I just celebrated my 70th New Year’s… though “celebrating” is laughable. Long ago we decided “going up ain’t worth the coming down” so we stay home and (sometimes) are both still awake at midnight when we say “Another year’s gone by? Damn, we’re gettin’ old!”
Being 70 includes me among those born in the first year of that quintessential baby boom decade: the 1950s. It made the song these Florida boys released the year we turned 35 particularly meaningful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1FkN7IWIfc
Born to fathers emotionally scarred by the horrors of WWII, and mothers who smoked and drank through pregnancy, we rode in our parents cars without seatbelts — often standing up in the front seat or riding in the rear of pickup trucks. We rode our bikes without helmets during long uninterrupted hours of unsupervised play. And the great majority of us managed to survive. We had never even heard of a “peanut allergy”… because we grew up eating PB&J.
We participated in more pick-up games of sports — where we learned conflict resolution on our own — than we did in adult-controlled leagues organized and regulated by external rules. We learned about sex (hands-on, so to speak) at drive-in movie theaters — not on the internet.
It was the height of the ‘Cold War’, which makes living with the current over-hyped pandemic seem like a walk in the park. This pandemic is low risk to kids, but those nuclear fireballs would incinerate us along with our parents. We grew up in the shadow of nuclear destruction, being taught in elementary school to ‘duck and cover’ to survive the A-bomb. I don’t recall if any of us actually believed hiding under our desks would save us.
The apex of nuclear brinksmanship was in October, 1962, when the Russians parked some nukes in Cuba… about 200 miles from my house. Living in Florida within the radiation fallout zone of MacDill Air Force Base, we doubted we had much chance to survive if the nukes fell.
Parents of some of my friends built personal “fallout shelters”. My Dad who had survived Pearl Harbor, and my English war bride mom who survived the Blitz, figured if the bombs got us, they got us. So we didn’t have a shelter. A couple of those cold war era backyard shelters still stand in my old hometown. They are used for storage – or man-caves (you can’t hear you wife calling for you through those lead-reinforced walls, and you can store enough snacks to hide from her for weeks.)
We 1950 babies came of age in the ’60s, graduating high school in one of the most turbulent years in the second half of the 20th century: 1968. During our senior year Martin Luther King was assassinated, as was a presidential candidate. But we could handle it without “grief counselors” having to come to our schools because we’d “been there, done that”. By the 8th grade, we had already experienced the assassination of a President… and murder of the alleged assassin on live TV.
Then, waiting for us men after graduation was the prospect of being drafted and sent to the quagmire in Vietnam. “They sent him off to Vietnam, for his senior trip”. Those of us who went, fell within the average age group of the highest casualty rates of that war.
But this rant is not about me! It’s about our grandchildren… those kids known as millennials (defined by the Nielsen research group in 2019 as “adults between the ages of 22 and 38 years old”). There is something sadly wrong with their thought processes.
Case in point. I recently had an extended conversation with a bright young man. He is a polite, soft-spoken, articulate college graduate currently working as a reporter for our county newspaper. Though we share few political positions, we were able to respectfully discuss them without personal acrimony. But there is something very clearly lacking in his thinking. Most striking was his apparent inability to see anyone as an individual. To him, everyone is classified into some defined group — often with pejorative connotations. He doesn’t seem capable of recognizing nuance or that not everyone can be conveniently pigeonholed.
Most concerning was how little he, as a college graduate, knew about American history. When I pointed out historical precedent for some contemporary issues, he was unaware of the history. Nor was he aware even of some history in my relatively recent lifetime.
That is not his fault, but of a school system that wasted his time and money by giving him little in return, other than a distorting his thought processes in lieu of actually educating him. It’s sad, really.
He also suffers from that failing of youth that he can’t conceive he could possibly be wrong, having yet to learn what Benjamin Franklin is reported to have said about opinions: That the older he got, the fewer he had, because experience taught him opinions he firmly held in youth were wrong.
Or, as Winston Churchill observed, “If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at 35, you have no brain!” This young reporter is typical of many of his contemporaries.
As a law professor I have frequent contact with millennials, which make up most of my students. Being law students they are — at least on paper — the best educated of their generation. But as I’m sadly learning there is a disturbing gap between what appears on paper, and their actual knowledge base — if you can even call it that. Few have been taught there are two sides to nearly all issues. Debate is all or nothing, with no apparent room for compromise.
I’ve too often discovered that, as with the young reporter, my students have never heard of historical references I make (which were commonly taught in high school in my day). They seem particularly bereft of knowledge of history of the western culture from which our legal system is derived. Even some who studied history as undergrads are frighteningly ignorant of fundamentals of American history.
Talking to them after class, I’ve learned it’s not just me who notices this phenomena. Some recognize the problem within their own contemporaries. One of my better students told me that trying to talk about social issues with most classmates is frustrating because, in her words, “All they seem to know is what some celebrity said!”
A couple years ago, in another publication, I referred to a group of younger siblings of the millennials as “history-impaired hashtag kids”.
From what I’ve observed, and what some of my current law students report, that characterization can be applied to most millennials as well. I blame our current schools (I won’t call them an “education” system) dominated by teachers who indoctrinate rather than educate.
“Professional educators” pontificate that they are teaching “critical thinking skills” to students. But if you analyze public primary, secondary, and most college curricula you notice something curious. Over the last three decades, somehow teachers never get around to requiring students to apply “critical thinking skills” to progressive, or socialist teaching, but only to ideas antithetical to that those bankrupt dogmas.
So millennial students, and now those after them, have been cheated of their birthright to be well-educated members of a free electorate who can critically analyze both sides of issues. I have little optimism for our future as a free society.
Marx (Karl, not Groucho) suggested religion is the opiate of the masses. For kids today, religion has been replaced by social media, with which the school systems are unable to prepare students to critically cope. Social media is better at brainwashing than public school systems. Since the only formal education these kids have known is indoctrination, social media appears to them to be education — and certainly a lot more fun that sitting in class. #hashtags are replacing profundity!
To paraphrase John Lennon, “the way things are going”, I’ve come to appreciate being closer to the end, rather than the beginning, of my life. This is not the intellectually enlightened society I was fortunate enough to be born into 70 years ago.
Gary Beatty lives between Florida and Pagosa Springs. He retired after 30 years as a prosecutor for the State of Florida, has a doctorate in law, is Board Certified in Criminal Trial law by the Florida Supreme Court, and is now a law professor.