PM Charges Youth to Lead New and Higher Standards of Behaviour

Prime Minister the Hon. Bruce Golding has emphasised the need for young people to establish new standards of right and wrong for their own age, and for their elders to give them the opportunity to do so.
He was speaking on Thursday (May 28) at the American International School of Kingston, when he told the Graduating Class of 2009, “Society has become ambivalent about morals and values. You are facing a world that is no longer anchored as safely and securely as it used to be in terms of the values and the norms and the cultures that hold it together… I want to charge you as young people to help to establish, to secure and to cement, new standards of behaviour, new qualities of relationships and a new understanding of right and wrong.”
More than 70 per cent of the class of ten girls and four boys have been accepted to colleges, but the Prime Minister noted that success was more than getting good grades, “Be trailblazers, not just in the excellence of your academic pursuits, not only in the grades that you achieve as you go to college, but in the kind of consensus that you create about what is wrong and what is right and the direction in which we ought to go, how we measure our behaviour and our conduct, and how we respond to different situations and how we relate to each other.”
Urging the youth to embrace responsibility and become leaders, he said that he trusted them to do well.
“We must call on our young people to take responsibility and if I may say this to people of my generation, we must also get out of the way to allow them the space to take responsibility. It is not that they are unwilling or, it is not that they are incapable of doing that, it is that I do not think that we are doing enough to encourage them and to position them to take responsibility. Give them the space to take charge. I have every confidence that if we do that, the world and its future will be in safe hands.”