Why do Drop Out Kids do Drugs?

State schooling is very much an institution where normative “middle class” and “upwardly mobile” values are taught – some say “inflicted” on the students. Around 12 years of early development is taken up with schooling on a daily basis. If a child has a problem at school it can affect their sense of self esteem and become a source of worry and distress. Children drop out early from school because they don’t get satisfaction –most have been struggling for some time before dropping out becomes their choice.

Violence in the school room is merely a coalface symptom of the conflict that exists when those with institute power use teachers to train children to be compliant and conformist to values that confront them. Kids feel the pressure when their home environment is not in tune with the dominant system. Kids can also feel under too much pressure when the home environment demands that they “do well” at school. Dropping out can be a means of rebelling against “the system”. Unless drop out kids’ find another “group” they will feel alienated and alone.

The drop- out rate from school is high for kids from marginalized social groups and ghettos. There are also drop out kids who are rebelling against both school and a home environment that they find repressing and distressing. Kids caught in a conflict will drop out from school and need to find for themselves a new and meaningful way of life.

For many drop out kids, with little or no support, achievement becomes symbolic. They see that those with power have money, so success means getting money, to do as you wish and you like.

Drop out kids can be attracted to drugs, to ease the pain of “failure”, or see in drug supply the way to earn powerful amounts of money.

Kids who drop out from school before completing final exams will find that they have “burnt their bridges” when it comes to earning mainstream money. Unless they have dropped out in order to access an artistic lifestyle, such as playing in a band, or continue to live in a supportive home environment, they will soon find that lack of a school certificate puts them at a great disadvantage in the regular work place.

Job status, income and your “value” in our society today is very much linked to academic achievement. Those who drop out early from school don’t make the first rung of the ladder. They will, unless they have special talents, need to make a living – laboring, driving, finding work at the level of the street.

Society frowns, the person feels down, and drug use can bring easy relief. Doing work that is tedious, routine and boring does little for self esteem, escape can be found in drug use.

Most drop out kids drop out because they feel that school is unrelated to their needs. Kids who don’t conform to social values as represented by state schools face expulsion and uncompromised rejection. Society does not think in terms of its own failure to accommodate the variety of individual needs.

Increasingly society is driven by those who only value people by their compliance, as cogs in a wheel, to money making enterprise. With parents in the same mode, who will listen to the need of the drop out child to simply speak out about his feelings.

Without holistic style counseling to help them to deal with their feelings – drop out kids are highly likely to turn to drug use.