Not succeeding at school does not have to blight people for life. Schools try hard; sometimes they fail. Just like Olympic athletes, observes Elspeth McLean.
Now the Olympics are here, I am ready.
I have been training so hard I feel quite exhausted, even though at the time of writing all I have done is avoid watching any of the opening ceremony.
I didn't watch it because the colour, cacophony and choreography of such spectacles bores me senseless.
That is what I have been in training for - trying to ignore the sheer predictability of the Olympics.
There will be sportswriters brazenly working their way through their cliché collections.
By the end of it, there will have been more dramas than in the collected works of Shakespeare.
There will be triumphs and tragedies. Pointless questions will be asked if this athlete or that does not perform to the level we might have expected.
Our medals, if and when we get any, will be constantly tallied and compared with other countries' and previous years.
Everything will be analysed and agonised over when all we should really be doing, from our armchairs, is ensuring we are cosy, comfortable and with plenty of food and beverages within easy reach.
If our medal count is a record high, no-one will mention schools, but if it is low, sooner or later someone will blame them for stopping the nation's precious children from being competitive and putting too much emphasis on participation.
The few who make it to the Olympic Games may well revel in the opportunity to participate in sport but, if they didn't have the competitive urge, they would be back on the couch with the junk food like us mere mortals.
Any parent who has seen the competitive streak in a child would rightly laugh at any suggestion a school could destroy that.
Faced with children who turn any everyday event into a competition, we might have liked to see them try.
Armchair critics are generally not former Olympic athletes, so it is difficult for them to comprehend what it might be like to train for years for a moment of glory and then stuff it up.
In the same way as being a finely tuned athlete is outside most people's experience, so is any real understanding of what it is like in many a secondary school classroom these days.
Rangiora High School principal Peggy Burrows recently spoke out about Ministry of Education policy to cut numbers leaving school early and the confrontations her staff and pupils had to cope with when pupils would rather be elsewhere.
In her radio interview, she did not give much detail about such events, but anyone who has experienced the worst of teenage behaviour in schools would know how ugly, frightening and dangerous it can be.
She did not leave any impression that the school was irresponsibly trying to shove kids out because they were a bit tricky to deal with.
Special exemptions can be granted to schools allowing 15-year-olds to leave on the basis of educational problems, conduct or the unlikelihood of the pupil gaining benefit from attending available schools.
Details must be given about training programmes or employment the pupil would move on to.
More than a year ago, the ministry tightened its approval process.
In Peggy's area, she is being asked to try to get young men who are fed up with school and who could earn good money in available jobs to stay.
Why should she? Educationists will blether on about how society has changed and how people need to have (often dubious) qualifications for everything.
Some young people who stay at school go on to rack up plenty of student debt, find the la-la land jobs they wanted to do don't exist and end up doing something menial instead.
This is progress.
Not everybody wants or is suited to tertiary education, and society would not function particularly well if there were not people to do the jobs which do not require it.
If that involves allowing disruptive 15-year-olds who are driving classmates and teachers insane to go into the workforce, so what?Schools are not good places for every child, and it is simplistic to imagine they are.
An intractable teenager is a difficult beast, and children of varying ability can be turned off by schools which may be trying their best.
Sending what are politically correctly called disengaged pupils out into the big bad world early after schools have done their darnedest for them does not mean the end of learning which - and I know this is a radical thought - can occur outside formal education.
Not succeeding at school does not have to blight people for life.
Schools try hard; sometimes they fail.
Just like Olympic athletes.
Since we're probably not mature enough to grasp either concept, we should keep in training while the Games stutter on.
I recommend regular hand-wringing practice.
We could combine it with hand-washing in the ad breaks.
If nothing else, it may have the benefit of deterring any diarrhoea which is not verbal.
Let the blame begin.
Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
