Middle-class kids are taught from an early age that they should work hard and finish school. Yet 3 out of 10 students dropped out of high school as recently as 2006, and less than a third of young people have finished college. Many economists attribute the sluggish wage growth in the U.S. to educational stagnation, which is one reason politicians of every stripe call for doubling or tripling the number of college graduates. But what if the millions of so-called dropouts are onto something? As conventional high schools and colleges prepare the next generation for jobs that won't exist, we're on the cusp of a dropout revolution, one that will spark an era of experimentation in new ways to learn and new ways to live. It's important to keep in mind that behavior that seems irrational from a middle-class perspective is perfectly rational in the face of straitened circumstances. People who feel obsolete in today's information economy will be joined by millions more in the emerging post-information economy, in which routine professional work and even some high-end services will be more cheaply performed overseas or by machines. This doesn't mean that work will vanish. It does mean, however, that it will take a new and unfamiliar form. Look at the projections of fiscal doom emanating from the federal government, and consider the possibility that things could prove both worse and better. Worse because the jobless recovery we all expect could be severe enough to starve the New Deal social programs on which we base our life plans. Better because the millennial generation could prove to be more resilient and creative than its predecessors, abandoning old, familiar and broken institutions in favor of new, strange and flourishing ones.
Middle-class kids are taught from an early age that they should work hard and finish school. Yet 3 out of 10 students dropped out of high school as recently as 2006, and less than a third of young people have finished college. Many economists attribute the sluggish wage growth in the U.S. to educational stagnation, which is one reason politicians of every stripe call for doubling or tripling the number of college graduates.
But what if the millions of so-called dropouts are onto something? As conventional high schools and colleges prepare the next generation for jobs that won't exist, we're on the cusp of a dropout revolution, one that will spark an era of experimentation in new ways to learn and new ways to live.
It's important to keep in mind that behavior that seems irrational from a middle-class perspective is perfectly rational in the face of straitened circumstances. People who feel obsolete in today's information economy will be joined by millions more in the emerging post-information economy, in which routine professional work and even some high-end services will be more cheaply performed overseas or by machines. This doesn't mean that work will vanish. It does mean, however, that it will take a new and unfamiliar form.
Look at the projections of fiscal doom emanating from the federal government, and consider the possibility that things could prove both worse and better. Worse because the jobless recovery we all expect could be severe enough to starve the New Deal social programs on which we base our life plans. Better because the millennial generation could prove to be more resilient and creative than its predecessors, abandoning old, familiar and broken institutions in favor of new, strange and flourishing ones.
...one of which appears to be the 'wander the planet doing odd jobs for food and lodging while waiting for something better to emerge, and making friends and accruing life experiences more stimulating than queuing for dole money or watching your mailbox for that job interview from all those applications you sent out'.
it's odd yet makes perfect sense. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
Most observations thus far are that the post-1982 set is ill-equipped to work or contribute to society in most meaningful ways despite sincere earnestness. They are the "everyone gets a trophy for playing" generation with the obvious and predictable consequences. Meanwhile the jaded gen-xers who saw through the right-wing lie as early as twenty years ago are actually the ones growing into the decision-making positions of society that will determine how we come out of all of this.
The corporate media, meanwhile, continues to demonstrate its utter irrelevance by fixating on a bunch of 22 year-olds, falsely connecting them with tools like Twitter (which is not particularly popular with people under 35). This is burying the slew of articles that were coming out in 06/07 that featured the appalled reactions of employers who were getting their first-taste of the entitled recent college grads who all expected to be hired into 60k/year management positions for having achieved a bachelor's degree from a US college.
The disconnect from reality one finds in this generation would be disturbing did it not so closely mirror the cynicism of the group just older than them. The millennials are eager to contribute and lack strong original ideas of their own. They will be easily led to whatever gen x decides is of value. This dynamic should become readily apparent within 5 years.
What the media reports are identifying with these Millennials is a rejection of most of the assumptions and values that went with the economy and work practices of the second half of the 20th century. Some of what is reported is a cynical response to an economy that is built upon piracy and does not actually reward hard work or creativity, some of it is an expectation of basic levels of economic and financial security, and some of it is a belief that people should be able to do work that makes them happy. There are levels of interrelatedness between those factors, and likely others that I've not mentioned.
What I see in the media reports about Millennials is an anger that we won't lower our horizons, abandon our dreams, and suffer through life like everyone else. The other generations currently on the stage all experienced an economic crisis that forced them to scale back their personal dreams and ambitions.
So far, from what I have seen, Millennials are unwilling to do this. What some see as a disconnect from reality is in fact a rejection of reality and a desire to produce a different reality. So far Millennials lack access to resources to realize this, but are starting to find ways to do it anyway.
It's a generation that has a deep potential for radicalism, but of a constructive sort. I should think that ought to be embraced, especially when polls of American Millennials show us to be a very progressive group supportive of a strong public sector and deeply hostile to the right-wing, whereas "Gen X" is the most Republican-friendly generation in the country. And the world will live as one
