It’s been a while since I’ve made a post. That’s changing. Unfortunately, I didn’t want to make a post that wasn’t correlated with my writing, but I suppose this is tangentially connected. In any event, it certainly raised my bile, enough so that I felt compelled to RAMBL!
I subscribe to Newsweek. When the latest issue arrived, I noticed on the cover a headline touting “What Kids Don’t Know” and I was intrigued. My intrigue quickly turned to anger when upon flipping to page 42 I realized that this was an article touting a new book by a so-called intellectual (Mark Bauerlein, Professor of English at Emory University) titled The Dumbest Generation: How The Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30). While the article largely dismissed the book as a premature evaluation of a generation that is largely unappreciated, it also managed to slip in some backhanded insults of the cohort whose fringes I occupy (I’m technically a Gen X baby, but since I’ve grown up as a tweener straddling both Gen X and Y with friends and colleagues mainly in Gen Y, I feel a close bond and kinship to that group).
The fact that there’s actually a book dedicated to something as asinine as whether or not someone believes a generation of children is vapid and without substance is offensive enough, but more disturbing is that this man seems to be parroting the consensus opinion of Baby Boomers and older generations. One might think that these people would learn from their pasts and see that the accusations leveled against the young generation of today bears more than a passing resemblance to the arguments that their parents’ generation made against them and that their grandparents’ generation made against their parents. But apparently this fell beyond his scope for the book and so the task falls to people like myself to respond and call Mark and those like him to the carpet. With that in mind, I’d like to address some of the issues that are commonly raised and my rebuttal which is completely unscientific and based on interactions with friends and colleagues, personal experiences, some printed articles, and whatever else could be culled from my mental flotsam.
The first and most common claim: this generation is dumb… the dumbest, in fact, according to Prof. Bauerlein and many of his ilk. Superficially, this appears to be true. However, one must take time to examine the source of this information as well as the causes of how this could come to be the case. First, how do people get an education? Aristotle claims that learning comes from the places you visit, the people you meet, and the books you read. In the modern world, that translates into school, friends, and parents.
Frankly, one group bears the greatest part of the blame, and that group is named in the previous sentence: the parents. Not only are parents a part of the high-and-mighty generation that seems to think they are fit to call us out, but they are the ones that spent (or should have spent, rather) time raising us to instill values and impart knowledge. Does that make them the greatest failures? Possibly, if Mark’s logic is correct. Not only are parents responsible for raising their children, but they also play a great role in choosing what schools their child attends and the friends that they are allowed to keep. If a parent is upset with any of the choices their child made with regard to those things, they have no one to blame but themselves for not taking a more active role in their child’s growth and worrying more about how to remodel the kitchen or keep up with the Joneses by committing both parents’ time to a full-time job to pay down their enormous credit debt.
Friends are a little more nebulous and difficult to pin down, but ultimately, it’s the job of the parents to monitor and control the kind of company that their child keeps. If this means going to their kids’ day care, so be it. If that means taking in the media that their child consumes, do it. Older adults should think back to their own childhoods. Friends were some of the greatest forces that shaped them. Nothing has changed, especially with the connectedness of today where if a child so desires (and parents allow it), they can spend all day in constant contact with friends.
With the parents and friends spoken for, let’s move on to the greatest failure (in this author’s estimation) of modern society: education. Schools today are trash. Period. With all of the ballyhoo surrounding benchmarks and standardized testing, no one learns anymore unless it’s for a test. Teaching for a test is the educational equivalent of forcing kids to run wind sprints. Not only is it unpleasant, it sears forever a connection between punishment and activity. With testing, there is such a deluge of material that needs to be covered that kids memorize some choice facts for recall in a few months for a test rather than getting to own the information and enjoy it.
The educational system has also failed in its decision to cut programs in order to focus on testing. The fact of the matter is that not everyone wants to be an accountant or an attorney or a businessman. Some people want to be musicians and artists and writers. Some want to be personal trainers and mechanics. Some people just want to bag groceries. That’s OK. People are not a uniform body. Not everyone is interested in the same things, but rather than celebrate and nurture the differences, we focus on homogenizing the educational experience and taking out variety that could draw kids to enjoy learning. Thanks, parents.
