A millennial ranting about millennial cry babies.
I’m reminded of young adventurers who settled the West and invented American football because they thought their generation was turning into “pussies” compared to their parents seeing the nation through a Civil War. The old-timer lamenting the decline of youth is an old cliché. Less recognized but at least as common is the frustrated youngster railing at their “lazy, stupid, weak” peers.
New words, same old tune.
Yes, we’ve lost some things and we’ve gained some things. But personally what I want to see us as a culture develop isn’t something we ever had in any great supply…self-actualization. I look at those who are changing the world, not just the superstars, but the “music makers…the dreamers of dreams…movers and shakers,” and what I see are people who embraced the knowledge at their fingertips - the work of generations of scholars and scientists and artists and disadvantaged upstarts whose thirst and curiosity prevailed against adversity they sought to remove from the path of future generations. I see people who perceive there not a stymieing overload, but an endless cornucopia of opportunity.
A handful of self-actualized people born to privilege or good fortune or simply possessed of indomitable spirits have always added to that richness of humanity’s legacy. Now in the crucible of the 21st Century our civilization faces its greatest existential threats since the Toba event took a good swipe at expunging our prehistoric ancestors, and hence us, from the fossil record. Now more than ever we need more of those self-actualized people.
I’m not saying everyone needs to revolutionize the world. I’m saying our best chance for survival and prosperity is in giving as many people as we possibly can the opportunity and the belief in their own potential not to fulfill some static version of the American Dream, but to carve their own niches instead of waiting for places to be prepared for them. Give someone a choice between careers defined by others and they’ll try to figure out where they’ll be least unhappy. Give them knowledge and train them to appreciate being in control of their lives, and they’ll try to make something out of themselves. But give them an inflexible college education without any appreciation for connecting the dots of their own life, and don’t be surprised when you get a generation of lost boys and girls bouncing through majors like pinballs through a dizzying machine.
They all need to learn a practical mentality toward quotidian affairs, to dream for themselves in their own voices whether expressed in metal, marketing, music or management, and to exercise the common sense to sit back, calm down and think before acting, then follow through without stopping to panic. But they do not all need to learn to integrate or write a sonnet. Some will thirst to learn both, as I did, and others will pursue knowledge I never even knew existed. We don’t need drones, we need practical dreamers who don’t see the adult world as their great Adversary.
To that end, as institutions created to serve the future and lift all boats, both secondary and higher ed have a mandate to offer not just a diversity of majors, but a diversity of kinds of degrees. And I’m not talking about vocational schools and two-year colleges being billed as alternate less desirable routes. I’m talking about academia itself recognizing and serving the need for a continuum of skillsets.
If anyone feels I’m being vague, I strongly encourage at least giving the following debate a chance. Even if you just give it 15 minutes (a fraction of the time it takes to watch a circus that it a presidential debate), you’ll come away with food for thought.
