I'm no hipster and so my attempt at irony here above has probably fallen flat. As some of my readers will recall, I'm alert to the perils of pigeonholing. While I understand our human tendency to make groupings in order to better make sense of our world, but having spent my life since the early '70's working with thousands of youth, I must at least chuckle. I'm not denying that the circumstances of my coming of age are quite different from those of young people growing up in the 1980's and '90's. It's just that my experience tells me that most 15-year-olds seem self-centered and even narcissistic to those who've moved beyond that stage of human development.
A fairly benign example of adults trying to get a handle on the young folks in their lives might be the way the teachers of a certain grade level, somewhere well into the school year, try to characterize each graduating class with personality traits, as if people born in a given year are describable a la Chinese astrology. At the teachers' meeting, the one who comes up with a couple of vivid-yet-vague words for, say, the current Junior Class, gets to wear the Seeing-the-forest Award, at least until the next trenchant cliché is offered up.
Certain clichés seem to be attached to certain zeitgeists. As a Youth-of-the-Sixties, I find myself more often than not getting either blank stares or "how quaint" looks when I pipe up with something like, "So as you can see, I'm a true Gemini" or look knowingly at a young woman who tells me her new boyfriend's birthdate and come with something like, "Ah, a Scorpio. Now I get it." The twelve zodiac signs used to be code for our New Age view that we're living in wheels within wheels, ever-connected through age-old wisdom.
But back to Generation Nice. Even though I'm not-so-subtly trying to point out that those of us year-in-year-out in the trenches with young people may also wish we had a codex with which to understand our students, we truly are dealing with unique individuals who are at that developmental stage where they often just hate being categorized. So now, I admit it, without irony, I did like to read that in surveying the hopes and dreams and attitudes of Millennials, they're here to assure us that this is a generation of young people with values that differ from Gen X and the Boomers. These teens' and twenty-somethings' highest three values are "being a good parent," "having a successful marriage" and "helping others in need." Do we wonder why?
Youth learns from their elders, but not always responsively. As they become adults, they tend toward wishing to effect change from their parents. And as Millennials have grown up in a record number of one-parent homes with that one person having to work very hard, often more than one job, to make ends meet, it makes sense that the surveys point toward M's seeing the value of stable families. They also have eschewed the naive trust of the Boomers in companies and corporations. And they seem to get what ancient-times President Eisenhower was talking about with his warnings re the Military-Industrial Complex. I hope that they don't pour ALL their righteous indignation into status updates and clever memes.
We need engagement. Face-to-face contact. Devices as our servants, not our masters. Mother Earth consciousness. Global awareness. The end to religions as rulers. I'm rooting for you, young'uns. And as long as my long legs will carry me, I'll be walking at your side, maybe even teaching you some songs from the last revolution along the way. Here we are.