Remember when that kid ate a poison mushroom and spewed in English class?

What the loss of 'third spaces' means for teenagers

Life got a bit busy this week, so I’ve recruited a guest writer! My sister Tamara (who is also very often my subeditor…) reflects on a truly sublime highschool experience.

I’ll be back next Monday!

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Once upon a time in high school, a classmate of mine was dared to eat an unidentified mushroom growing wild in the bushland in order to “see what would happen.”

What happened - predictably - was a period of increasing nausea and sweatiness, followed by a mad dash from English class and a *spectacular* projectile vomit.

Cheering ensued.

This potentially fatal act remains the most striking example of selfless scientific inquiry I have ever witnessed, worthy of either a detention or a Nobel, because for certain my friend knew the risks.

Teenagers might be stupid, but they’re not stupid - if you know what I mean.

As anecdotes go, it wasn’t exactly a crowd-pleaser with responsible adults at the time, and it takes on new shades of terror in light of recent events. Poisonous fungi have taken hold of Australia’s collective consciousness as though it’s a decomposing wet log and they’re… well… fungi.

If there’s a single person left in this country who thinks that experimentally chowing down on mystery mushrooms is a good idea, I hope they are reading this so that I can personally say to them - don’t.

Don’t do it. It is a really, really, really bad idea. A “could very probably kill you” bad idea.

Once again! Don’t do it.

With those disclaimers out of the way, I feel honour bound to confess that, in six enervating years of rote learning, crippling boredom and claustrophobic, dispiriting rules, my friend’s act of idiotic, nihilistic heroism remains a treasured highlight.

And doesn’t that just tell us something about the state of education for teenagers in this country.

Teenagers are a feared and maligned underclass of human in western society. If this was true when I was in school, things have only become worse in subsequent decades.

So called “third spaces” for teens - parks, malls, arcades, skate parks and youth clubs - which were already in decline during my time, scarcely exist today.

My generation turned to the internet to meet the need for territory of our own. A veritable buffet of largely-benign websites for young people gave us room to explore our burgeoning identities without unwarranted adult supervision.

Even this avenue for decompression and self-expression is now denied to Australia’s youth, as our government inserts itself between teens and their computers, determined to cut the problem off at its destination rather than the source.

In response to this and other stressors, teens are emphatically showing us that they are not ok. Teachers report increasing gender divides and troubled behaviour in the classroom. School refusal remains an issue nationwide. Health professionals report alarming, unprecedented rates of teen depression and anxiety.

Teenagers might do idiotic, dangerous things at times, but these acts don’t happen in a vacuum. If my generation, which grew up in a relative utopia, was driven to bizarre, nihilistic acts by the pressures of our environment - what the hell can we expect from today’s teens?

Unless we start listening to teens and giving them more control of their environment and destinies - we’re going to find out.

And as adults - I guarantee, we won’t like it.