A report by the US Navy, both disturbing and extremely funny at the same time, describes the millenial generation as an alien life form.
The report is supposed to paint a bleak picture of the future of recruitment, with a new generation of kids that is basically “unrecruitable”. As it turned out, it paints a picture of the cluelessness of the Navy and their calcified “them commies” attitude of 5 decades ago.
It is definitely worth the read, no matter if you are into doomsday forecasting, Iraq bashing, or just in for a laugh.
Here is Wired’s take on it (with a link to the actual presentation), but it is all over the place. Feel free to find it from your favourite media feed.
A year or so ago SDMB teachers were complaining that the new generation was “coddled”, saying almost exact same thing that if you even yelled at a kid for not showing up on time or something that they wouldn’t be able to take it.
I wonder what the current crop of 18 year olds will have to deal with when they are the one’s doing the recruiting.
The company I work for in a desperate measure to get some new blood in the door recruited some high-school students. I asked the HR manager how that went. He took a serious look at me and simply said, “never again.”
True, not on my tax money, though. I found it funny and a bit scary that a study that didn’t mean to be sarcastic included gems such as “suuuuuup means what’s up” and “some of their friends might be chinese”
Nor is that what I said. Teachers see new students every year. So when they say that starting three years ago, out of their 10 or 20 year experience as a teacher that these kids are different that makes me sit up and ponder.
And there’s a point to this. While the more things change, the more they stay the same, as a culture, we are more introspective and metacognitive than our previous generations. We are aware that there’s a shift not just in our children’s culture, but in our own.
There will always be kids who have no problem figuring out how life works - that hard work and responsibility bear more rewards than laziness, and so on. There will always be kids who become hardened criminals at frighteningly young ages. There is, however, a shift that affects the large group of kids in the middle.
It’s not about blaming the kids, either. If today’s children have a much higher rate of expected entitlement, it’s because their parents and society (us) have taught them this is the way the world is. As the world becomes a safer place, we become more and more neurotic about the dangers to ourselves and our children.
Personally, I think it will be self-correcting. The habits that lead us to success don’t change very quickly, and the fact that this next generation is plugged into the Internet in ways the older generation isn’t doesn’t change the core values success depends on.
I reviewed the Powerpoint Presentation, and honestly, I don’t get where Wired and others were criticizing it. There were some solid insights there. The generation of kids they were discussing weren’t dismissed or disrespected. They were analyzed, and the writer came up with advice to help recruiters address the gulf of culture that lay between the military and the kids. After all, the military has to be able to recruit new members no matter what the culture is doing.
This thread seems very relevant to the discussion.
Being relatively young, I was mostly of the opinion that these old farts just need to get over their old fartiness and get with the times. Now I don’t know what to think.
The Navy (or any military branch) bitching about acronyms is the mother of all pots calling the kettle black. SAC COM needs to upgrade to DEF CON 4. Should probably consult MIL INT too. :rolleyes:
With the numbers of the current gen rising parabolically that wouldn’t consider joining the military, the old hippies are made to look even more prophetic. “What if they threw a war and nobody showed up?”
I bet Naval personnel blur the distinction between ‘talking’ on the radio and talking. God help us all if people began to blur the distinction between ‘talking’ on the phone and talking!
The Navy being shocked at this is also fairly amusing:
Ignoring the fact the people in charge of Navy recruitment were the people who invented the Hippie Selfish Generation Boomer Universe, this is simple reality. Anyone who finds it shocking is out there… somewhere… beyond even Hubble’s ability to track them. (Of course, joining the military doesn’t end your ability to be irresponsible. Up to a fifth of American soldiers in Vietnam were using heroin.)
