Problems with youth today...

[WrathOfDeadguy]

Ah... one of my hot-button issues. Apologies for the wall'o'text I'm about to vomit all over y'all.

 

Unfortunately, I have to count myself among the current generation of disaffected youth. I was raised right, that's for sure, but of late I've become so disillusioned with the way the world works that it's bordering on open contempt. Here's why:

 

Beginning around when I was hitting middle school, the System began to rely more on standardized testing than on the subjective grades given by teachers. While that solved some problems, it created many more to replace them- favoritism holds a lot less influence over grades and career field choice than it used to, but it also severely limits the teacher's in-classroom options for how to instruct, and also on how much content to include in the curriculum. By the time I got to high school, it had already reached a point where fully one third of every major class was spent not on teaching material, but on test preparation. Junior year was the worst, as students faced not only preparation for the SATs but also for the HSPAs, and this was also back when the ACTs were beginning to come into their own as a rival to the SAT. That's three major testing events, one required for graduation, one for college admission, and the third a huge bonus to one's chances of college admission. Keep in mind, that doesn't take into account the time spent in test prep for other, lesser exams which determined course grades- and this was before they went and added a third SAT section, and before the ACT became pretty much mandatory as well.

 

All of this works out just fine and dandy for the majority of the population, mind you- every generation is dominated by linear thinkers, people who process thought and action in a highly structured fashion. This is not so great for us nonlinear thinkers, who get pretty much screwed because the system is now entirely dependent upon highly structured curriculums focusing on lecture/memorization techniques, leaving very little room for open-ended discussion formats and other alternative teaching styles that just work better for folks like me. I never took a single page of notes throughout high school, and it never harmed my ability to absorb information... but it did cost me 5% or even 10% of some grades because some joker of a bureaucrat decided to require that note-taking skills be included in the scoring system. Likewise with homework- I nearly failed several classes despite learning the material better than other students who got higher grades. The end result was that I had a very poor impression of the education system in general by the time I graduated.

 

That's where I discovered another stumbling block- imposed debt load. While I had the good fortune of coming from a fairly well off family, many of my friends did not. As I understand it, this was a problem for previous generations... but never to such an extent as today. I know people who have more than fifty thousand in debt from loans because the cost of attending college- not because they're financially irresponsible, but because it is virtually impossible to not go into debt if your parents didn't set aside your tuition in advance... and it's even worse for lower middle class folks, whose parents might not have been able to save that much yet who are considered too well off to qualify for many of the scholarships and subsidies that folks below the poverty line have access to. These are good, hard working people who will be under a cloud of debt possibly for the next several decades, because they were convinced that the only way to get where they want in life is to get a college degree... which leads me to the third hurdle...

 

...credential value inflation. You may have heard it said before that a college degree is today what a high school degree was a few decades ago. It's true... but the amount of time, effort, and money that goes into it hasn't decreased to compensate. My generation has to work twice as hard under far more pressure because of the aforementioned debt load and the tendency of academics to be treated by the professional world as a competition. Lots of people work well under pressure. Lots of people don't. Also, the prospect of losing another four years to get to the same socioeconomic status just falls somewhere short of the bright, enlightened future of education and opportunity that is always touted on TV ads. The truth is not that shiny.

 

In fact, the truth is pretty bloody dismal. Because of the aforementioned inflation of credentials, a college degree really is treated like a high school degree... but only by employers who require higher education. Other employers, service-oriented jobs, retail, and so forth, treat a college degree as overqualificiation. Out of all of my friends who graduated, precisely one is currently employed in a position related even peripherally to his degree. Nobody else was able to secure employment in their field because every single potential employer required experience in the field as a prerequisite for even entry-level jobs. To further compound the problem, because a college degree makes one overqualified for jobs which still require only a high school degree, many of those employers were put out of reach as well. The end result is a higher rate of unemployment as thousands upon thousands are spat out of the system every year with no prospect of finding gainful employment. I dropped out at the end of my junior year of college because of an illness in the family... and I've since decided not to go back because, frankly, my outlook is much better with only a high school degree.

