Persecuted Silence

We, the gifted and twice-exceptional youth, are extremely frustrated as to why no one will listen to us. We are not being heard, and our mental health is declining; it is killing us. We do have voices that are heard and help us to a certain extent, but they are not of our age. They are adults who talk from their perspective and not about what it would look like in the future for us. It always has been like this; through the centuries, the gifted youth did not have a voice, and if they tried, they were persecuted (the occasional one got away, such as Einstein, Walt Disney and Stephen Hawking). Consider what happened to 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai from Pakistan when she tried to speak up for educational rights. Yes, that is an extreme example, but there are far more accounts of similar stories to hers where adults decide their fate.

Today we do not want to be persecuted anymore. From today we want to be heard.

·      We want to be heard when you make decisions to better our educational system, especially when it involves our learning.

·      Listen to us when we tell you that how our system delivers and assesses the curriculum against numbers is not learning. Numbers             are a business structure, not an educational one.

·      We know that you know that we have evolved rapidly over the last century. However, we are still perplexed about why we still use the         industrial-era educational system. Think about the changes that have occurred over the previous 100 years.

       Many things have advanced rapidly, but our educational system has not.

Maybe it is because we have yet to see a government that is open, honest, accountable

and better represented in terms of the diversity of viewpoints and the

diversity of people. I suppose the only way to open the eyes of progress is to

plant a seed. There may be teething problems hearing us at first, which may

take a while, but I think that is with most things people pursue. We need our

voices to represent how we feel and what we need to succeed. We are the now, we

are the future, and we know what is needed to survive.

So please be one of the first organisations to open up a committee that includes

representatives of diverse youth around Australia so we can be involved in how

and what we learn.