I finished reading In Defense of a Liberal Education by Fareed Zakaria. Having read two books now by different authors (coming from very different backgrounds) about "the classics", I have to say that I much preferred this second one. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison by any stretch--one book was a quasi-manual for teaching in a prescribed way, the other was an argument for why liberal arts and the humanities ought to be invested--and, in a sense--believed in.
The fifth and final chapter of Zakaria's book really made me happy. Perhaps it was an echo-chamber effect--I'm not above confirmation bias--but I felt optimistic about the students I teach and my role in the world. The other book left me disgruntled, abused, and pessimistic; this one made me hopeful. And the last part of the book is where it made the most sense to me.
In it, Zakaria goes to great lengths to describe the accusations against the "millennial generation", of which I am barely a part (having been born in '83). Nothing turns me off of a thinkpiece faster than generational blame, especially because they so often rely on ill-formed or poorly considered statistics to verify their proof, and they almost always fail to incorporate broader social movements, historical currents, and dynamic considerations that upset the faulty assumptions of the status quo. While not all generational analyses make these mistakes, a great many do, and in a viral clickbait age, mistakes get trotted about and compounded. With Zakaria, he avoids these generalizations and pushes back, though he, too, relies on statistics as solid evidences when that pathway always seems fraught to me.
Though it's only from my very small sliver of the world--and it is, indeed, quite small--I put forth this brief defense of the youth of the world right now: They're doing pretty well.
No, they're not perfect. The world they are growing up in (and, I suppose, I could say "we", but I'm looking more at the younger part of the millennial generation) is as difficult, complex, and nuanced as their parents' or grandparents' worlds. And, lest we forget, those worlds were far from perfect, too, complete with a world war, genocide, nuclear devastation, proxy wars, recessions, racial violence, political upheaval, and the rewriting of cultural paradigms. The modern world's problems are still immense and, perhaps, even more catastrophic than what the twentieth century survived, as the planet's environmental health is looking grim. What's truly and deeply different between what the youth have to endure and what their parents did is the fact that the woes of the world cannot be hidden.
If you talk to sundry generations and ask them when America was at its best, you'll likely be able to trace it to one particular time: When they were kids. Ask a baby boomer when life was best, she'll tell you the fifties and early sixties. But that time period was awash with horrendous racial violence. Nuclear obliteration was considered all but guaranteed as the Soviet Union, followed by a handful of other countries, expanded their nuclear arsenal. The early sixties saw the election of Kennedy, who, were it not for a great deal of luck and, if I had to guess, God's intervention, would have started a rather short lived World War III. The Cuban Missile Crisis was closer to all-out war than the Americans knew; the world was saved by one man, Vasili Arkhipov.
But if you were a kid growing up in the fifties, even the worry of your parents probably wasn't enough to distract you from your childhood. Sure, there were some scary days, but you likely didn't wake up with existential dread, if only because you didn't know the fine details.
Nowadays, however, everyone can learn things. Those who are slightly more aware of the world and are plugged into sundry social networks have a broader view of how large the world is, how diverse, and how cold. The sadness of life leaks into their worlds faster than in the past, and though I don't think kids "grow up faster" than they used to, they are tackling larger problems earlier than their parents anticipate--and often have to overcome these difficulties alone. It's little wonder that they would rather talk about themselves--not only is that a natural thing for kids to do, but they can amplify their voices and feel larger, contributing more than the really do through social media. Thus the virulence of ideas is a double-edged sword: One one hand, they can be cut by the news; on the other, they can feel more important and in control.
Navigating this new way of interacting and learning requires skills that the adults in their lives may not actually have. If my students are emotionally injured because they haven't yet developed the self-esteem to not worry about losing a Facebook friend or being unfollowed on Twitter, it's not a failing on their part: The adults in their lives haven't taught them the proper place social media plays in the life of a person. And the adults can't really be blamed for that, at least not entirely: They were never taught about it, either.
So we have a complicated world that is easier to access than ever before, and the people who bridge the gap--people who have embraced the technological advances but with a maturity of experience--are few and far between. There's a paucity of leadership through this kind of digital world because the experience is so new.
That's why older generations grousing about the way millennials behave strikes me as, at my most generous, as hypocritical codswallop. (That it's the millennials who have to fix the cantankerous baby boomers' cable TV when it goes out is just the ironic icing on the humble pie.) Kids these days are doing a fantastic job, overall, trying to do what no generation before them has ever done: Grow up knowing that there is a big, colorful, painful world out there, filled with joys and problems not of their own making. Millennials can see farther, but--because of their youth--not clearer, than ever before. And that's part of what my job is to do, and is really part of why we need defenders of classical, liberal arts education. It gives a person the tools needed to navigate a world as dangerous as ours is now.
