Oh Millennials, Y do we hate UR generation?

For the better part of the last two years, I've been thinking on and off about the nature of the generation following Gen X, Generation Y. As one of the last Gen Xers, I often find myself standing more with one foot in each group than anything. And so when folks bring up this newest generation, which spans roughly from 1980 to 2000, I find myself often simultaneously nodding my head in ascent and dropping it in despair.

Fact of the matter is, Most folks think that Generation Y (or the Millennials, DotNet Generation, Facebook Generation, etc) is at best in distress and at worst hell-bent on the unconscious dismantlement of society as we know it. But do the Millennials really deserve all this bad press?

Without a doubt, each upcoming generation gnashes its teeth against the Old Guard. Musically, Gen X started out throwing bottles and spit on stage with Punk and continued on a path of raging against the machine all the way from Hair Metal to Goth to Grunge, Hip Hop to Gangsta Rap. We tore it up.

And as the Hippies turned Yuppies lost everything when the Big 80s crashed it was the first of the Gen Xers coming out of college that paved the new Internet startups. We've been movers and shakers. Granted, we don't do things the traditional way, bringing about cultural analysts like Richard Florida to publish The Rise of the Creative Class, but we drive change through challenging the status quo.

Now as the Millennials are starting to reach their 20s, and most are in college, the bad press has really swung into force. While baby-boomers hated the fact that Gen Xers didn't care about "proper business attire," and were forced to concede to tattoos, piercings, alternative lifestyles, and more casual work attire, Gen X still got the job done. Gen Y, doesn't seem to have the same capability, or so say the critics.

Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation provides perhaps, one of the most pointed and quantitatively supported argument against the newest generation. He says, "Today's rising generation thinks more highly of its lesser traits. It wears anti-intellectualism on its sleeve, pronouncing book-reading an old-fashioned custom, and it snaps at people who rebuke them for it" (41). Throughout his book, Bauerlein cites study after study showing the steady decline in reading rates for young Americans, with one study showing that teens spend only about eight minutes of their day reading when on average they had more than five hours of daily leisure time (49). These are some startling statistics. But is reading everything?

Take a break from reading, and watch Professor Michael Wesch's, Digital Ethnography professor at the University of Kansas video,A vision of Students Today
Some interesting statistics

• I only complete 49% of my assigned readings
• 26% of them are relevant to my life
• I buy hundred dollar textbooks that I never open
• My Neighbor Paid for class, but never comes
• I will read 8 books this year
• 2300 webpages and 1281 Facebook profiles
• I will write 42 pages for class this semester
• and over 500 pages of email
• I am a multi-tasker
• (I have to be)

These are some fairly striking statistics. And they came from the students. Two things stick out to me:

1. Priorities are shifting away from what is expected of them to what they want.
2. Millennials are less concerned with expectations and more with narcissistic pursuits.

About a year ago, I started laying out the groundwork for an essay on teaching to the Millennial generation. At the time, I was still largely optimistic to the notion, thinking that a lot of what Bauerlein and other critics say about Millennials was more of the Old Guard groaning at their replacements not living up to whatever archaic standards that no replacement can live up to. And in this planning, I came up with several suppositions about Millennials that define their generation:

1. The Millennial Generation is wholly unlike and preceding generation
2. Students don't read or just aren't interested in reading
3. Reading for today's students more often is seen as a chore or punishment
4. Students think the internet holds all of the answers
5. Students have little patience for things that have no direct connection to their situation
6. Students don't look for deeper connection/analysis with with they read.
7. Students fail to see the importance of writing, which leads to a major crisis in the business world
8. High school doesn't prepare students for the necessary critical thinking in college
9. Students have a very poor grasp of grammar, if they have one at all
10. Students have a difficulty assessing purpose to their writing through recognizing a specific audience

I'm generalizing here; obviously exception exists on both sides of the spectrum, but what I'm witnessing after nearly 300 students worth of Millennials is that some darker currents beyond the above suppositions are rising:

1. Passionate disinterest
2. Selective technical apathy
3. Ultra short attention spans masquerading as multi-tasking
4. Unwillingness to excel

Along these lines Bauerlein says,

It's a new attitude, this brazen disregard of books and reading. Earlier generations resented homework assignments, of course, and only a small segment of each dove into the intellectual currents of the time, but no generation trumpeted a-literacy (knowing how to read but choosing not to) as a valid behavior of their peers. (40)

And so, I'm left standing still between two precipices. I can't help but scowl at the passionate disinterest and apathy I see when students don't even bother to try doing an assignment. I don't expect everyone to feel the readings are relevant, or even interesting, but by reading them, at least we can talk about what could have happened to make the reading useful. A room full of blank stares accomplishes nothing, and ultimately it's their loss not mine; I've earned my degree; I know how to put together an essay, how to deconstruct a text, how to apply it to other arguments.

But on the other side, I feel that pull of narcissism. Teh Intarnets!!111! does have that effect on us. Our social outlets, Facebook profiles, YouTube videos, blogs, scattered comments across the net all serve as brand identity. Brand identity for the big ole capital I. The facade of anonymity draws us in, makes us feel cozy and safe, beckons for us to say anything, and one thing Millennials can do better than any other generation is post anything and everything that's on their minds to the net--privacy to Gen Y is a distant meaningless thing to so many young people today--something that a anti-social curmudgeon like myself will never fully understand.