This article was originally published in Danish on October 23, 2018.
60,000 young people with a high school diploma are struggling to find a foothold, Jyllands-Posten reports with alarm. Young people simply don’t know what they want to do, and a couple of gap years or three are not uncommon. The professor with the exotic name Noemi Katznelson, head of the “Center for Youth Research” (one of the many completely superfluous “research centers” in the country) at Aalborg’s so-called university (a completely unnecessary fifth-rate institution), is concerned. According to Noemi, the young people’s difficulties are due to “psychological challenges, which primarily come from the many demands they face in the education system. …. They have to deliver and perform, which is why they become tormented and stressed and end up inactive.” Mette Fjord Sørensen from the Confederation of Danish Industry agrees: “They are used to the idea that an A is good enough.”
Good grief! Young people today have no idea what demands and achievements mean. The rest of us learned this when school, high school and especially daily life made demands that would make today’s spoiled brats fall over. The fact is that throughout their lives, too few demands are made of them and they never learn discipline and a sense of duty, nor do they gain any understanding of what it means to be part of a national community through their upbringing. They are simply not provided with the framework that gives them a real identity and an awareness of who they are. Against this backdrop, you can feel sorry for them and see them as victims – precisely for people like Noemi Katznelson. They barely search for such an identity because they don’t know they have one. They are content to live their virtual lives, filled with trivialities like football players, pop stars and nobodies like the Kardashians and other artificial leading stars, all rich and on the front pages of the media. If you set such individuals as the measure of success, you can easily feel inadequate, even though you are actually worth much more than these false idols. The only real pressure they face is to earn money for the latest I-phone instead of doing something useful that could make them spiritually richer people.
It has been a goal that virtually everyone should have a “high school diploma”, but in doing so, they have abolished the high school diploma, which by its very nature can only be an exam for the most academically gifted – probably between 5 and 10% of the population. The requirements for a so-called matriculation exam are now catastrophically low, but are perhaps perceived as insurmountable by the 90% of high school students who are not actually qualified to take it. And of course, this is not helped by the fact that an idiotic grading scale has been introduced that does not provide sufficient opportunity to grade performance, with the ultimate goal of abolishing grades and assessments altogether, as we are all basically equal. It’s all a problem, of course, but a problem that is simple to solve. The education system just needs to be turned back 50 years or so – with a few adjustments so that everyone can get on their right shelf.
At the same time, the children need to regain their identity so that they feel the immediate joy of being part of a larger – homogeneous – community. Young people are victims in the sense that their future has been taken away from them. The safe and secure world the rest of us grew up in has been transformed into a value-free, relativistic, multi-ethnic and multicultural cabinet of horrors, where today’s youth may very well risk losing out to other groups that possess absolute values, an identity, a faith and a culture that gives them strength – but this identity is unfortunately not Danish, nor will it ever be.
Young people are led to believe that they are living in the best age the world has ever seen – but unfortunately the reality is quite different and in the not too distant future, civil war looms. In this context, it’s hardly surprising that an increasing number of children and young people are seeking psychiatric treatment, suffering from eating disorders, cutting themselves or committing suicide – all things that were virtually unknown 50 years ago.
Only a radical change in society can remedy this!
Povl H. Riis-Knudsen
Translated by means of AI
Danmarks Frihedsraad 
