I must be honest, last week when I saw in the syllabus we would be discussing ageism-- I assumed that meant we would be discussing issues surrounding the elderly. It did not occur to me that young people were oppressed by adults, until I heard people discussing it just last Saturday. And, as I look back on my own childhood, I know that I was expected to be a young adult-- and like other only children I know, except for school, most of my interactions were with adults.
Over the weekend I attended the New Politics Forum at the LBJ School. One of the lecturers spoke about the five main misconceptions about today's youth, they are;
1) Millennial’s are disengaged-- not true many are concerned about social justice issues
Examples: Hollaback.com, catchfire.com, and the Awesome Foundation.
2) Millennial’s prefer virtual connection to human connection-- not true, but social networking is embraced
3) Millennial’s are lazy—I’ll just use you guys as an example I wouldn't call any of you lazy
4) Millennial’s are predictable-- my personal experience says this is not true and I'm sure yours reflect that as well, I personally feel that we are under a paradigm shift in how can you predict that? Who Will be leading the way? You will.
5) Millennial’s are motivated by money-- this is an old paradigm baby boomer idea, and I see that shifting even in my own generation, and in a new paradigm-- shift values change.
I actually found a link to the article the speaker had quoted, if you want to read more: http://theyounggunsblog.com/2011/08/26/5-misconceptions-on-todays-youth/
Thanks for sharing this and for the encouragement! I am pretty surprised by the statement about millennials being motivated by money. I've seen this to be quite the opposite with myself, most of my friends, and people I've talked to. I feel that we are pretty disillusioned with the idea of money being a desirable thing to achieve or a measure of success. The Occupy Wall Street protests are a good example of this.
ReplyDeleteI thought that was very funny what you said about when you saw that we were discussing ageism this week that it meant something dealing with the elderly. I don't mean that being funny in a bad way because I thought that the elderly had something to do with ageism also, but that's not the case. I knew that young people were oppressed by adults, because I was oppressed by adults when I was growing up, but I didn't know that there was a word for it.
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