Brighton skater boy Jake is studying for his GCSEs despite being expelled from a top Indian school during a TV experiment.
Jake, pictured skateboarding at The Level in Brighton before heading to the Doon School in northern India, fell foul of the disciplined environment there.
And he had already missed his final two years of school in Brighton and Hove, according to the Channel 4 programme Indian Summer School.
Since returning home, Jake, 19, has left home, lived under the roof of a friend’s mum and most recently moved into a flat of his own.
He aims to take GCSEs in the summer while continuing to enjoy skateboarding in his spare time.
Doon head teacher Matthew Raggett agreed to take five British boys for the televised experiment filmed over six months – but only two stayed the course.
And while Mr Raggett recognised Jake’s charisma and verbal fluency, he threw Jake out for skipping lessons and breaking the school rules.
Two other boys chose to go home before the six months were up.
Despite the effort put in by the teachers at Doon – sometimes described as India’s Eton – none of the boys ended the experiment with the grades that they wanted.
Jake said on Twitter that the three-part documentary had been edited to show him in a bad light but that he would surprise people.
Sitting his exams and getting good grades could be the start of Jake proving his doubters wrong.
Indulgent parenting in the present era is producing weakling adults incapable and unwilling to take on responsibilities outside their own pleasure in far too many cases.
Parents have a duty to equip their kids for survival as adults in this world. Sadly parents in India and China appear to be better placed to achieve this because it is THEIR kids who are now excelling and THEIR countries streaking ahead economically.
Time to turn off the tv, time to get back to a 10pm bed time and time to get back to using the weekend to party, stay out late, have fun…and not treat weekday nights as available for entertainment till all hours. It’s about the survival instinct! Its about self respect and looking after ourselves too.
I feel pity for these kids who have no idea how crippled their adult lives risk becoming because of the decisions they are ALLOWED to make now, have habitually been allowed to make. Learning to ‘apply’ ourselves, to deny distractions and corral social impulses is really hard as a kid. I feel so sorry for them in the age of information overload and hyper-stimulation.
One or two non-achieving kids transcend their childhood failures but most do not. Without the basic equipment from schooling, how can they?
Well I hope Jake is man enough to knuckle down now and, if so, that his hard work is rewarded. The boys were a dismal advert for the way we bring our children up. In spite of how it sounds, this is not a personal criticism of the five boys on the show, and it’s not just their parents. This is a much bigger problem.
The headmaster and his staff looked as though they combined kindness, courtesy and tolerance with positive values like hard work, rigour and determination. Even if the boys never sit another exam, we can only hope they start to learn the resilience and tenacity and sense of duty we should be distilling in our children from an early age. While it’s important to show children they are loved, in itself it’s not enough.
And let’s bring back the birch and national service while we’re at it.