Bashing young people has long been a popular pastime.
Socrates (469 - 399 BCE) is quoted as saying, "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
In The Winter's Tale, III.iii, Shakespeare has an old shepherd say, “I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting -"
I'll have to tease my kids about "wronging the ancientry".
While young people do get arrested at higher rates than older people, they are, in general, better behaved than their parents were at the same age, as this graphic shows:
The only people acting up worse today than a generation ago are the over-55's!
Each generation appears to be doing a better job than the previous one. By every metric, the world is getting better over time. We live longer, global GDP has surged, and extreme poverty has fallen. War deaths have fallen dramatically. Deaths from HIV/AIDS and many other diseases have fallen. Fewer mothers die in childbirth, and infant and child mortality rates have dropped.
On a global scale, we are far better educated than we have ever been. Global illiteracy has dropped from almost 90% in 1800 to 14.7% in 2014. School enrollment and mean years of schooling are increasing. Education is becoming more accessible to girls, in spite of the many barriers that still exist in some parts of the world. Educated women, in turn, contribute to further bettering the world. Young people are smarter than their elders. Global IQ has risen 20 points since 1950 (the Flynn effect).
As Steven Pinker would say, "The Enlightenment Is Working". As a species, we are making more rational, data-driven choices about what does and does not improve human flourishing.
Today, a month after the Parkland shooting, young people all over the country walked out of their schools to protest our gun culture and our society's unwillingness to address mass shootings. The student survivors of Parkland have spoken out with clarity and confidence in a way that I don't think students of my own generation could have done. They have looked at the facts and come up with compelling arguments. They are not intimidated by powerful adults who accept NRA donations. These clear-eyed, outspoken, and courageous young people give me great hope for the future. They have taken a look at the status quo and are, as Emma Gonzalez puts it, calling BS:
"Companies trying to make caricatures of the teenagers these days, saying that we are all self-involved and trend-obsessed and they hush us into submission when our message doesn't reach the ears of the nation, we are prepared to call BS. Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have been done to prevent this, we call BS. They say tougher gun laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS. They say no laws could have prevented the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS. That us kids don't know what we're talking about, that we're too young to understand how the government works. We call BS."
You go, kids!
Socrates (469 - 399 BCE) is quoted as saying, "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
In The Winter's Tale, III.iii, Shakespeare has an old shepherd say, “I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting -"
I'll have to tease my kids about "wronging the ancientry".
While young people do get arrested at higher rates than older people, they are, in general, better behaved than their parents were at the same age, as this graphic shows:
The only people acting up worse today than a generation ago are the over-55's!
Each generation appears to be doing a better job than the previous one. By every metric, the world is getting better over time. We live longer, global GDP has surged, and extreme poverty has fallen. War deaths have fallen dramatically. Deaths from HIV/AIDS and many other diseases have fallen. Fewer mothers die in childbirth, and infant and child mortality rates have dropped.
On a global scale, we are far better educated than we have ever been. Global illiteracy has dropped from almost 90% in 1800 to 14.7% in 2014. School enrollment and mean years of schooling are increasing. Education is becoming more accessible to girls, in spite of the many barriers that still exist in some parts of the world. Educated women, in turn, contribute to further bettering the world. Young people are smarter than their elders. Global IQ has risen 20 points since 1950 (the Flynn effect).
As Steven Pinker would say, "The Enlightenment Is Working". As a species, we are making more rational, data-driven choices about what does and does not improve human flourishing.
Today, a month after the Parkland shooting, young people all over the country walked out of their schools to protest our gun culture and our society's unwillingness to address mass shootings. The student survivors of Parkland have spoken out with clarity and confidence in a way that I don't think students of my own generation could have done. They have looked at the facts and come up with compelling arguments. They are not intimidated by powerful adults who accept NRA donations. These clear-eyed, outspoken, and courageous young people give me great hope for the future. They have taken a look at the status quo and are, as Emma Gonzalez puts it, calling BS:
"Companies trying to make caricatures of the teenagers these days, saying that we are all self-involved and trend-obsessed and they hush us into submission when our message doesn't reach the ears of the nation, we are prepared to call BS. Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have been done to prevent this, we call BS. They say tougher gun laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS. They say no laws could have prevented the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS. That us kids don't know what we're talking about, that we're too young to understand how the government works. We call BS."
You go, kids!
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