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The Mindset of the Incoming College Freshmen
Beloit College has come out with its annual Mindset List of what the incoming class (of 2013) has always known and has never known. "For these students, ... the Green Giant has always been Shrek, not the big guy picking vegetables. They have never used a card catalog to find a book. ... Tattoos have always been very chic and highly visible. ... Rap music has always been mainstream. ... Except for the present incumbent, the President has never inhaled. ... Amateur radio operators have never needed to know Morse code."
...with my eyesight failing from old age like this, it's too hard to aim if you're across the street.
Somewhere between reactionary neophilia and reactionary neophobia, there is a sparsely populated middle ground where things are evaluated on their own merits, and new things are not automatically good nor old things automatically bad, or vice versa. The modern predilection for the new is just as robotic and mindless as the pre-modern predilection for tradition, the only difference being that we're now indoctrinated into neophilia by advertising instead of being indoctrinated into neophobia by religion.
Maybe, if we learned from the past instead of ignoring it, we wouldn't feel compelled to reinvent COBOL every thirty years. Then we would have been spared the horror of Visual Basic, and then later, Python. Can't wait to see what the next lumbering reanimated monster from the forgotten past will be.
Oh wait, I can already guess: another implementation of Scheme.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
There's something to that. This is a generation that grew up thinking Jerry Springer was normal and acceptable behavior.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
What gives you the right to say that? You're generalising my generation. You are implying that we all listen to rap, and we all conform. You are implying that we are all stupid, and we all are materialistic. I do not listen to rap. I listen to Slayer. I am not stupid. I kick my whole classes ass at the academic bowl every year. I know about these things. I know who the green giant is. We are not all ignorant. It's like me saying your generation is the pot smoking generation. Or maybe you're older. Maybe you're the racist generation. You can't generalise a whole generation of people. You're saying that all the people who will spend the vast majority of their life in the 21st century are ignorant conformists who listen to rap. That's not very fair of you.
We're fucked and we've fucked their future. I don't think that one's on the list, but, I'm guessing, it's something any bright grad will know.
Are you fucking kidding me? They've got another 4 years and $95,000 worth of debt to rack up before they sue the college for not being handed a six-figure salary WITH their diploma. Yeah, talk about a fucked system.
IMHO, we haven't begun to see fucked yet, with the ignorance that MTV likes to portray as the Real World. Let's hope there are still some out there who still see the morality of the world today AND are bright enough to see that we have more than ONE political party out there.
I quote, "What's wrong withe status quo? It works for me!"
Argh.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
At what I feel may be a very real risk of WHOOSH, I'll respond. This hate on "generalising" is totally irrational. Humans are habit forming, pattern matching biological machines who owe a large part of our success as a species to the ability to generalise. Forming connections based on observed behaviours between multiple sources and using those connections to draw conclusions. Sometimes right, sometimes wrong, but largely useful. Surely you recognise that in even attempting to speak on the character on something as widely varied as the culture of a generation of people, you're dealing with such huge numbers of people that in order to say anything of non-obvious value means identifying the largest occupied unions of the set. What's crazy here is your apparent level of butthurt over someone putting a label on something which by your tone you already knew to be true.
Or maybe you're hating on generalisations for the sake of them being generalisations. Which is twisted in its own ironic way because it's not based on any proof that abstraction is a bad thing, but rather on the feared result of being subject to some inappropriate application of generalisation to an individual. So really you're damning generalisation as a whole because some idiots misuse it. Generalising generalising not out of its most frequent use, but most feared misuse, a highly faulty premise.
Yes, its vaguely-but-not-really interesting stuff like this that belongs in Idle.
This is a generation that grew up thinking Jerry Springer was normal and acceptable behavior.
Because their parents suck, politically-correct panty-waisted fools who "feel" their children won't love them if a parent say, means, and enforces:
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Indeed. The only things I could really relate to were the bits about chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, GDP, and Blue Jello.
Honestly, this is basically a list of things to assume about the class of 2013 that you can bring out in conversation to insult their knowledge of history.
