Today, organized by the Youth Council, a lively dialogue took place in the Cabinet of Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova with about sixty high school students.
Difficult issues were discussed at the debate: the safety of young people in an unsafe world; media literacy in an environment of information hyperproduction; the pressure to be successful in a not always equal competition, as well as the attitude of young people towards smoking cigarettes and marijuana and developing awareness and resistance to addiction.
The young interlocutors expressed reasoned views on the causes of fear, violence and insecurity, the way of dealing with them, as well as possible solutions for reducing and overcoming them.
The President compared the conditions of her high school youth with the current ones, concluding that the youth life of her generation was far safer and more peaceful than the current one.
Regarding the issue of media literacy, young people pointed to the insufficient literacy of most of the older generations, on the one hand, but also the real inability to distinguish relevant from irrelevant information, as well as truth from falsehood, on the other hand, in a time of videocracy, information flood and chaos.
Almost all of them, regardless of the individual specifics of viewing, pointed to the need to create mechanisms for critical evaluation of what is read, seen and heard, as well as wise and careful use of artificial intelligence, given its 2 faces: the face of a useful tool, but also the threat to human thought.
The President pointed to the oversaturation of the media space with politics and the unacceptable absence of information in the fields of science, culture, education and sports.
Young thinkers spoke intelligently and openly about the heavy pressure to be successful according to not always credible standards, but also nepotistic, partisan and political influences in the evaluation.
In the series of individual views on cigarettes and marijuana, it seems as if a common view has filtered through that bans and sanctions are not always a good solution, and that awareness of the possible consequences of addiction should be built from the earliest school days. The most important thing for everyone is that, instead of giving lessons about the future that will belong to young people, they must be involved in creating policies and deciding about the present.
