Before the present MTV and drugs-crazed era, however, we never let our poverty as a state affect our intellectual development.
To answer Gena directly, I had a consulting assignment in which 200 (!) young people were hired off the streets of a fair-sized town and invited to train for medium-tech factory work at $18/hr.(not exactly peanuts) After a three month training period, during which they were taught basic shop skills, arithmetic, safety, and were given physical training (work-hardening), they were to be placed on the assembly line, given $21/Hr + full benefits, and given the chance to move up to $30/hr within 18 months. There is also a $100 bonus for being on time to your shift for 30 days. (...and tuition help and daycare, etc.)
Within 6 months, only about half of these young folk were still at work. Now, a year later, only about 50 are still working. Many fell to random drug testing, many more to absence and lateness. The job was far too arduous for many, and many could not follow written instructions, although high school graduates. This experience of mine is not unique. It has happened frequently in the last decade. As the 50's crowd retires from their 40 years of manufacturing, there is no one local to reliably replace them. It is one reason that illegal aliens have done so well.
There is of course, no essential difference between people of one generation and another. If anyone is to blame for the cultural condition of many of your generation, it is mine. The collapse of public education, for example, cannot be blamed on the students!
IMNSHO, What has happened with the collapse of the schools (and parental authority) is that we have allowed your generation to be shamelessly manipulated into a commercial culture in which you are not given the finest traditions of Western Christian Civilization to carry forward as a duty, but a base,ugly, and fundamentally silly set of characters to use as role models.
Ask 10 of your friends who is in their state's congressional delegation, who is the Superintendent of Schools where you live, and to find Iraq on a map.
The Challenge: your generation (a marvelous and somewhat fatuous generalization, I admit) has been intellectually short-changed. That is the fault of my generation. But the repair of that great deficit will have to be solved on an individual basis by those who wish to do so.
Of course, you can truthfully point out that "mature" folks have always been "down" on the younger generation. But today, we actually can see the country slipping away from our progeny. Of course it's our own damn fault, which drives many of us nuts. However, neither does it seem reasonable to us that the younger generation can save it. In fact, it seems to us that they are rather enjoying the slide downhill!
I absolutely agree. And, unless you're in your sixties, we are probably in the same generation.
Look at the majority of the posts on this thread. Almost all of the free-traders and super-capitalists argue the above point, but, from the other side. They say that the commercialization of our culture is good and, in fact, should progress to other countries. You have stated my case rather succinctly. We have become a nation of consumers whose sole purpose in life is to buy.
I always bring up the fact that today, children in high school must begin planning for their retirement. While that in itself is not a bad thing the idea that, if they don't do it now they will not secure their future, can be a frightening and depressing task. When I was in high school all I had to think about was grades and girls. Now they are forced to contemplate Roth IRA's, 401K's, education accounts, etc. What kind of life is that for a 15 y.o.?
As a nation we are quickly becoming, instead of E Pluribus Unum, Unum E Pluribus (if I have that wrong, I never studied Latin). It is quickly becoming each man for himself in a way that is going to be deadly.
I grew up in the Midwest and when I moved here, the first thing I noticed was the closed way New Englanders are. The people around here mostly couldn't care less what happens to their neighboors. Where I came from we did care and actually looked out for our neighboors.
Sadly, what you say is true. But to the dumbed down masses it doesn't matter that it's true. Reality is invented by the new dummies and if they think they are supermen, who can disagree? Modern education is no different than diet fads; easy ways to get smart quick that never work.
IMNSHO, What has happened with the collapse of the schools (and parental authority) is that we have allowed your generation to be shamelessly manipulated into a commercial culture in which you are not given the finest traditions of Western Christian Civilization to carry forward as a duty, but a base,ugly, and fundamentally silly set of characters to use as role models.
If we let Western Civ collapse, we will fall into a new dark age of oppression, slavery and mass extermination that will make the 200 million executions of last century look like a trial run.