Actually for all the concerns of "ageism", I do take a lot of these concerns to heart and think there's a bit of truth to them - and that's coming from someone who's supposed to be of a totally different generation. As a college teacher, I get to work with exactly the demographic this is written "against", and you know what, there really is a big loss of maturity and life experience among them. I'm not the only one to say it either - many, many other people I work with agree with me. There's been a dramatic downtrend in the average 'quality' of students entering college over the past 20 years or so. You can't generalize completely, of course, and there's lots of brilliant, mature, life-savvy kids out there these days - but there is a lot that points to the fact that today's middle-class youth culture is sheltered, conventional, and over-entertained. And that's even reflected in things like music tastes, interests, political involvement, hobbies... There's a real trend today away from actual counter-culture, and towards just buying the cultural types you're sold. As a favourite musician of mine said, this is probably the first generation since the 1950s where the kids are more conventional than their parents.
Again, plenty of exceptions to that, but by and large I do find it sadly true.
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There are only forty people in the world and five of them are hamburgers.
-Don Van Vliet (aka Captain Beefheart)
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