 

Since a college degree is treated by the 'higher' career fields as today's equivalent of a high school degree, it stands to reason that a graduate degree is today's equivalent of a college degree. Also true. Of my graduate friends, fully half of them (about a dozen people) have gone back to school in order to get their Masters or Doctorate, which further increases their debt load, in the hopes that a graduate degree will actually allow them to find a bloody job with which to pay it all off with. That's no guarantee, but at least it lets them defer payment of their college loans until they get their graduate degree.

 

Hopefully, you've all begun to see the problem here. Now, I can't speak for the other side of the spectrum, where you'd find the folks whose greatest aspiration is gang life, but there is a damned good reason why my generation is so pissed off at those who came before us. We are not the ones who broke the system. We are the ones who are going to have to fix it... but we can only do that if we can make it through that severely broken system first- and every single year, the entire government, from the White House to the school boards, makes it harder and harder for each successive graduating class to clear the bureaucratic ad economic hurdles in our path.

 

This is all, of course, just my experience and my observation. Perhaps there's someone else who'll post about how wonderfully the System worked for them and how they just graduated and got a great job doing exactly what they always wanted. There is a tendency, however, in the media- all forms of media- to ignore inconvenient problems with how our modern society works. You will always see loads of airtime dedicated to extolling the virtues of a great education (note that "education" has become a synonym of "credentials" and "money" in our lexicon)... remember that this is at least in some part because the people running all of the media giants all have such degrees, and in many cases are receiving very large sums of money from the institutions that offer them.

 

All this crap about today's youth being disrespectful... I know all too well that a lot of today's youth lack respect for older generations because they've been so thoroughly screwed by them. Today's professional doesn't need a higher level of expertise in order to do his job... just an additional degree or two, amounting to years sunk into what is ultimately a mark in a checkbox. There are lots of other causes; nothing is ever as simple as a single issue, and I can't stand hearing how it's all because parents can't beat their kids, or because kids have too much access to shiny crap and don't spend enough time with their noses on the grindstone- those are peripheral causes at worst. Yes, it should be legal to spank Junior when he breaks the front window with his baseball, but Daddy's inability to whack him firmly on the bottom is not the reason why he felt the need to get piss drunk and stupid and wind up in jail. Acting out on that level occurs because of far deeper, more serious concerns when it occurs on such a widespread scale as what we're witnessing today.

 

Far more important is the issue of motivation, and I'm sorry to say that it is terribly hard to feel motivated about "moving up in the world" when it takes twice as long and costs twice as much for what is ultimately the same result. Also of greater significance is the utter contempt with which young people in general are treated- we are routinely ignored as a voting population, overwhelmed by older folks with different agendas and a hell of a lot more resources to draw on. We are constantly blasted in the media for such idiotic things as preferring different forms of entertainment from the ones our parents had at our ages. We are used as lab rats for every new social experiment that comes down the pipe, burdened by restrictions on our financial and personal affairs, higher insurance premiums that we cannot afford to pay, effectively prohibited from doing many things which older people take for granted until we reach certain ages well after becoming legal adults, and routinely screwed and taken advantage of as a matter of policy by the very institutions which exist to prepare us for professional life.

 

To add a little personal experience flavor to that last bit- I'm 24 years old. I cannot afford to pay my own health or car insurance because the rates are stupidly high- I am in excellent health, god shape, I have a perfect driving record, and absolutely zero run ins of any kind with any kind of authorities. My father, who has been in several accidents (none his fault, but accidents nonetheless), has severe and sometimes crippling back pain, an ulcer, and possible cardiac issues, has lower insurance premiums than I do. Why? Because premiums are primarily determined by a sorting algorithm dominated by the factors of age and level of education, not by individual risk factors. If it weren't for my father's generosity, I wouldn't be legally able to drive because I live in a state where it is illegal to not carry car insurance. I would also have trouble accessing medical services because many of them require insurance as well. And I'm still better off than most of my friends who did graduate from college.

