I've been fairly involved in my kids extra-caricular school activities so have gotten to know quite a few kids in the schools over the years. Somehow I've been volunteered to be the burger flipper several years running at the high school homecoming tailgate party and the cross country running region championships race. The kids are by and large very polite and curteous. Several of them found a simple thank you insufficient so came up to me to say how much they appreciated what I was doing.
A couple weeks back I volunteered in a couple of the biology classes to tell the kids some details of how oil makes it out of the ground and through the pipeline, how science plays into it and how many different engineering jobs there were related to the industry. A few kids kinda had that look that they'd rather be somewhere else but most of them were tuned in and full of questions.
Somehow we tend to put too much energy focussing on the misfits and failures. I'd say the future doesn't look nearly so grim and there are some exceptionally bright and thoughtful kids that will be coming up in the future.
