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January 6, 2009
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Branford Marsalis riffs
... on students today. I'm sure if pressed he would acknowledge there are plenty of exceptions to his rule. He's probably taught people whose dedication and commitment and eagerness to learn are exceptional. Most teachers have. But at the same time, it's instructive to hear him distill his teaching experiences into a characterization of collective youth entitlement. No doubt his comments will offend some, and some will argue that he's overstating his case or irresponsibly generalizing. But at the same time, he's attempting to characterize the overall tenor of his teaching experiences--and, quite self-consciously, to pinpoint truths we as a culture are reluctant to face. You can't come to grips with anything unless you generalize--nor can you judge. And informed judgement, as unpleasant as it may be, is a vital process of learning, problem-solving, and constructive change.
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Where is he teaching? From something I found on the web it looked like the University of New Orleans, which may not be typical.
Unquestionably, though, there is a bad epidemic of people wanting to be endlessly patted on the back and totally uninterested in honest feedback. For a long and depressing thread on this, search "superheated 'steem" at my blog.
It's pretty scary to think about people like this as: physicians, nurses, airline pilots, structural engineers, military officers, or executives of any kind. Fortunately, most of them will probably either avoid fields involving serious measurability and accountability or will fail early enough in their careers to minimize the damage to others.
Absent hard data and rigorous analysis, these "kids today" claims leave me pretty cold. There's a structural problem involved in casual comparisons of the way young people are today to the way they were when we were young. The tendency is to compare one's current students not to a previous generation of students, but to one's memory of oneself as a student. And we--certainly Branford Marsalis, and probably Erin and David--were not representative students but exceptionally ones. Even if we weren't particularly good, we might well remember ourselves that way. So there's a built-in danger of false generalization--not about people today but about people yesterday.
Marsalis may well be right in some general way about people today. But I'm not at all sure that he's talking about anything new, much less about anything that might be laid at the door of the self-esteem movement or any other popular bogeyman.
es...of course, there's always the danger of the "kids today" overreaction. But do you really think that 20 years ago--or even 10--recent college graduates were bringing *their parents* to job interviews? Or having their mother call their boss if they got a less-than-outstanding performance review at work?
When kids are fed an endless diet of you-are-wonderful, and when teachers are forbidden to use a red pen for correcting papers because it might be damaging to self-esteem, it seems like it *has* to have some kind of lasting effect.
Do you really think that 20 years ago...recent college graduates were...having their mother call their boss if they got a less-than-outstanding performance review at work?
No, I don't. I also don't think that happens today except in rare instances. I haven't had a parent contact me about a child's grade in several years, and I have no reason to think that these same parents changed their habits dramatically after their kids' graduations.
When kids are fed an endless diet of you-are-wonderful...it seems like it *has* to have some kind of lasting effect.
Yes, it would seem so, and perhaps someday someone will actually demonstrate that it does. Perhaps someone has already done so, in which case I'd be happy to read the study. Until then I'll take the anecdote-based generalizations with a grain of salt.
Come to think of it, when an economy is based on millions of people making millions of individual decisions based on private self-interest, it seems like it has to result in a general condition of economic chaos and. Oddly enough, it doesn't--though one could easily cherry-pick a few anecdotes to make it appear otherwise.
