

This creates a feeling in children that they are never doing as well as they really are and, I think, this has profoundly affected our society. We now have a culture where people are driven to get the highest salary doing the cleanest, easiest job they can. Why? Because that is the ideal lifestyle, it seems. Money, luxury and leisure.

Unfortunately, the jobs Britain really needs doing are the ones that are not clean, are not easy and are certainly not well-paid. These dirty jobs are ones like street cleaners, farm labourers and workmen – the jobs that are relied on to keep things running smoothly. The jobs British people, like our student from earlier, now feel that they are too good to do.

So, if we British aren’t going to do these jobs for ourselves, who will? Well, those friendly chaps from Eastern Europe will come and do it for us, of course! They don’t mind serving MacDonald’s, sweeping floors or delivering the post. In fact, they’re so happy to do these jobs, it seems, that they can under-cut British workers in price as well.

How? You see, these foreigners “stealing our jobs” know something that we don’t. They know what it’s like not to have the luxury of being able to turn your nose up at a job just because you think you could do better. They know that a job’s a job and money’s money – whatever you do. This is not a value instilled by the British education system at all.

Immigration is a point for debate, but it seems agreed that we really would be better if there was less of it. I argue, however, that without it life would grind to a shuddering halt. So, how could we make our country function without requiring millions of foreigners to do the dirty jobs for us?

The obvious solution is to the dirty jobs ourselves. It would take a very long time, and a lot of effort, but if we could change the way Britons think about the merit of a job, we may be able to become almost self-sufficient again. In the days before the industrial revolution we used to provide ourselves with all the labour we ever needed – so why not again?

~Kevin X