“We had a great civilization going, and we’d have made it, if only it weren’t for those darn kids.” Or perhaps you prefer “we are in a time of declining decliney decline, and nothing can save us from declining till we crash.” Or perhaps “Kids these days don’t want to work. In my day–“
I hope you’re happy repeating USSR agit prop, because that’s what all of those were at their origin. To be fair they fit in very well with the idea of the heroic parents who walked uphill both ways to school, in snow up to their knees, and whose children are pampered little flowers who ride the school bus. And both are what’s known as “prevalent and ineradicable bullsh#t”
However, if you haven’t caught on yet, the idea that our civilization was declining, that we were in decadence “like the Roman empire” and that children were corrupt hedonists were indeed propagated by the USSR. As was the sixties “rebellion” and the idea of a righteous generation who, of course, believed all the communist bullshit. The boomers, as depicted in the media, and as we know them in the humanities are indeed “kids these days” destroying civilization into their 70s and now complaining about the younger kids, as they tantrum their way to the grave. On the good side, they didn’t get their way on their own, it took pervasive and unified propaganda, of a type that’s now hard to deploy on younger generations without the mass industrial means of communicating.
The people who swallow the MSM hook line and sinker are now mostly older than I, not “kids these days.”
But… They have it too easy!
Define too easy. Go ahead, do it. Because what you’re seeing is where your challenges were mitigated for them, not where they have new challenges you never even thought of.
Take for instance me. Yeah, my dad walked five miles to school each way, rain or shine. I had it easy, as I mostly rode the train or the bus.
But my dad, though he grew up under a socialist regime too (we both did. I just got hit by both, national and international socialism, and the instability in between) had a certain amount of stability and of knowing what to expect.
My challenge? Curriculum could and did change sometimes three times a year. School might or might not convene. A teacher might teach us what was on the curriculum, or he might have us paint a revolutionary mural…. None of which helped with the fact that in 9th grade a placing exam happened, which I had to answer whether or not I’d ever been taught.
Not only didn’t my parents see that challenge, but they would both berate me for not knowing things they knew at my age — not only had no one taught it, but I’d been kept busy NOT learning. Honestly, without Summer vacation, I’d be illiterate — and tell me how easy I had it and why was I complaining.
This gives me great empathy with “kids these days.”
Yes, they grew up with more “material goods” and greater ease than most of us did. Not all of them, mind you, but the average. But the question is: does that really make their lives easier?
I noticed early on, and remember my kids are in and heading for their thirties at speed, that the kids were being kept busy with busywork. And graded mostly on busywork. You could have straight As, but you didn’t turn in the worksheet, or you colored the flowers on it the wrong color (in 10th grade) and you’d fail.
They weren’t being TAUGHT anything, but they were being kept very busy with make work. And my countering it, often ran into the stone wall of “but we don’t have time” — because they were scheduled after school, too.
And it got appreciably worse in the same school system three to four years later, when younger son hit it. For one, all the halfway decent teachers had quit or been run up the ladder to administrator.
Look, I come from a place where my ancestors lived for a very long time. There are things we know about the family line. “Will eat History for breakfast and ask for more.” “Usually good at math, but might transpose digits.” and “Will learn languages, whether naturally good at them or not.”
So when my kids couldn’t — not wouldn’t. COULDN’T — learn French I became concerned. And did a deep dive into their class.
They weren’t being taught. That’s the easy part. The difficult part is that they were being kept so busy NOT learning that they couldn’t learn even accidentally.
They were given French teen magazines and told to cut pictures, and make collages. They were taught to sing French songs. What they were never given was the basics with which to decode those things into language- learning experiences.
“But that’s because it was easy on them.” Well, actually no. It was easy on the teacher. I mean, she could have fun and be the kids “friend”. Unlike my favorite languages teacher who gave us vocabulary sheets every day and tested and corrected every night.
The kids, meanwhile, felt like failures because they weren’t learning. And everyone told them how easy and fun this should be. They thought it was their personal failure.
Let this fit in as a micro cosmos for “Children these days.”
Our kids are stressed — you’d be shocked to know how many, particularly girls, are on psychiatric drugs by prescription — and unhappy, and running in place, all the while being told how easy they have it, and “pull up your socks, young thing.”
Kids aren’t raised only by the schools. They’re raised by a culture. As broken as ours is — and it is. They are the generation being raised by the generation that was raised by the boomers, who were raised by the lost children of world war II — it retains that “Grandpappy lived in a wood cabin, in the snow, and he made good. So, look at all I have, I should do better!”
Only…. it’s almost impossible. It starts in the schools. And btw, of course, I’m sure there’s exceptions, but let me break in here to say both boys and girls are being broken in peculiar and different ways. And are being denied what they most need, while being told it’s all THEIR personal fault.
