Is this the education consequence of a nation of wimps?

Steve Horwitz has often told us about A Nation of Wimps phenomena that results from helicopter parents and the overproctection of children.  This includes the way our kids play, learn at school, and dress and behave in general.  Parents are too permissive and too protective at the same time, and the skils of a child to be a self-motivated, self-disciplined, and self-governing citizen have been atrophied.

Now I bet if you go back in history, every generation had words to described the horrible behavior of teenagers.  Drug-store cowboys gave way to greasers which gave way to hippies and then to burn-outs.  Jocks have been jocks, and nerds were once just described as bookish.  But is all that is going on is that the older generation is highlighting the problems with todays youth?

It does seem like something more is going on.  And the loss of our ability to be self-governing citizens is a far more dire consequence than whether Johnny or Janey can get into the right college, or score the winning goal, or perform in the senior play.  Perhaps Steve's new book will explain all of this clearly.

In the meantime, Bradford Marselis is convinced that today's students cannot take criticism and do not know what it means to work hard to get better.  As a coach and teacher I can relate, though I am not sure it is any worse today than it was back when in general.  Except that there are some kids who are willing to take criticism and learn then and now, and those are the ones who tended to excel and move on in the endeavor with a greater degree of success.  One has to remember that John Wooden use to tell his players in the 1960s and early 1970s, "Its what you learn after you know it all that counts most."  Another Wooden phrase was "Failure is never fatal, but failure to change might be."  But if we never allow individuals to fail, then they never learn to change and that is a problem (for the individual and the system --- witness our current crisis).

What is your impression of students today?  Do they work less than your generation, do they resist criticism more, do they respond only to positive reinforcement, and is their likelihood to become self-governing citizens in a free society smaller than the generations before them?  Has our permissive yet protective method of childrearing endangered their future?

Hat tip to Dave Beito for the Marselis video.

Comments

[Mario Rizzo]

Pete,
I think about this often especially in connection with courses I have taught for many years. Undergraduate students at NYU seem FAR more interested in getting good grades, getting into good professional or even, but infrequently, graduate programs than learning for its own sake. The universities are to blame in significant part. Private university tuition is much, much higher in real terms than 10,20, and 30 years ago. So students need to make money when they graduate to pay back huge loans. Why then should they care about substance than is not "practical"? I have had many a freshman tell me that they are very interested in such-and-so but cannot pursue it because they must make money.

I also teach what used to be a freshman seminar for "honors" students. A few years ago the freshman seminars were open to all incoming students -- yet they are still called "honors seminars." It is a rare student who is ready for a seminar in their first semester of college. But the University has an interest in creating the illusion of special learning environments for everyone in exchange for the big tuition money. in reality, the really good students are being done a disservice as the educational environment of the seminar is degraded.

I realize that we faculty members benefit from the higher-tuition universities because our teaching loads are much lower than in the past. So few professors will protest. In fact they will rationalize by saying, "Hey, these students don't care to learn so why should we spend a lot of time teaching them." Indeed.

The Federal government makes this kind of environment possible by providing the low-interest loans to students to pay. But obviously none of this is cheap to the students or else they wouldn't be "crazy" about making money.

It is hard to know where to break into this cycle. But I for one enjoy the low teaching load too much to care. Yes, that is "selfish" but honest, at least.

[Zachary Kurtz]

Prof. Rizzo - I have observed much the same thing at my State school (SUNY Stony Brook). People are paying less for tuition, but are just as interested in passing through without learning anything. I consider myself the exception to this. But a big problem is that there are too many classes without much to offer in the way of teaching students something useful.

[Daniel J. D'Amico]

I re-read Malcolm Gladwell's chapter on crime in The Tipping Point recently. Gladwell's theory in essence is a more subtle version of a "broken windows" theory of crime (not to be confused with the broken windows fallacy in economics). Consistent with Gladwell's broader tipping point theme - small things have big effects - the broken windows theory can be summed up as small crimes promote big. And inversely small crime enforcement can have big deterrent effects. His case in point is New York City in the 1990s. Plagued by menial crimes: graffiti, loitering and turnstile jumpers, the New York City subway system was also a spawning ground for muggings, rape, robbery and murder. Gladwell's theory: if we clean it they (the criminals) will leave. By painting over graffiti, fixing turnstiles and getting strict on the menial stuff, the city sent a strong signal that they meant business.

The biggest counter example to Gladwell that comes to mind is public high schools. Administrations and security officers desperately try to enforce a litany of rules and regulations that when compared to adult life seem menial but in my casual observation, to no avail. What sorts of citizens are these public institutions molding and how will they be influenced by tipping points of law enforcement in the future? Yes it seems kids are wimps at standing up against bullying or even administrative pressures. But they do seem willing to casually disregard what they interpret to be insignificant rules: no gum chewing, no swearing, no smoking, etc.