-jX
Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
Now now, lets not get rid of stereotypes: they make it easier it unnecessary to talk to the person to find out how they think. People of the previous generation actually listened to Rick Astley because they liked the music, they aren't sure if they should be using OS/2 or Win 3.0 for there application, they can't program their VCR, they didn't save for retirement because they were promised a pension and are now biter and broke. Does that about cover it?
As a student, I say, fuck that, my dear academic, and fuck your easy willingness to give up on us. We clueless, cynical, little automatons have been tasked with developing our own frameworks for filtering and handling information blasted at us from society's great unmetered firehose even as you sit there whining on Slashdot about your abject failure to connect with us. We, the post-post-modern twerps that you are griping about, have grown up DRENCHED in information, to the point that we're numbed to it. We have not experienced the type of developmental cocoons that previous generations wore into adulthood; we didn't grow up in a crappy town where our best sources of information were an out-of-date encyclopedia, Time magazine, and the evening news. We grew up with Internet access and a TV in our bedroom, and we realized at quite a young age that most of the ideas we thought we were alone in having were actually shared by countless thousands or millions. It's discouraging to the thinker, really; quite often, the instant we have a thought, we type it into Google and realize that the discussion is not merely mature, but closed. We realized early on that we were not alone, yet nobody cared what we had to say.
I can say, without specific knowledge of your field, that your job is fundamentally two pronged: it is the promotion of the best approximation of reality available, and it is also the displacement of the less accurate models which came before. Modernism/postmodernism had an important job to do, and retains some importance as a perspective, a naggling doubt at the back of every good student's mind, but it's beginning to reach saturation in my own, younger generation. The holdouts who haven't either digested the pill to the best of their abilities or passed it through their system are getting rare outside of some fairly recognizable enclaves. It's time to react to that fact. We young people have been told to ask "why?" as a reflex, true, but many of us have unfortunately developed the habit of making snap judgments in the face of informational overload. We have no authorities; we have no role models. The politicians are liars; the businessmen are crooks; the priests are pedophiles. We never learned about righteousness and values; we were taught consumerism and encouraged to swim in knowledge as if we would learn by mere proximity. We are three generations removed from the cultural revolutions of the sixties and seventies. Our grandparents were at Woodstock enjoying sex, drugs, and rock and roll; our parents grew up shaking their heads at the hypocrisy of their suddenly-reactionary baby boomer parents, and now we, their kids, don't know what the hell to think. They say that it takes three generations to breed accent out of spoken language; we've left respect for authority so far behind us that we can't even conceive what the fuss was about.
Our childhood is getting longer, as is our adolescence, although we were exposed to the facts of life as soon as we could reach a keyboard. It seems that college is no longer a privilege, but a right awarded for simply not screwing up massively in life. Many of us arrive with no specific goal in mind, expecting to have our hands held as they were in high school, and we often wind up with a degree in hand and no plans for its use. Alternately, many of us believe (often correctly) that our future employers care little about what is taught in college and that simply completing the routine is what matters. The reasoners, the deep thinkers, and those interested in pursuing science for its own sake are in there too, but we've always been there, Mr. Academic. Our deep-thinking minds have always been attracted to the college atmosphere, but those of us with that mindset make up a proportionally smaller fragment of the new student body. You, sir, are in a situation where you need to search diligently for the part of that scholastically-minded fragment that's interested in learning, but afraid to step forth; the ones that have been repeatedly abused or isolated
It's just a different genre of mindless grunting.
Thank you for showing your ignorance. Death and thrash metal (including Slayer) are both incredibly intricate and demanding styles of music. I am not sure what kind of music you listen to, but Slayer's compositions and playing ability are light years ahead of ANY popular music these days. You might not like it, this form of music may not be your cup of tea, but calling it mindless is just plain ignorant. Each member of that band (Araya excepted) has more musical ability than pretty much everything you hear on the radio. I would be very interested to hear... what do you listen to that you base your comparison off of? I listen to literally everything, and I put death metal in the same vaunted category as jazz and classical in terms of musicianship.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Of course you kick your whole class' ass at the academic bowl - you're in a generation of ignorant conformists! :P