|
seriously, i haven't seen any evidence of "kids these days" being more lazy than kids 10 years ago--within the self-selecting populations that i deal with in a university.
what i do see that i dont like is intellectual passivity and political dossility.
lots more tiresome good boys and good girls.
personally, i think they've in the main been scared into adopting this posture.
this a function of the social management/control functions of secondary schools reinforced by parental status anxiety.
play it safe, dont question things, be a good boy.
it's so lame. and self-defeating.
this is one of the few generalizations i have developed based on 10 years of teaching. there are no doubt others who have more experience here.
i think alot of these kids i encounter are in for a hell of a midlife crisis and will likely be totally unprepared to deal with it. if you are already doing something that you dont want because mummy and daddy are effectively forcing you into it because they are worried about downward mobility for all the obvious reasons, it doesnt take a rocket scientist to see the above looming somewhere for alot of these kids.
anyway: i also think that the flight into private schools is a joke. it addresses nothing--it serves only to depoliticize education. the idea that private schools are necessarily better than public is a conservative sham--in both public and private, what seems to matter is resource availability, both in the money sense and--perhaps as importantly--the sense in which schools replicate some floating sense of class position by enforcing class-specific sense of limitations on what kids imagine they are allowed to hope for.
and it isn't exactly a new thing to see schools as warehouses for children. its how the system as a whole is organized. the mystery is why this isnt obvious.
seems to me that if you have kids and want them to do well in school, it would make sense to fill them in on the game early and often. but that's just me.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|