[Rafe Champion]

This discussion seems to be trending in two rather different directions, one related to childraising and the other to attitudes to learning and higher education. On child-raising there is a Taking Children Seriously movement which has libertarian roots with the aim of raising independent and responsible children by providing a non-coercive environment. Good Luck!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taking_Children_Seriously

The other issue, of student attitudes to study, probably needs to be addressed as a part of a bigger picture, along the lines sketched by Jacques Barzun (1907 - ) in his series of books "Teacher in America" (1946, 1983), "The House of Intellect" (1959), "Science: The Glorious Entertainment" (1964) and "The American University" (1968). Among other things he addressed the habits and attitudes towards learing and orgnised thinking that are fostered (or retarded) by all kinds of influences, starting in the home (the kind of conversation that is encouraged), the schools, the media (25 second grabs on major world events, political favoritism), and the organs of higher learning and high culture.

[Elliot Temple]

Here is the context of my take on this:

Our society is getting better and freer. We are moving towards Karl Popper's "Open Society". The more taboos we cast off, and the more authoritarian traditions we question, and the more people feel able not to do what is expected of them, then the more *mistakes will be made*. Mistakes are one of the consequences of people using their own judgment.

Change can be disruptive, and there are probably better ways to do it, but on the whole it is a good thing.

Now my comments about schools in general:

Schools are cruel, authoritarian places where children are not treated as thinking people, and are forbidden from pursuing their own happiness according to their own judgment. School children do not much have freedom or full human rights. It comes as no surprise to me that school is not working for a lot of students who have Western values and see and feel that they aren't being allowed to live in a Western way.

The better our society gets, the larger the gap becomes between the treatment of citizens in general, and the treatment of school students. Schools are going to have to change their attitude from commanding students to uncritically learn the material an authority decided is important, to helping students achieve their own goals.

A critical step in this change is to get rid of public (Government) schools, which are very poor at responding to a changing world.

I think your post points out some of the specific ways the schools are failing. e.g., the authoritarian attitude of schools, where students work for the school's goals and not their own, does not help students learn the merits of voluntarily working hard. and the "don't you dare be wrong!" attitude of schools and their tests fails to help students to appreciate criticism.

[Aaron Brown]

"Marselis" --> "Marsalis"

[Richard Ebeling]

If I may make a related observation.

Compared to my "generation" -- i.e., those who were in their teens and their twenties in the 1960s and 1970s -- it often seems to me that younger people who get interested in the ideas of Austrian Economics and Classical Liberalism are less interested and motivated to read the "classics" of these two strands of thought.

I've heard things like the following (or an attitude that suggests this sentiment):

"Well, I've read Rothbard's 'Man, Economy, and State,' so I know all that's relevant in the older 'Austrian' literature. Besides, I've read the recent works of 'Dr. X,' and 'Professor Y,' so I know that 'Austro-Anarchism' is the only consistent and morally correct position. So I don't need to really study those 'mini-statists' like Mises, Hayek, and Friedman."

I am, obviously, making a "brush-stroke" generalization, but this seems to me far more the "study habits" of many younger people.

(My phrasing it this way does not imply that reading Rothbard is not extremely valuable or that there is anything wrong with accepting a "no-state" political position.)

But there seems less concern with serious intellectual scholarship among too many of these younger people.

I am not saying that every one should be only interested in the history of ideas. But how do you know where your own ideas come from? How they have evolved into what these strands of thought are presently? How what others have written and thought in the past may have relevence for own's time? Well, you get what I'm getting at.

This bother's me a lot.

Richard Ebeling

[Tyler Watts]

Prof. Boettke,

My initial response to your post would be to dismiss any kind of "kids these days!" mentality as simply nostalgia bias. Human nature doesn't change; the proportion of quality kids vs. rotten kids probably doesn't change much over the years. But maybe the nature of the rotten kids is changing, and the manifestation of the new trends in bad behavior tend to draw out older people's nostalgia.
I think the big problem is not so much over-protective parents, but over-providng parents. Thanks to the awesome material abundance we enjoy these days, middle class parents can, if they choose, give their kids just about every damn thing they ask for, such that the kids don't have to work for what they want and they needn't learn tough lessons about scarcity and economizing. The parents may not even be aware of this- they think they have their kids best interest in mind, without realizing the long term consequences. The kids then are thrust into the world without having developed a good work ethic and a stoic ability to cope with scarcity- what I like to call a "hard times mentality."
I view organized, competitive sports as a social mechanism that has developed to cope with this phenomenon. Modern middle-class kids don't face hard times and hard work in their home lives, so we contrive some hardship and discipline for them. But then, helicopter parents tend to screw up these benefits too, by trying to insulate their kids from the hardships and disappointments that go with sports.
One of the best things my parents did for me in this regard was to put me to work at an early age. I went to construction sites with my dad from age 12 or so. I learned valuable trade skills that I still use (and I love the work), but, more importantly, I learned to work my ass off and not complain. I hope I will be able to provide the same type of experience for my kids when they get old enough.

-Tyler