Alex In Wonderland

What do you want to be when you grow up?

Some survey somewhere in good old Blighty quizzed kids from 7 - 11 (I think it was) on what type of job they wanted when they grew up.

I was shocked by the total lack of imagination and the reflection of a society where the general degeneration of values was starkly visible. When I were a lad, we had ambitions to be doctors, astronauts, racing drivers, scientists, deep sea divers, explorers, archaeologists (this was the time of Indiana Jones films), one of the Goonies - anything that sparked our imaginations!

***WARNING*** - Rambling Aside Alert!

When we were at school and Star Wars was released (we were about 6 or 7) me and my friends decided that on our work we would change our names to the various lead characters in Star Wars. So, for a whole day, I was Luke Skywalker (I was about as good an actor as Mark Hammil), my friends were Han Solo, Chewbacca, Princess Leia but no one wanted to be Ben Kenobi because they didn't want to die at the end of the day.

***RAMBLE FINISHED***

Nowadays kids want to be a Premiership footballer or a WAG, appear on Big Brother, win the lottery and most don't even have that much ambition. The overriding theme here is that they want a LOT of money, with all the accompanying chavtasticness (that's kind of like being trailer trash and wanting to be Britney Spears), but for what they perceive as doing very little (if any) work.

I had proper ambitions when I was at school. When I started thinking properly about it I wanted to be an inventor. Then as I grew older I wanted to be a navigator in the RAF (like my grandad had been), and then I wanted to be a geologist and work for a big oil company (something I considered to be worthwhile and exciting - travelling to remote places and drilling them for oil! Sheesh!). I became none of these things, but found something else instead.

I have ambitions for my children too. So long as they understand what the world is about I want them to find something interesting and worthwhile to do and make sure that they enjoy doing it. I want them to go to university and realise their ambitions, but to be able to talk to us about them and understand where their choice will take them.

Perhaps I want them to be the exception to the rule that seems to now dominate society.

Do you remember what you wanted to be when you were at school? Do your kids know what they want to be, or what you hope for them to be?

Posted by AlexC at July 17, 2007 10:37 AM