When will we ever learn?

It's that time of year again when every newspaper, news website and television news dust off last years story that exams are getting easier. It's the last chance you have to be a proper student, 'student' meaning that you all compete on a level playing field where everyone is aiming at the same standard pretty much, A Levels. So from sixteen onwards you slog your guts out trying to get as good grades as you possibly can amongst the backdrop of being:

• An employment pariah: I mean really who wants to be served in a shop by someone aged 17 studying for 3 A levels when you can be served badly by someone aged 18 with six months experience studying nail and beauty care but dropped out of the course as they found it too taxing. So from 16-18 your pretty much skint.
• Emotionally disabled: Everything is difficult when you are a teenager as everything you do has a consequence from how much effort you place on your studies to the type of laces you have in your designer trainers. The teenage world has an opinion of what is cool and what is not. Once you get to uni this disappears because uni is full of everyone trying to be individual and in turn overly eccentric and sometimes just plain weird. e.g being weird in uni gets you friends, being weird in school gets you beaten up and bullied.
• Relationships: Anyone who had a relationship during their teenage years will know this is train wreck!

Given all this you spend your time studying for your A Levels. The pressure is on because these are the most important exams you will ever do.....well since the last ones you did...........or the next ones you'll do. Then that day in August comes and the results come through.......... Yessss!! 9 A*! YOU'RE A GENIUS.

Except, no. The world turns around and says that exams are easier, that in fact even though you know much more about everything in the world than your father and your grandad you are in fact educationally subnormal. This doesn't happen in any other field. We don't line the streets honouring our war dead from Afghanistan saying yes they gave their life but war these days is much easier than it used to be. Perhaps we only have a 30 second silence based upon the level of difficulty you faced in dying for you country.

the news tells us that exams are easier, that all children are stupid and that all university courses are in pointless topics, might have a point there but that's a whole other rant. So you spend all day on the phone to desperately trying to see if your 9 A*s can get you into a university you've never heard of, in fact you where fairly sure it was a leisure centre the last time you looked, to get you on your seventh choice course of Jedi Knightism or the Science of Glee. You have no choice to accept the course, the fees and the student debt until you die because there are no jobs! Only rich people went to university in the past to be a doctor or a research scientist now everyone goes otherwise it would mess with the unemployment figures. So being good at something because you are interested or have a natural talent for it or a willingness to learn that trade from the bottom up has gone and has been replaced by a degree which qualifies you to be able to do nothing.

Then just when things couldn't be more depressing for the world of A level students, one dies. A group will have gone out and rolled their Saxo through a hedge sideways because nothing celebrates having three more years to go out socialising and drinking than going out socialising and drinking and the tragedy will be that they would have got the best results in the whole history of the school/college. It's o.k, as long as somebody remembers to mention during the eulogy that dying it just so much more easy these days.