Hopeless youth, confused parents, and unlived childhoods...

In these days when university preferences have begun and placement results for high schools that accept students based on scores have been announced, some of the words you hear most might be “preference, score, ranking, shifting, placement, or failure to place.”

Even if you are not directly involved with these exams, you hear about them in one way or another through your profession, family, relatives, or social media. As an academic who is personally involved in the preference process due to both my profession and my social circle, I wanted to write a little about the confusion experienced by young people and parents, and draw attention to the fact that the root of all this confusion is related to childhood. I hope I can be of some help to you, and that my readers who are parents will invest in the future in a real sense by allowing their children—whose futures they care about more than anything—to fully live their present, that is, their childhood!

I am sure that many of us took high school or university exams at times when we did not clearly know our own personal characteristics, interests, and talents, or even what we liked and disliked, and we made a school or career choice in one way or another. When we think about our life journey, how happy did the schools we attended or the professions we chose make us? Were we able to reach the schools or professions of our dreams, or were we happy when we finally attained the schools or professions that decorated our dreams? While reading these lines, you will likely go back in time and ask yourselves similar questions. I hope you are satisfied with the answers you have received as of now, but I am unfortunately sure that there are many among us who experience regret and dissatisfaction!

Setting ourselves aside and looking at the lives of young people and parents who have not yet experienced satisfaction or dissatisfaction in this regard but are quite anxious, I can see some similarities in all of them. Our country's economic, social, and political issues are everyone's common problem; however, I think there is one more fundamental issue regarding the hopeless youth and their parents in the preference process that is ignored and for which it is a bit too late to find a solution. I can hear you asking, “What kind of problem is this, how is it identified, and what is the solution?” First of all, I would like to start with the name of the problem. The name of the problem is “unlived childhood.”

When I observe young people who do not know what to do and their parents, or when I talk to them, I see that none of them have been able to live their childhoods. These people have not been able to live their childhoods; they have either been rushed from course to course, from exam to exam like racehorses, or they have been raised in a way where they were just fed and clothed, with pocket money put in their pockets. Yes, they were just raised; their heights increased, their weights increased; their hands and feet grew, but none of them had their favorite color known, none of them were played with properly; for example, none of them knew what their father was afraid of or what their mother might be happy about. When you talk a little, you understand this, and you can easily say that a young person who feels faint when they see blood should not become a doctor just to realize their father's dream, or that a young girl who is incredibly talented in painting will not be able to use her superior painting talent at all in a department with guaranteed employment that she will choose out of employment anxiety, and perhaps she will stifle this talent. In fact, the childhoods that young people could not live become a shared fate with their parents in a way. We see that parents who could not live their own childhoods cannot provide a childhood for their children; because a person cannot do or apply something they do not know or have not experienced.

Actually, at this point, in the words of Edip Cansever, “childhood, which goes nowhere like the sky,” does not leave us alone during the preference process, and I think a childhood lived to the fullest deserves to be with us always like the sky and to be placed on our heads like a golden crown. After all, we are all kings and queens of our own lives, and we should know the value of this!