I am wondering just how steeled those writers are who continually attack youth, millennials, the Dumbest Generation Ever, the distracted generation, Generation Like (as in F.U.Book). Really wondering how it can be in this insipid, inane, murderous, Mafioso Society, US of Israel, how anyone would want to even expend a few digital ink spots on the Fox News gotcha crap that has inseminated the mainstream, corporate and even faux lefty news that talks about the entitlement of today’s youth.
Have any of these writers been with fire department captains, city managers, stock traders, colonels and generals, CEOs in boardrooms, with Rotarians? Really, youth today are the most entitled? Youth today are part of the punishment generation, fined and interest-rate-ed to death. A war and toxin loving society that throws money at an elite force of pigs to turn us into pigs in the stockyard.
Suing the school for not getting a nursing certificate? Really big news? This is like that Welfare Cadillac Driving Racist Reagan Story that was promulgated throughout the land. Can this be, this folly of following shit stories, a big-big minority of shit stories, about today’s entitled youth?
Read the real story behind how students are getting screwed by on-line profiteers for nursing degrees — “Induced to Fail?”
The CPNE costs $2,225 per attempt, and students are given a test date between three and eight months after signing up.
One of the 17 students, who spoke on condition of anonymity, did not sign up to retake the test after failing it the first time. The student described being subjected to “psychological tricks,” such as facing constant interruptions and having to whisper the reasoning behind each step of the clinical process. At one point during the test, the student said a registered nurse walked up and said “I feel really sorry for you guys.”
“They were trying to induce you to fail,” the student said. “When you’re playing against a stacked deck, you don’t stand much of a chance of winning.”
The group of plaintiffs also includes Jillian Phelan, who passed the CPNE “solely because of the Examiner’s discretion.” In Phelan’s case, the complaint says her examiner “assisted [Phelan] on six (6) different occasions during her examination” and “informed [Phelan] that she felt that the program was ‘unfair.’”
Education has become total bullshit, for profit, for no classroom skills building, for a few chosen people who have made money at gutting real education. So saying today’s generation is coddled and sue happy and weak, is pure, Bullshit. I’ve been a teacher since 1983 from El Paso to Austin to Las Cruces to Seattle to Spokane to Vancouver, and some other parts in between. It’s not the youth that are screwed up and sue happy and entitled. It’s the entire elite systems, the One Percent and 19 Percenters, those pigs of profit, those levy makers, toll takers, tax extractors, fine facilitators. Those murderous “A” students of the MBA kind, those legal eagles, all those suit wearing, 30 year olds all the way up to 80 year olds. It’s those folk who are the biggest entitled murderers on earth, and yet, we look at the aberrations? A rotten kid here and a sue-happy student there?
This is a culture of precarity, and during my 30 years teaching, hands down, I’ve been with a vast majority of community college students who want to inquire, think, learn, work, try, struggle, succeed, and do. The only fear I’ve had is the Admin Class, the HR Class, the Tenured Class of people in education who have shifted the baseline hard right, who have smashed any even playing field, who are afraid of their own shadows, who have lived lives of spender on the backs of the majority – part-time faculty – and on the souls of youth.
Youth who have needed revolutionaries in their lives. Living and practicing ones, active ones, those teaching them in K12 and in college. Revolutionaries on city councils. Revolutionaries in the small business world. Revolutionaries as governors. As representatives in state houses and senates.
So, these accusations against an entire generation, whew, we’ve heard it before. So, how do we get Amazon (dot) com workers, drone builders, all the cogs in the machine (subsidiaries of big energy-big money-big ag-big medicine-big prison-big military industrial complex ) going strong without each new generation of lost souls? That’s how the stock market rises, on the backs of ignorants, this generation of ignoramuses and last generation’s ignoramuses. How do we get wars irgnited and the constant flood of nothingness tied to nihilistic capitalism created and purchased? Hmm, dumbdowning, teaching to the faux test, holding all history and science and thinking close to a party line, the republicrat line a la Big Business and Corrupt Corporation!
Gee, I doubt with those rare cases of headline news-shaped stories of entitled kids or entitled students – read Walter Brasch’s, “A Nation of Millennial Entitlements” here — that Americans can really see the shape of things to come, those disasters, those economic tsunamis, all based on the generation of the Jimmy Carter kind, of the Bill Clinton and Obama and Bush and Cruz and Walker kind.
Picking on one disgruntled student? We have let criminals by the tens of thousands get away with millions of murders!
I’d say forced arbitration, forced usury US of Murder Inc, I’d say the US of Un-Education, US of Privatization, the US of Predation, the US of Poverty, the US of Bills-Kills-Spills, all of that, way past any millenial entitled grouping, all of them, Koch to Bezos to the Google boys to the entire mess of Fortune 1,000, all the un-state State Department A-plus Ivy League students running USA into a continual criminal-terrorism enterprise, well, I’d say those convict-able but never to be convicted entitled New Agers, Baby Boomers, Gen X-ers, I’d say they are the culprits, the deeply felonious entitled One Percent and 19 Percenters.
It’s an old saw, going after the younger generation, an old attack of the inane and mean and powerful and money-holders.
Recall – Welcome to My Generation. I hear it everyday in Portland, Vancouver, Beaverton, Hood River, you name it USA. Kids paying $1200 a month for a shack. Three bucks a gallon for gasoline. Fifty mile round trips to a $10 an hour job. No single payer health care, no public transportation worth a damn, and the constant drone of the Corporate Media, the Bill Cosby’s, Sean Hannity’s and even leftist writers attacking “THIS generation’s spoiledness.”
Spoiled, uh? Ever see the paychecks of middle managers of banks we bailed out? Civil servants working for the war machine. Missile toolers out in California? The billions doled out in public funds to keep poor people on the hamster wheel of spiritual and psychological and economic hell?
