The kids are all right

Kids these days, ya know what I mean?

Wiser heads than mine have commented on the laziness, disrespectfulness, and general dissipation of youth.  Here's a sampler:

• Parents themselves were often the cause of many difficulties.  They frequently failed in their obvious duty to teach self-control and discipline to their own children.
• We defy anyone who goes about with his eyes open to deny that there is, as never before, an attitude on the part of young folk which is best described as grossly thoughtless, rude, and utterly selfish.
• The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.  Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households.  They no longer rise when elders enter the room.  They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
• Never has youth been exposed to such dangers of both perversion and arrest as in our own land and day.  Increasing urban life with its temptations, prematurities, sedentary occupations, and passive stimuli just when an active life is most needed, early emancipation and a lessening sense for both duty and discipline, the haste to know and do all befitting man's estate before its time, the mad rush for sudden wealth and the reckless fashions set by its gilded youth -- all these lack some of the regulatives they still have in older lands with more conservative conditions.
• Youth were never more saucy -- never more savagely saucy -- as now... the ancient are scorned, the honourable are condemned, and the magistrate is not dreaded.
• Our sires' age was worse than our grandsires'.  We, their sons, are more worthless than they; so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt.
• [Young people] are high-minded because they have not yet been humbled by life, nor have they experienced the force of circumstances…  They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it.

Of course, I haven't told you where these quotes come from. In order:

• from an editorial in the Leeds Mercury, 1938
• from an editorial in the Hull Daily Mail, 1925
• Kenneth John Freeman, Cambridge University, 1907
• Granville Stanley Hall, The Psychology of Adolescence, 1904
• Thomas Barnes, The Wise Man's Forecast Against the Evil Time, 1624
• Horace, Odes, Book III, 20 B.C.E.
• Aristotle, 4th century B.C.E.

So yeah.  Adults saying "kids these days" has a long, inglorious history.  [Nota bene: the third quote, from Kenneth Freeman, has often been misattributed to Socrates, but it seems pretty unequivocal that Freeman was the originator.]

This comes up because of a study that was published in Science Advances, by John Protzko and Jonathan Schooler, called "Kids These Days: Why the Youth of Today Seem Lacking."  And its unfortunate conclusion -- unfortunate for us adults, that is -- is that the sense of today's young people being irresponsible, disrespectful, and lazy is mostly because we don't remember how irresponsible, disrespectful, and lazy we were when we were teenagers.  And before you say, "Wait a moment, I was a respectful and hard-working teenager" -- okay, maybe.  But so are many of today's teenagers.  If you want me to buy that we're in a downward spiral, you'll have to convince me that more teenagers back then were hard-working and responsible, and that I simply don't believe.

And neither do Protzko and Schooler.

So the whole thing hinges more on idealization of the past, and our own poor memories, than on anything real.  I also suspect that a good many of the older adults who roll their eyes about "kids these days" don't have any actual substantive contact with young people, and are getting their impressions of teenagers from the media -- which certainly doesn't have a vested interest in portraying anyone as ordinary, honest, and law-abiding.

My own experience of teaching corroborates this.  Sure, I had a handful of students who were unmotivated, disruptive, or downright obnoxious; but in general, I found that my classes responded to my own enthusiasm about my subject with interest and engagement.  Whenever I raised the bar, they met and often exceeded it.  I still recall one of the best classes I ever taught -- one of my Critical Thinking classes, perhaps five years prior to my retirement.  It was a class of about 25, so large by my school's standards, but to say they were eager learners is a dramatic understatement.  I still recall when we were doing a unit on ethics, and I'd given them a series of readings (amongst them Jean-Paul Sartre's "The Wall" and Richard Feynman's "Who Stole the Door?") centered around the question of intent.  Are you lying if you thought what you said was a lie but accidentally told the truth -- or if you deliberately told the truth so unconvincingly that it seemed like a lie, and no one believed you?

Well, I gave them a week to do the reading, and we were going to have a class discussion of the topic, but I was walking to lunch one day (maybe three days after I'd given the assignment) and I got nabbed in the hall by five of my students who said they'd all done the readings and had been arguing over them, and wanted me to sit in the cafeteria with them and discuss what they'd read.  I reassured them we'd be hashing the whole thing out in class in a day or two.

"Oh, no," one kid said, completely serious.  "We can't wait to settle this.  We want to discuss it now."

This is the same class in which we were talking about your basis for knowledge.  If you believe something to be true, how can you be certain?  There are things we strongly believe despite having never experienced them -- based on having heard it from a trusted authority, or seeing indirect evidence, or simply that whatever it is seems consistent with what you know from other sources.  So I said, as an example, "With what you have with you right now, I want you to prove to me that pandas exist."

Several kids reached for their smartphones -- but one young woman reached into her backpack, and completely straight-faced, brought out a stuffed panda and set it on her desk.

I cracked up, and said, "Fine, you win."  At the end of the semester she gave me the panda as a keepsake -- and I still have him.

Those are just two of many experiences I had as a teacher of students and classes that were engaged, curious, hard-working, creative, and challenging (in the best possible ways).  Don't try to convince me there's anything wrong with "kids these days."

So I'm an optimist about today's youth.  I saw way too many positive things in my years as a high school teacher to feel like this is going to be the generation that trashes everything through irresponsibility and disrespect for tradition.  And if after reading this, you're still in any doubt about that, I want you to think back on your own teenage years, and ask yourself honestly if you were as squeaky-clean as you'd like people to believe.

Or were you -- like the youth in Aristotle's day -- guilty of thinking you knew everything, and being quite sure about it?

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