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Slapping labels on younger generations can only backfire
(by David Linzee - May 21, 2008)
This is the season of commencement ceremonies. As tradition demands, parents and professors are gathering to praise the young for their accomplishments. This year, though, it’s a safe bet that many will be muttering that the young have already been praised too much for accomplishing too little.
A wave of exasperation with today’s youth has been breaking in the media lately. “America’s educational industrial complex has worked tirelessly to make our kids think the most of themselves regardless of their accomplishments,” grouses Jonah Goldberg of the National Review. “Teach a kid that merely having a pulse is a major accomplishment, and he’ll carry that lesson for the rest of his life.” Mother Jones reporter Dave Gilson notes that high-school seniors’ grades have been rising while their reading levels have been sinking for years, and that even at Harvard, grade inflation is running rampant: half the grades given are As.
When the National Review and Mother Jones agree on something, you have to call it a broad-based trend.
My generation’s disappointment with our children goes deeper than journalistic sarcasm. Earnest social scientists and prestigious foundations have been compiling the facts and figures. The average teen spends 186 minutes a weekend day watching television and only 26 minutes reading, states the National Endowment for the Arts. The National Commission on Writing reports that 30 percent of employees at the nation’s top companies write poorly, and their employers are spending billions on remedial training. Building students’ self-esteem was supposed to motivate learning, but it’s had the opposite effect, concludes a much-discussed study from San Diego State University entitled “Generation Me.” The titles of current books, in fact, tell the whole story: The Age of American Unreason and The Dumbest Generation. Harvard researcher Rick Hess told USA Today, “There is this kind of Aren’t We Stupid? industry,” and he thinks it has gone too far.
I agree. Sure, I’m worried about how little the young read and write, but those same studies show that the middle-aged don’t do much better. And I work with college students every day. Some drive me to distraction, but others are bright, hard-working and not waiting for compliments.
Before we write the whole generation off as dumb and smug, we should pause to remember that elders have always complained about the young. We should consider that the elders’ doubts that the young are up to handling the future may be mixed with a certain amount of resentment that the future belongs to them and not us.
Our generation, in fact, has less right than previous ones to grumble that these kids today have it so much easier than we did. We’re boomers. Or to use our more contemptuous name, Spock babies.
Recently I dug up a copy of Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care just to check on the standard of parental sternness in the ’50s: “Doctors who used to conscientiously warn young parents against spoiling are now encouraging them to meet their baby’s needs for comfort and loving.”
This may be a bit of a shock to some of my contemporaries, who seem to be confusing memories of their early life with an old Masterpiece Theatre production of Oliver Twist. They’ll be even more startled to be reminded that once they got to school, they weren’t flogged as often as they thought. Protecting the self-esteem of students didn’t start in the ’70s, contrary to myth. “Don’t scold or punish a child who has difficulty with lessons,” wrote Spock. “The child who lacks confidence needs chances to succeed … the child who seems to be lazy has to have his enthusiasm discovered.”
Pampered in the ’50s, we were exalted in the ’60s. In contrast to the journalists of today who rail against the young, Time magazine in 1966 made the 25-and-under generation Man of the Year and gushed about his future: “He is the man who will land on the moon, cure cancer and the common cold, lay out blight-proof, smog-free cities, enrich the underdeveloped world and, no doubt, write finis to poverty and war.” (Time did realize there were women 25 and under, but mostly ignored them.)
It didn’t take us long to disappoint those expectations. In the ’70s, our elders bitterly regretted how they’d coddled us. Vice President Spiro Agnew denounced Spock, who by that time was leading protests against the Vietnam War, as “the father of permissiveness.” The Rev. Norman Vincent Peale slammed us as undisciplined, immoral and hooked on instant gratification.
It was easy enough to ignore those jibes once. But now we’re middle-aged, and we haven’t cured cancer, and the angry words of our elders have come back to haunt us. We think, of course, our kids are lazy and full of themselves — what else would you expect from the offspring of the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll generation? Underlying today’s rancor at the young, I suspect, is the self-doubt of the middle-aged.
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