The Trophy Generation
Sunday 23 October 2011 - Filed under Uncategorized
It seems we may be getting to the heart of the OccupyX protests:
Maybe this is all really about disappointment. I spoke to a young woman who had clearly bathed more recently than most. I asked her why she was at OccupySF. She told me she’d done all the right things. Studied hard. Graduated college. (She was an art major.) And now she can’t get a job. It didn’t matter. It’s all messed up. She was lied to.
Of course she was. She’s a member of the Trophy Generation. Win or lose, you get a trophy. We embraced mediocrity to an entire generation of kids during good times who are now finding themselves mediocre in bad times. There still is that American dream: Go to college, get a job, buy a Prius. But like it or not, studying art or humanities or gender studies won’t get you there. Marissa Mayer at Google complains she can’t find enough computer-science majors. Civil engineers are getting hired sight unseen.
Educating the whole child was bad advice. So was follow your passion. California spends months teaching ninth-graders how to build a waste-treatment plant with only a day or two on natural selection. I think Occupy Wall Streeters are as much disappointed with the route they all took as they are with “fat cat” bankers.
I too fell in to the lie. At my various universities (I attended 2 universities and a community college during my undergraduate years, and 1 during graduate school) and it was taken for granted that humanities majors of all kinds were perfectly qualified for jobs outside of academia because we had been taught to “think critically” and that we had the ability to analyze different situations and use a refined sense of logic in order to solve complex problems. That’s just hogwash.
Don’t get me wrong, I majored in English Literature not because I thought it would make me smarter than everyone else, but because I loved to read (notice the perfect tense being used). I was skeptical as to exactly how learning Old English inflections would give me a leg up in the private sector, but I did agree with the essential premise that a college degree, no matter the field, would give me a competitive advantage.
It wasn’t until after I quit in the midst of a Ph D program in Medieval Literature that I realize I had been duped. College has been corrupted; turned from an institution that allowed for personal growth in to one that truly believes (and teaches as sure as the sky is blue) that its products are somehow more enlightened than everyone else, and that those people are more qualified to set public policy. And it’s a shame, both for those who actually believe that college somehow makes them better or more qualified than everyone else (pig, lipstick, etc), but also for the institution itself.
2011-10-23 » madlibertarianguy