 

No, I do not believe my generation would do any better of a job running the show than the folks who are doing it now. I don't think anyone could fix the mess we're in at this point, short of a global nuclear war hitting the civilization reset button on the entire first world. However, don't be so quick to pin every problem related to today's youth on today's youth when much of it stems from a slow but steady shift in government and corporate policies that started many, many years ago. The worst of this crap isn't our fault, or the fault of our parents, and that's the plain truth of it.

[evilneko]

Watch your auto insurance premiums plummet in the next year, two at max, pretty much guaranteed. I pay much less than my dad. In fact, I pay roughly a third. ;)

 

Anyway, re:cost of degrees. It really depends on where you go, what degree you're getting. State schools cost a fraction of what private universities do. Two year degrees can be had for chump change. A Pell grant can get you up to five grand, enough to cover half a year at most state colleges, and you can get another one every year.

 

The standardized test thing existed, but wasn't as bad in my middle/high school years. We spent a week, if that on it, and then it was over.

[ginnyfizz]

I think some of the problems experienced by the youth of today stem from the huge sense of entitlement and expectation that many of them have. In many ways this is fostered by the advertising and media culture that tells them that they must have the latest gadgets, games etc. Leading to the pursuit of crime in some cases in order to get them. The other year the employers organizations and the universities here in Britain commented on this sense of entitlement and extreme overconfidence of young people today, due to the child-centric thrust of our entire schools system. The emphasis is very much on doing your thing, on personal development, rather than skills that will be of any use in the workplace, and the way in which the emphasis has shifted from examination to continuous assessment means that they are very often ill-prepared for the cut and thrust and competitiveness of, for example, the jobs market. So you have straight A students arriving at Oxford to read English...and their professors are first having to teach them to spell and write effectively. These same students then whinge when anyone of my generation, who had to be able to spell to pass the high school exams in our day, dares to suggest that the exams have been dumbed down.

 

In my work I see both ends of the scale, but this sense of entitlement is still there. I have young lads who are barely literate (and who refuse help in that respect) and with no vocational qualifications (who will refuse vocational training when offered because they might have to travel a little distance, travel which I might add would be paid for by my organization)and yet they tell me that they will not accept a job earning less than £350 per week.

 

"No man has any rights, unless he first does his duty"

 

Bossy authoritarian politician? No indeed. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi said that. It is a saying that many would do well to heed. To get something out of life, from society, you have to contribute yourself.

[grannywils]

Oh Ginnyfizz I am so happy to say that I could not agree with you more. I don't think that I could have said it any better myself. I would add one other point. That is that when in the workplace I did find young people willing to "work", their work ethic was seriously lacking, to say the least. People in my generation went to work and did a full days' work. That's what we were paid to do. Unfortunately many of the youth of today don't have a clue about what a "full days's work" entails. Let me just back off for a moment and say that I know that their are lots of bright willing young people out their who are the exceptions to those about whom we speak. Please do not be offended. But there are many, many, many of those others that Ginny and I have both unfortunately come across. I guess I should not have said that I'm happy to say that I agree with you, as it is really a sad state of affairs, isn't it?

[monkybuttface]

I hate my generation. Do you know how often somebody my age asks me to spell something that they should be able to spell JUST FROM THE SOUND OF THE WORD?

On the topic of the work ethics of young people, while I do not yet have the ability to drive a car on my own, and I live in a highly rural area where there are no places hiring, unless you are Mexican (not being racist, I have Mexican friends), I have heard my sister, who is 22, speak of how 16 year olds always want to be the first one to leave, and how she will stay because she is after the money, she is a waitress while going to college.

