The Generation that Isn’t Growing Up: What’s Going On?

In an article on children, philosopher Stephen Hicks makes an interesting case against homework for school-aged kids.

Less interesting than the argument itself are the reasons Hicks provides.

He writes:

Everyone says that they want children to grow up able to live independent lives and pursue their self-chosen careers passionately. But that aspiration does not fit with a traditional practice of education that teaches children above all to follow instructions without questioning the why.

What kind of education will prepare students only for order-following and self-stultifying jobs? One in which rigidly defined school projects are assigned by their authorities. When kids do the schoolwork primarily because they have been told to do so, homework then becomes merely an additional imposition. Kids learn that life is about doing tasks, whether they like it or not, and following orders.

In the latter system, most children will learn to accept and go along, hopefully grudgingly, and to that extent let subside their potential for a life fully lived. Only a few will fight to preserve their potential for self actualization by rebelling — often obnoxiously because of their youth — against their teachers, parents, and other perceived representatives of the system.

Excellent points. We seem to have created a generation of children whose aspirations and expectations are immensely high, but whose initiative and follow-through are way behind. More young people are living at home with their parents than at any time since the 1930s. Yes, some of this is economic and due to high student loan bills. But it must go deeper than that.

As a therapist and a writer, I hear stories every day from people, either about their own kids or their friends’ or relatives’ kids. When I began training as a family therapist in the late 1980s, I never heard of kids living at home with their parents, lacking direction and purpose, unless there was some kind of obvious medical illness or, more frequently, a drug or alcohol addiction. Today, it’s different. I routinely hear stories of people whose kids (or whose friends’ or relatives’ children) are home well into their 20s and even their 30s. They’re not ill, and they don’t abuse drugs or alcohol. Many of them completed college. They’re not particularly irresponsible. But they do seem frightened and insecure while—oddly, and seemingly in contradiction—entitled to a level of comfort and success which nobody can attain as easily as they seem to assume. Even when grown kids are moved out and working, it’s typical and normal for me to hear complaints from the older generation that we didn’t used to hear in the past. “My son [or daughter] has such grand expectations. He can’t understand why he’s not making a million dollars so quickly.” It seems that ambition and expectations young people have of themselves have never been higher, while initiative and follow-through have never been weaker.

Of course this is not always true, and I’m not suggesting it’s even the norm (at least yet). But it’s truer than it was several decades ago, and perhaps ever was before. What gives? Here’s a theory. Schools for recent and current generations do it the old way, but with a new twist. The old way was to create passivity and ultimately resentment, by authorities in a command-and-control school system, as Stephen Hicks talks about when he criticizes homework. But in more recent decades, added to that uninspiring approach to education has been an emphasis on self-esteem badly defined. The prevailing definition of self-esteem has been (and still is) to make someone “feel good” about themselves. When you use a subjective standard to define self-esteem, you convey to kids unrealistic ideas such as, “You can be anything you want to be,” or “You’re entitled to be happy.” While some young people challenge and abandon this silliness for the Pollyanna phoniness it is when they reach young adulthood, many internalize and come to believe it. The result is that they expect huge levels of wealth and achievement pretty quickly, but they lack the follow through required to make it happen. They want ends without means; results without effort. To some extent all people (of any generation) are subject to this problem, but in the present generation this appears to have reached epic proportions.

Hicks brilliantly sums it up when he says:

So we should listen carefully and read between the lines, so to speak, when our children start saying self-assertive things like; “You’re not the boss of me!”

And we should reply, “Damned straight, kid. You are the boss of your own life, and our job as adults is to help you become better at it.”

Exactly. Kids should be encouraged to be their own persons, not told what to do. Everything about our current approach to education is command-and-control, one-size-fits-all and reign from above. This prepares children for a world in which they follow orders, lack initiative, creativity and skills of innovation. We’re squelching the best within them, and then scratching our heads when they grow up wanting to be instant millionaires without following through on anything other than a video game or looking at the latest pictures on Instagram.

You get what you pay for, right? The tragic thing is that taxpayers are pouring billions of dollars a year into public education and what they’re getting for it is an uncertain, confused and oddly overconfident generation that votes for socialism (an ends without means ideology) without even knowing what it really is. It doesn’t bode well for the future, does it? Homework is the least of the problem.

I’m not sure where society goes from here. Course corrections are always possible, within individuals as well as whole societies. But it’s hard to instill such deep rooted values and traits as independence, authentic self-esteem and initiative in people who lack these things. Our best hope lies in the small number of people who really do think for themselves to drive and push the world along. We had better reestablish economic freedom, along with individual liberty, as quickly as possible, if future generations are to have a chance.

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