Forget the narratives of the now, no matter who is writing them. We are a bastardized society, and no manner of peeling away the neo-con/neo-liberal/neo-left/neo-tea party onion will get to the root sickness , the collective disease, of a society that is plugged in/tuned out/dialed into the pratter of the blogsphere/documentary-sphere.
I was asked by a cool guy I met on my job as a job developer why I don’t self-publish these killer books – novels and short story collections for which I once had a New York literary agent who tried and tried to get my work past the Vassar college interns at the major publishing house.
Now, come on. Set up my own web site, self-publish the books, and then what? What sort of paying readership? What sort of real change will occur? I don’t think big books, big ideas, big movies change diddly squat. I told this paraplegic that if I did a coffee table photo book of all the “cool bathrooms and toilets and restrooms in Portland” with some hip writing accompanying the artsy-photoshopped images, hell, I’d sell out. People would eat it up, nicely done, edgy, but, I’d sell out and would have Volume Two waiting to be written and photographed.
I doubt we have that many entitled kiddos and youth waiting for some ambulance chaser to sue the university or college because of bad performance or poor study habits. It makes good Salon (dot) com copy, or NBC headline news, or O’Reilly prattle.
But, think about those old bent over heads of law firms suing for billions copyright infringements. Think of all those bent over accountants and retired generals making cool millions doing nothing more than parasitic investing and devesting.
No that’s the entitled generation. Gold bullion and silver ingots. Straight A West Pointers and Stanfordites.
Yep, forced arbitration, the old generation’s stew:
What is forced arbitration?
In forced arbitration, a company requires a consumer or employee to submit any dispute that may arise to binding arbitration as a condition of employment or buying a product or service. The employee or consumer is required to waive their right to sue, to participate in a class action lawsuit, or to appeal. Forced arbitration is mandatory, the arbitrator’s decision is binding, and the results are not public.
Where is forced arbitration commonly used?
Forced arbitration is being written into more and more terms of agreement and contracts, including those used for employment, insurance, home-building, car loans and leases, credit cards, retirement accounts, investment accounts, and nursing facilities, to name a few.
Are these clauses easy to find in the paperwork?
Generally not. Most Americans have never noticed this clause in the fine print of terms of agreement or contracts. Moreover, companies may call the condition “binding mandatory arbitration,” “arbitration,” “mandatory arbitration” or even call it a “dispute resolution mechanism.”
So, those thirtysomethings, fiftysomethings, SeniorBabyBoomers, en mass, have given this so-called millennial generation a load of crap, a rowboat without oars, a society so entranced by and entrenched in consumer hedonism, b-b-q’s and weekends at the beach and fix ’em up projects, that there is no soul left in literature, reading, history, the ecological sciences, communitarianism, all that’s left is a gold and silver star on the essay when Little Johnny puts his name at the top right hand cornder.
This is us, mirrors to our souls, these so-called slackers. They are us, and we begat them, and they shall reap our profits as poor, disheveled amnesiacs. There is no preponderance of lazy and willfully entitled kids out there – just shadowless ghost of teachers and people who threw in the towel in the 1970s and ’80s. These young people have no models of zeal and zest. Just info-mercials, parading as news. Just controlled oppositions making a cool million as NGO and non-profit purveyors.
What do we expect of this generation or the next?
- You’re so lucky! Everything is at your fingertips with these smartphones and gadgets. If we wanted to get things done, we had to literally do it ourselves.”
- “You guys have it easy.”
- “Is that all you kids do these days? Facebook and surf the internet?”
- “When’s the last time you picked up a book? Do you read anything else besides gossip?”
- “I think you should spend your money on things that actually matter.”
- “You people say a lot, but don’t do enough.”
Of course, this book by an English professor is insipid and foolish and a waste of paper, but he still gets air time and talking fees and audiences, but he is yet another gutless wonder in the tenured track tradition — Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, and his rotten book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30).
Here, I will let a so-called Millennial speak to this bugger’s book:
If the Millennial generation is indeed dumber than any before it, writes Bauerlein, many people and institutions must share the blame. Let’s start with the pop-media image of the overworked yet overachieving American high-school student—largely a myth, in Bauerlein’s view. To hear him tell it, the kids are most decidedlynotalright. Instead, they score abysmally low on knowledge tests, shun reading for pleasure in higher numbers than ever before, devote little time to homework, and enter college ill-prepared in such basic arenas as writing and math.
But the book never quite delivers on Bauerlein’s promise of explaining how or why the digital age endangers our future. Bauerlein lays much of the liability for the robust leisure habits and intellectual torpor of the Millennials squarely at the feet of the U.S. educational system, where parents and educators have emphasized “self-esteem” at the expense of discipline. True, perhaps—but that dynamic is hardly a manifestation of “digital culture.”
In other instances Bauerlein finds signs of decline that can, in fact, be attributed to technology, yet they apply to the adult population in its entirety, not just to teens and 20-somethings. The author laments the rise in television viewing and other media consumption at the expense of book reading, pointing out that the literary reading rate for 18- to 24-year-olds fell from 60 percent in 1982 to 43 percent in 2002. But as Bauerlein’s own charts reveal, the reading rate sagged in every age group: from 60 percent to 47 percent for 35- to 44-year-olds, and from 47 to 45 percent for the 65-to-74 set. Bauerlein cites Pew Research Center statistics showing that the emergence of 24-hour cable news shows and the growth of the Internet have “had little impact on how much Americans know about national and international affairs.” But again, this knowledge deficit holds true among all age groups. (And by the same token, media-selection bias—the tendency of consumers to seek out only those cable programs, websites, and other news sources that reinforce their existing prejudices—is a problem that afflicts each generation in turn.)