My kids were 12 or so when I realized in every class the boys were falling behind. There’s a reason for this. Boys were being asked to do the impossible for them.
You see, boys and girls mature at different speeds. In general, boys of 12 have no sense of time or scheduling. Girls do.
By 12 the “button counting” had got to “Must deliver work on this day, in this way, without being reminded.” Now both kids are ADD (AF) but still. They were being asked to do things they couldn’t do. They sort of managed, because they were more afraid of me than … well, anyone. BUT it left marks in anxiety, depression and self-loathing.
Meanwhile the girls were excelling in school, partly because at this point the process is pretty much designed for the average female.
Remember men and women are different, at the nervous system level. We were shaped by evolution. Men are good at short-burst, difficult, competitive tasks. Women are good at indoor, repetitive tasks involving a lot of boredom and conforming to senseless standards. Which is what schooling has devolved to. Mostly because almost every teacher is a woman, but also because it minimizes work for teachers. The fact that it also renders politically-correct results, in that the boys give up and all award-winning students are female, is just icing on the cake.
So, girls are being told they’re so smart, and they can have it all, and why would they throw themselves away on a family and children. Note, this was already true in my day. In the 80s I was shunned at every social occasion because I stayed home and tried to write. It was just an excuse to be a housewife, and my being such meant I was both stupid and lazy.
This is the pressure the girls are under. They are taught to deny perfectly normal instinctive longings in favor of “having a career.”
And of course, mostly people don’t have a career. They have — at best — a job.
Now, at least most girls are leaving schools and colleges with credentials and usually have an easier time than boys finding jobs. The problem comes after, because their “ladies A” schooling didn’t in fact prepare them to do the JOB. Which is why when they go into the workplace, the “real” job must be social justice, or something like. Because they can’t actually do the job.
And then there’s the boys and men in their parents’ basement. Or working at making a game. Or whatever. Why? Because most young men with degrees or not (And graduating requires more than it did of you, trust me. Doesn’t mean they learn more, but they have to jump through some insane hoops) are having a heck of a time finding work.
We’ll go into this later, but a lot of those “now hiring” signs seem to be something else, because people can’t actually get hired. And at a corporate level, they prefer to hire foreigners on work visas. Chances are high your hospital is being taken over by China-trained physicians, for instance. Which will end in tears, because the training is not the same. But there we are. In the same way, they’ve started showing up even in engineering jobs where clearance is needed.
Why? Well, they’re cheaper. And also since the schools aren’t producing enough people with the right credentials to take the jobs, the leviathan of our government is making it easy to import what looks like from the credential side the same type of thing.
BUT to every family, the kid who is unemployed or under employed; the girl who has a job but is increasingly more neurotic and unhappy; the family that breaks apart; the kids that never are born is a private tragedy. Each family feels a deep sense of shame and failure over these.
I only know because I know several of them, at a lot of socio-economic levels, and across the spectrum of many many ways to fail.
The liberals have an easier time of this. They can say it’s systemic this or that, or that their kids is some special form of disabled and therefore just can’t do this.
BUT the conservative families eat themselves alive. Because they tried. They tried so hard. And they have standards to which they held their kids and —
It took me till the middle of last year to go “You know, if it’s one kid here and there it’s a personal failure. If it’s everywhere, all at once, and most people in this age range are failing…. it’s the system that’s broken.”
This was particularly funny because I’ve seen this before. As a writer, I came into a field where they’d publish your book, on a smallish print run and put it in the book store. IF IT FAILED TO BECOME A BESTSELLER OVERNIGHT IT WAS BECAUSE YOU WERE A BAD WRITER. And of course, most books failed to become bestsellers, given they had no publicity and people didn’t even find them till they were out of print. But each writer was assured it was his or her fault, and lived with the shame of failure, and tried to do better while being paid less.
This kind of abusive system destroys people. And it’s everywhere right now, but it’s particularly in education. They’re preparing and training kids to a world that doesn’t exist, and then blaming them when they fail in the real world.
Now, yes, most kids try, and probably about half find some kind of job and start clawing their way upward. But most of them are extremely under paid (the boys) or extremely pushed (the girls) and finding no time to marry and have kids, or even to plan to purchase/own a house.
They’re flailing and drowning, and throwing them anvils while saying “In my day we knew how to swim” is not helping anything.
Education as set up is eating the seed corn to keep education majors happy. This can’t go on.
Fortunately there’s indications it won’t. The covidiocy sent people home to teach their kids.
Is it too little too late?
Might be. Might not. The future is a very long time. Right now I’m just saying what’s broken. Because half the fight is knowing you (or your kids) aren’t alone.
Only when we internalize that, can we start fixing things.
According To Hoyt 