This year’s graduating class has been ill-served by its elders, David Brooks says, because the graduates’ lives have been perversely structured:
This year’s graduates are members of the most supervised generation in American history. Through their childhoods and teenage years, they have been monitored, tutored, coached and honed to an unprecedented degree.
Yet upon graduation they will enter a world that is unprecedentedly wide open and unstructured. Most of them will not quickly get married, buy a home and have kids, as previous generations did. Instead, they will confront amazingly diverse job markets, social landscapes and lifestyle niches. Most will spend a decade wandering from job to job and clique to clique, searching for a role.
No one would design a system of extreme supervision to prepare people for a decade of extreme openness. But this is exactly what has emerged in modern America.
Worst of all, Brooks says, they are being sent off into the world with baby-boomer theology ringing in their ears:
If you sample some of the commencement addresses being broadcast on C-Span these days, you see that many graduates are told to: Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself. This is the litany of expressive individualism, which is still the dominant note in American culture.
[...]
But this talk is of no help to the central business of adulthood, finding serious things to tie yourself down to. The successful young adult is beginning to make sacred commitments — to a spouse, a community and calling — yet mostly hears about freedom and autonomy.Today’s graduates are also told to find their passion and then pursue their dreams. The implication is that they should find themselves first and then go off and live their quest. But, of course, very few people at age 22 or 24 can take an inward journey and come out having discovered a developed self.
The years between about 22 and getting married seemed like ‘fun’ at the time, albeit rather desperate fun; in retrospect they were bleak and empty years of constantly seeking distractions.
Humans are not designed for perpetual adolescence, but they can become addicted to it.
I don’t really buy Brook’s argument. First of all, as a columnist, he needs to exaggerate or at least slightly overemphasize the point he is trying to make. My main objections are:
1. When he writes that many of these kids have lived “highly structured lives”, that is another way of saying they have been active participants in civil society: soccer leagues, art classes, school newspaper, internships, etc. Whether or not they were “nudged” (or coerced) by their parents to do these things, the fact is they now have a lot of experience in a wide range of activities, have seen how well-managed non-governmental organizations can exist, thrive and contribute to a richer live. Well, many kids who have spent years doing those things will: (1) be more likely to know how to run and lead such organizations, (2) have wide interests, curious minds and flexibility about the possibility of doing many things, (3) as a result of 1 and 2 may also be more entrepreneurial. Will there be some kids who were essentially lemmings, just doing it because they were told to but who did not get much out of it? Sure, but I would say the benefit outweighs the harm on balance. (And anyway, what harm has there actually been? It seems to me for righ-side of the bell curve people, it is much more challenging to go from an UNstructured live to a structured life than the other way around.)
2. Brooks also underestimates the power of individual predilection and inborn nature. People who are self-starters, are self-starters; people who are not, are not. To a great extent this is difficult to alter in people. So whether your childhood was structured, unstructured or whatever, it will only marginally impact your personality and style. (If this sounds like it contradicts point 1 above, consider point 1 as the “nurture” part, and this point as the “nature” part.)
3. As for kids having been bred on Baby Boomer optimism and high expectations, my sense is that most people of the younger generation are not stupid. They see the writing on the wall, they know the score, and they realize that the future is highly uncertain and in flux.
If you meet up with the other neighborhood kids at the local park or vacant lot and organize a pick-up ball game, have you been an active participant in civil society? Yes, certainly — and arguably more so than if you showed up, ferried by Mom, to the soccer practice she signed you up for. I think there’s plenty good that can come from formal instruction in the form of classes and practices, but the concern is that modern upper-middle-class kids get released into the real world with zero experience structuring their own lives. They go where adults take them and do what adults tell them to do, all under adult supervision, with adults adjudicating any disputes. If anything, these upper-middle-class university-bound kids are the kids who should be given more responsibility earlier.