I also find that most of today's youth seem to have a direct aversion to anything intelligent, I have heard many people talking about how they are stupid, and do nothing to rectify the problem, the human brain is just like any muscle, it gets stronger with use. For me it has always been that my mind is strong, but my body not so much, and because I am not LAZY I feel the need to do something about it. I am not ashamed to admit that, even though this being the Internet I could easily say I am a bodybuilder, quarterback, and have a perfect GPA (although I doubt anyone would believe me). why don't people feel the same way about weak minds?

[species5478]

This is an unfair portrait of American youth. I don't think there's a problem with my generation. So we like to have fun...and? Who doesn't? I'm more annoyed with parents who, in their insatiable need to have bigger cars, homes, and more things, brought the economy to a screeching halt, and wage wars against other nations, etc. My prospects when I finish school in a few years doesn't look all that great and I feel it's going to be up to my generation to repair the economic and social damage that has been inflicted across the globe.

 

And most of the media play that encourages violent behavior or promiscuity is done by adults. Most of the channels on TV, and on the radio, are controlled by adults. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that most of children and adolescent media has more pure content than that of adults.

 

And in my personal life, most of my friends and I have fun doing things that don't involve hurting, exploiting, or cheating on other people. But my older relatives and many of their friends are involved in various forms of debauchery. I often feel like the moral glue in my house sometimes, and a lot of my friends feel the same way. Is this what it means to be an adult? Just, disregard morality and then condemn those youth who follow in your footsteps? It's not right.

[Ghogiel]

the problem with youth today- there are just too many of them :laugh:

 

tbh, i haven't lived in the states for the best part of 2 decades. and i guess i have no opinion of the youth of today there. dunno. I do like the more liberal attitude youth have today in european countries. it's mainly 'traditional' values like homophobia, religious fundamentalism, and racism that are becoming less predomindant in the younger generations here. Even in asia as well.

 

happiness is more important than IQ. or pressing 200lbs. I've failed at being good at all 3.

 

but hey, who cares, i can juggle 7 balls. :teehee:

[ginnyfizz]

@ species5478

 

- I speak directly of my experiences with BRITISH youth, not American youth. I work with long term unemployed people of all ages, but many of them are of the younger generation. In this work, I come across the attitudes that I described. I SEE it first hand. It is not a case of making a moral judgement, it is a case of trying to fix the problems that are occasioned by the over confidence that they often have and the fact that no-one has ever said "no" to them. And yes, that is the fault of the liberal generation, their parents, and an over gentle education system. I have young people expecting to pull salaries of GB£25000 a year when they have no qualifications or experience. When I tell them "Well let's have a look at your resume" I will most often get "WTF is that...and why do I need one and I bet you wouldn't work for less than that..." Actually I do work for less than that(and I have a first class degree and years of experience). They talk only about entitlement, and not responsibility.

 

Ghogiel, I do wholeheartedly agree about the good thing about the attitudes of youth, in Europe at least, is their refusal in most cases to accept homophobia, racism and religious fundamentalism. I am not about to start a religious debate here BTW. That's not allowed. But I do share their attitude, and have personally ejected from my office people who have made racist and homophobic remarks. In this respect, the youth of today has something to teach the older people.

[monkybuttface]

Damn liberals. Also, why is it always considered "homophobic" to have an aversion to homosexuality? I have no problem with the PERSON just their LIFESTYLE, and while I do not like it, I feel that it is THEIR business if they like to cuddle up to another individual of the same gender. As long as they don't do it around me, or try to convince me to try it, i don't care. Doesn't mean I like it though. Also, I happen to be a religious man, SUE ME.

 

Why is it that in a world where tolerance is preached everywhere, nobody seems to find any for the most tolerant of all?

Those who say "I think your wrong, but I love you anyway."

[Ghogiel]

Damn liberals. Also, why is it always considered "homophobic" to have an aversion to homosexuality?

perhaps because that is part of the definition of homophobia?