High School: Pivotal?

Throughout the years, humankind has brought up many difficult questions-questions that depend on each person, with no completely unified answer. Among those is this: When was/is/will be the most important moment of your life?

This question is a bomb. This is a question that is difficult to answer and maybe even impossible to answer, since we do not know everything that will happen to us in our lives. But could it be that amid all the milestones placed through the course of a person's life, high school is the most pivotal of them all?

Due to the specificity of this question as opposed to the previous inquiry, it is possible to classify the responses into three categories: 1) yes, high school is the most important moment of a person's life, 2) no; high school is not the most important moment of a person's life and lastly, 3) a mixture of yes and no.

Some would argue yes. After all it is the gap of time in which teenagers must bridge the gap between being a child versus being an adult. Parents start giviing their adolescents adult responsibilities for the first time, such as driving, taking care of children, and working a job. It is the time where we first learn how to lead the rest of our adult lives.

Education also begins to hold more weight than ever before. Colleges pay most of their attention-if not all of their attention-to a student's performance in secondary education. High school is the primary foundation for what we decide to do for the rest of our lives. Doing well in high school leads to getting into college, and doing well in college leads to getting a good job, and having that solid profession makes it easier for a person to support themselves financially in life. What one does in high school influences a lot of what happens in our future.

Another could contend that while high school may be important, it is not the most pivotal. One cannot assert that a certain point in a person's life is the most important without experiencing all of it first. According to Karen Elizaga, founder of Forward Options, many successful people did not do well in high school and still managed to achieve the jobs and the lives that they wanted. While some may have high school as their most influential point in their life's history, others have getting a job, getting married, divorcing, having a loved one pass away, raising a child, their midlife crisis. Plenty of other things could easily be a person's turning point.

The third perspective on the influence of high school is a combination of both of the answers above. The emphasis on this perspective is that the most important time of anyone's life is NOW. If high school be what is currently your present, then it indeed is the most important moment of your life. The present is the only point in time where anyone has any control over his or her life. One cannot do anything about the past, whatever has happened is unerasable. One cannot do anything in the future because likewise with the past, that person will always be stuck in the present. Therefore, every moment of life is pivotal, every moment wherein someone takes control of life is important.

This documentary topic is aiming to provoke viewers into thinking about what they're doing with their present moments and to consider how important those moments are. This theme is particurally directed toward teens in order to make the most of their high school experience.