Of course, this isn't to say that the older generations don't have a lot to offer the millennials, however. For example, we can definitely use their expertise when it comes to defeating Nazis.
The fifth and final chapter of Zakaria's book really made me happy. Perhaps it was an echo-chamber effect--I'm not above confirmation bias--but I felt optimistic about the students I teach and my role in the world. The other book left me disgruntled, abused, and pessimistic; this one made me hopeful. And the last part of the book is where it made the most sense to me.
In it, Zakaria goes to great lengths to describe the accusations against the "millennial generation", of which I am barely a part (having been born in '83). Nothing turns me off of a thinkpiece faster than generational blame, especially because they so often rely on ill-formed or poorly considered statistics to verify their proof, and they almost always fail to incorporate broader social movements, historical currents, and dynamic considerations that upset the faulty assumptions of the status quo. While not all generational analyses make these mistakes, a great many do, and in a viral clickbait age, mistakes get trotted about and compounded. With Zakaria, he avoids these generalizations and pushes back, though he, too, relies on statistics as solid evidences when that pathway always seems fraught to me.
Though it's only from my very small sliver of the world--and it is, indeed, quite small--I put forth this brief defense of the youth of the world right now: They're doing pretty well.
No, they're not perfect. The world they are growing up in (and, I suppose, I could say "we", but I'm looking more at the younger part of the millennial generation) is as difficult, complex, and nuanced as their parents' or grandparents' worlds. And, lest we forget, those worlds were far from perfect, too, complete with a world war, genocide, nuclear devastation, proxy wars, recessions, racial violence, political upheaval, and the rewriting of cultural paradigms. The modern world's problems are still immense and, perhaps, even more catastrophic than what the twentieth century survived, as the planet's environmental health is looking grim. What's truly and deeply different between what the youth have to endure and what their parents did is the fact that the woes of the world cannot be hidden.
If you talk to sundry generations and ask them when America was at its best, you'll likely be able to trace it to one particular time: When they were kids. Ask a baby boomer when life was best, she'll tell you the fifties and early sixties. But that time period was awash with horrendous racial violence. Nuclear obliteration was considered all but guaranteed as the Soviet Union, followed by a handful of other countries, expanded their nuclear arsenal. The early sixties saw the election of Kennedy, who, were it not for a great deal of luck and, if I had to guess, God's intervention, would have started a rather short lived World War III. The Cuban Missile Crisis was closer to all-out war than the Americans knew; the world was saved by one man, Vasili Arkhipov.
But if you were a kid growing up in the fifties, even the worry of your parents probably wasn't enough to distract you from your childhood. Sure, there were some scary days, but you likely didn't wake up with existential dread, if only because you didn't know the fine details.
Nowadays, however, everyone can learn things. Those who are slightly more aware of the world and are plugged into sundry social networks have a broader view of how large the world is, how diverse, and how cold. The sadness of life leaks into their worlds faster than in the past, and though I don't think kids "grow up faster" than they used to, they are tackling larger problems earlier than their parents anticipate--and often have to overcome these difficulties alone. It's little wonder that they would rather talk about themselves--not only is that a natural thing for kids to do, but they can amplify their voices and feel larger, contributing more than the really do through social media. Thus the virulence of ideas is a double-edged sword: One one hand, they can be cut by the news; on the other, they can feel more important and in control.
Navigating this new way of interacting and learning requires skills that the adults in their lives may not actually have. If my students are emotionally injured because they haven't yet developed the self-esteem to not worry about losing a Facebook friend or being unfollowed on Twitter, it's not a failing on their part: The adults in their lives haven't taught them the proper place social media plays in the life of a person. And the adults can't really be blamed for that, at least not entirely: They were never taught about it, either.
So we have a complicated world that is easier to access than ever before, and the people who bridge the gap--people who have embraced the technological advances but with a maturity of experience--are few and far between. There's a paucity of leadership through this kind of digital world because the experience is so new.
That's why older generations grousing about the way millennials behave strikes me as, at my most generous, as hypocritical codswallop. (That it's the millennials who have to fix the cantankerous baby boomers' cable TV when it goes out is just the ironic icing on the humble pie.) Kids these days are doing a fantastic job, overall, trying to do what no generation before them has ever done: Grow up knowing that there is a big, colorful, painful world out there, filled with joys and problems not of their own making. Millennials can see farther, but--because of their youth--not clearer, than ever before. And that's part of what my job is to do, and is really part of why we need defenders of classical, liberal arts education. It gives a person the tools needed to navigate a world as dangerous as ours is now.
Of course, this isn't to say that the older generations don't have a lot to offer the millennials, however. For example, we can definitely use their expertise when it comes to defeating Nazis.