I have come across an interesting Pakistani 17 year old in Australia. He has been forced to do subjects by his parents that he is neither interested in or good at in school for his HSC [Australian equivalent of FSc.] He is, I believe, an intelligent guy, but has been forced to go into a stream whih is not of his liking and was never confident of being in the first place.
He came across this thing called Open Universities Australia which is basically a distance online education system for university students which does not requre a HSC mark. He has found a course on there that suits him and he likes ** He knows he will do poorly in his subjects so he plans on doing this:
1] Waiting for his final year[this year] to end so he can apply for that course which is open entry. By then he will be ‘‘independent’’ sort of and his parents will have less control over his choices.
2] He doesn’t take his subjects seriously because he thinks he just can’t do it. He finds it hard to touch his books as he just can’t sit down for hours with a book he has no interest in. The very idea of it seems to be mental torture for him.
3] That is not to say he is completely lax on his studies. He does try to pay serious attention and study when it is even more important for him to do do. Tutoring is helping him improve slowly but steadily on a few of his subjects.
He goes to an elite private school and his parents pay fees [thankfully the fees are not as high as most private schols here] and he even received two term scholarships for his School Certificate results [equivalent to Pakistani metric] so that means that his parents did not have to pay his fees for some times. He tried to alleviate his guilt by reminding himself of this that he at least is not wasting all of his parents’money.
He plans on paying his parents back sometime in the future for all the money they are spending on him now.
He feels guilty but he is not 100 percent confident that he will pull off an outstanding final score required to gain an entrance to a good uni in a good course. So he wants to go for online study which has no requirement and this has calmed him to such an extent that he has become lax in his studies since he knows it won’t affect him in the long-run as his future is not dependant on this. The only thing keeping him from carrying out his plan straight away is family pressure as he can currently do nothing as he is under 18.
What sort of advice can I give to him?**