I for one treasure my black-hole of decadence and personal irresponsibility. As a child of the 60’s, turned into a semi-responsible over-acheiving Boomer I can’t wait for early retirement so I can revisit my BHoDaPI. I have a card (sent to me by sinkid the older, who knows me well) on my fridge that says: “I’m thinking of becoming a mentor for people who want to be less responsible.”
Hehehehehehe, all you youngsters thought Boomer’s were bad when we were young. Wait till we all retire; I predict we will acheive new heights in meism. The current younger gen’s self-centeredness will seem pale in comparison.
Ditto. I think it’s very easy for folks to blame the institution for not disciplining students hard enough, lowering expectations while heaping praise, etc etc, but I can tell you one thing, that kids respond much more directly to how their parents treat them than their teachers.
If young adults today are more “self-centered” (and I’m not sure that all symptoms of such a malady are such a bad thing), then I guarantee that schools are the least of the causes.
There are a lot of parents out there these days that are openly advocating that their kids disregard authority (sometimes in general, sometimes any authority other than their parents), and this is a big part of what causes some of those problems, IMO. It seems like there’s lots more kids who are steamrolling their parents to get their way (regardless of whether it’s good for them or not) than I remember when I was their age. I also don’t ever remember any of my peers’ parents calling up and demanding grade changes and the like because “Little Johnny HAS to have an A!” or other such nonsense.
Well, for what it’s worth, I finished college in 1999. Here’s a book for you to read: You Can’t Say You Can’t Play by Vivian Gussin Paley. This is just one of the lovely nurturing books education students were being taught at the end of the 90s. This book was part of a required course - Special Issues: Moral Perspectives in Education - unfortunately, the topic of the special issues wasn’t announced until the class began. Bet you didn’t know that whether or not schools should be teaching morals is (was?) a hot topic too, not just self-esteem. The oft-repeated motto of the class was “we must educate, not indoctrinate” for which there are not eyerolls enough :dubious:
This brings to mind something else I have noticed in families where the parents are only a few years older than me (born in the mid- to late-70’s): politeness and courtesy aren’t seen as virtues to be practiced every day; they are an “act”, put on in order to garner a reward.
In my family, the little things mattered; we were expected to speak to one another with respect, in pleasant tones, and name-calling was NEVER tolerated. We didn’t demand that our parents do us favours, like drive us places; we asked politely knowing that they might say no, and if they did say no, we let it go, unless it was REALLY important to us, then we would talk it over and negotiate and compromise.
Things weren’t perfect, but there was always an undercurrent of mutual respect and reasonable accommodation that was the foundation of our family unit; it was integral.
I go to visit people and see families on reality tv shows who don’t have that, and it makes me nervous. I think a lot of behavioural problems in families come from the fact that everyone takes everyone else for granted and thinks they can talk to them however they want because “manners” are only for “company”.
That’s an interesting point, lola. I was born in 1966, and I was also raised with politeness and courtesy as an everyday norm, not something we put on and took off (I got my mouth washed out with soap once - for telling a sister to shut up). To this day, I don’t tell anyone to shut up unless I intend to be rude. I don’t know if this level of politeness is abnormal for my family, or if we were fairly normal for our day and things are not like this any more. We were raised to think of others, and to think of consequences for our actions. We were not raised to think only of ourselves and our immediate gratification. Of course, I wasn’t raised by Boomers, either.
Sometimes it’s funny, but it’s often irritating. We had a thread here a few months ago - I can’t seem to find it via the search engine - that was probably the most disgracefully ignorant thread in SDMB history; it was pretty much just three pages of “Kids today are stupid and don’t read.” In over a hundred posts not a single reliable and meaningful peice of evidence was presented, but it was just taken as gospel. When I challenged the posters to show why kids were stupid and ignorant, it was simply “Well, I just know it’s true.” And it’s already starting in this thread.
Children today are just as polite as they used to be.
They’re just as smart.
They’re just as considerate.
They are no more violent, criminal, or immoral than children of the past.
Their attention spans are not shorter.
If you think you and your peers were better, you’re wrong. You’re either not being honest with yourself, or your memory is failing.
My grandfather was a school principal from about the mid-20s to the 1950s, and he got a few calls like that. My dad clearly remembers an incident sometime in the 1930s, when a student’s father stormed up to the house and basically challenged my GP to a fight. (My dad says that when my GP, who had worked in a slate quarry before becoming a school principal, took off his suit coat, the challenge was withdrawn.) I’m not sure how typical that was (it was a small community) but it would surprise me to find that irate parents were unheard of pre-“these days”, although they probably were less common.
it’s easy to pick evidence on both sides of this issue. But I’d like to suggest one empirical measure: enlistments in the army.
There are a million reasons why people enlist, and many of those reasons are self-centered (to get college tuition, etc.) But even if today’s 18 year old is a selfish egotistical brat, he’s still volunteering to wear a uniform in time of war. Which is more than certain previous generations did.
What **RickJay ** said. You only have to think about it objectively for about 2 seconds to realise that:
1/ Older people have always said that “young people of today” are irresponsible and self centered and impolite compared to them (and that young women of today wear more provacative clothing and have looser morals than in their day)
2/ These pronouncements simply can’t be correct: if they were then by now “young people of today” would virtually autistic (and young women would be stark naked and having sex 100% of the time). You can’t just go on with a distinctive trend for generation after generation without bottoming out.
3/ Therefore, all or at least virtually all previous pronouncements in the past about “young people of today” must have been wrong.
4/ In all probability, older people of today are no more correct on the issue than older people in the past.
There is precious little reason to believe that young people today are much different to young people of yesterday. There is however a massive and growing body of evidence (to which this thread is contributing) that old people perceive young people to be less responsible etc than they were when they were young.
Aside: I have worked at my firm for close to two decades. I can remember what some of the now senior administrative staff (now with teenage children) were like when they were 16 or 17 and working here as junior secretaries etc. I overheard a discussion in the tearoom a few months back in which a bunch of them were clucking and tsking about “young women of today” and how outrageously skimpy the outfits their daughters attempted to go out in were. I nearly made some comment to the effect that if certain young women I recall from certain after work occasions many years ago could be regarded as setting the benchmark for acceptable evening wear, and if those women’s daughters now wore *less * than that benchmark, their clothing budget would be nil. But I bit my tongue.
<–retired sinjin on the beach demanding my SS, health care, pina colada, etc.