Of course, education also fails in recognizing the most basic of needs: free time. Kids today have less free time than any generation before them. With anal parents and educators micromanaging during and after school hours to shoehorn an ever-growing bookload into a day that, yes, still only numbers 24 hours, kids have no time to themselves. Is it any wonder, then, that as they grow older and have more freedom to make their own choices that they reject most reading as a pastime in favor of doing activities with friends? Playtime and social interaction are essential pieces of growth. Not only are schools blunting the intellectual growth of youth, but they’re helping to foster a culture of social ineptitude as well and forcing kids to play on school time as it encroaches on their personal time.
The next claim is another one that is severely irritating: that younger generations are materialistic. Frankly, this is a joke. Look past the Super Sweet 16s and Sex and the Citys and take a look at who’s really driving those media vehicles: the generation of 40-somethings that produces and finances those shows. Furthermore, who’s giving these kids money to live out their ultimate birthday fantasy? Could it be their materialistic parents?!?!? With great examples like Bridezillas and shows about “real people” in Orange County or New York City, it’s no wonder that impressionable young minds are being lead astray due to the machinations of a group of people that looks to exploit them financially. The generation that abhors youth also relies on the same Gen X-and-Y-ers to continue soaking up their empty messages and agendas of style over substance in order to fund their bloated middle-aged lifestyles and sprawling suburban growth.
Along with that financial exploitation, take a look at a much more subtle sort of hint that the author drops, and in the title of his book no less: The Dumbest Generation: How The Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30). So the truth comes out, which is something that is tacitly implied all of the time but rarely verbalized. Namely, that these people aren’t content with exploiting youth now… they want to continue exploiting youth for the rest of their lives. These are the people that are very happy with the way that Social Security runs now because they know that it will work for as long as they’re around, and to hell with everyone that comes later. Who’s the materialistic cohort now? Never mind the complete gap between perception and reality that has America’s older generations cash-strapped and overextended. In part, it’s this sense of entitlement that feeds this resentful and despicable perception of younger generations.
The last and most egregious of the complete fallacies perpetuated by older generations is that younger generations are lazy. Reality could not be further from this assertion. The truth is that youth aren’t lazy, they’re just not motivated by the same things as other generations. They are less worried with what elders think of them. They don’t care if some man in the corner office that accounts for 25% of a company’s payroll and 1% of a company’s output has ridiculous demands that can’t be delivered upon. Gen Y professional apathy doesn’t just exist as a character flaw, though. It’s rooted in a general unhappiness that older generations have weened them on a lie, or a series of lies, rather. Now they find themselves alone in the real world where the rules always change and no one tells it straight.
As children, this generation was led to believe that if they work hard enough, they can achieve anything. Elders held themselves up as shining examples. The reality when the youth hit the workplace, however, is that of a boring job void of challenge and reward where someone 20-30 years their elder will sponge off of their work for the next ten years while offering little room for upward advancement. To simplify, adults promised youth cookies and gave them dog shit. In retrospect, Gen X and Y’s attitude towards work is as much personal resentment as it is apathy. Frankly, based on the listless, drab middle-aged coworkers that surround them, putting in as much or more effort as older, more experienced “peers” and getting nothing in return seems like a pretty raw deal. The workplace environment is one that currently in large part is based on tenure rather than performance, and younger generations aren’t wired that way. The setup offends their most basic instincts. Hollow gratitude and empty exhortations of “how tough you had it when you were our age” doesn’t count for compensation.
To close, it’s obvious that Gen X and Gen Y aren’t dumb. Rather, they’re disgusted. When the world around a group is as baseless and illogical as the one that constantly bombards the current generation of youth, it’s no wonder that they tune everything out that is presented to them as noise and focus on things that are interesting to them. Honestly, the state of modern media has disgusted many to a point that they no longer watch television or listen to the radio. These brave souls choose to forge their own future rather than take what the crass middle management offer and smile no matter how foul it smells. When one takes time to consider what younger generations are tuning out, they might conclude that youth are the only sane ones around. At the very least, looking to the older generations for guidance seems like a case of the blind leading the blind.