Well, that's part of the problem. Nobody seems to know what a millennial is. I have seen varying age ranges, but it's anywhere from kids born in the early 80s to kids born in the early 2000s. My parents are boomers. Boomers are anyone born 1946 – 1964. So boomers definitely raised a huge chunk of the millennials. Gen X probably caught the very tail of the millennial range.
Fine. Baby boomers were the ones at the helm when public schools went directly into the toilet. Education has become entirely about standardized testing and working the numbers. Teachers have lamented the fact that they can't develop their own curriculum and are forced to only teach the curriculum that focuses on improved testing scores. Class sizes have grown and grown. I left high school and finished my education at a community college where the classes were smaller and much much better. I also got college credit so I was able to double dip. Funny enough, I'm seeing college education go into the toilet with boomers at the helm. Huge classes, lots of building to increase room for more students, but nothing done to add more teachers or improve the overall education. I was in required classes that were so full that there were kids sitting in the aisles. It's certainly not my generation in charge of this shit.
I'm a baby boomer and my kids are 42.33 and 31 years old. Blaming a generation is extremely foolish anyway.
So who would you charge with educating your children? Who were the administrators? Who were the teachers? Who was in congress during most of the millennial's formative years? If someone owns a greenhouse, and their plants keep dying, who is to blame? The person who is in charge of watering the plants? The person in charge making sure the environment in the greenhouse is conducive to growth? Or do you just blame the plants for being stupid and not growing on their own?
My kids and many of their classmates in which I was honored to coach many of them in various sports have grown up just fine and are not only intelligent people but also very well rounded. What age group do you fall under?
I was originally considered a millennial, but apparently I'm too old for that as they created a new generation for a small window of years called Xennials. I don't see anything wrong with Millennials. I'm merely trying to show people who like to bash on Millennials that they are a product of an environment that was created for them. They didn't raise themselves.
No 80s kids aren't millennials. You have to at least be born in the 90s. My nephew is a millennial, my son isn't.
See! This is what I'm talking about. This is incorrect. Every single definition of "millennial" includes kids born in the 80s. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tan...e-millennials-end-and-post-millennials-begin/ https://thecollegeinvestor.com/19793/millennial-age-range/ https://www.independent.co.uk/life-...cutoff-date-pew-research-center-a8235731.html
I agree completely with a good number of your points, but I feel that the largest amount of the responsibility for academic success lies with the parents and the kids. You can lead a horse to water but........I have 2 sons born 3 years apart. Both went to the same public schools (all of which had resources available that were utterly beyond my Catholic school experience and imagination). One son took it upon himself to make the most out of his education. The other son (very bright kid) took it upon himself to piss his opportunities away. My wife (especially.....and with a degree in education) and I did our best, but in the end each kid made a choice. My parents sent my siblings and I to private schools. My siblings made the most of it. I pissed it away. When I finally woke up, I had one helluva lot of ground to make up. But I put in the time and effort (community colleges ARE the best bang for the educational buck) because I knew the only person who owed me a living was me. I see far too many examples of younger people (“Millenials” has almost become a generic term for younger folks in general) who have pissed away their opportunities and find it easier to blame their schools and older generations for their own shortcomings. They don’t want to have to try any harder than they wanted to try in their school years. They want “quality of life[style]” without the trade offs or putting in the work. So it’s easier to point the finger elsewhere when they can’t achieve that. The only real difference I personally see between the younger folks who are succeeding/surviving and those who are floundering is effort, sacrifice and the willingness to accept personal responsibility. I’ll be extremely curious as to how the educational system evolves when it is your “generation in charge of this shit.”
While I agree with you that it's definitely something that you can change with hard work, I also think the world has changed drastically in the past 30 years. It's extremely difficult for families to live on one income. My family grew up with one income comfortably. That's a massive difference for the millennials. Buying a home is a huge difference. The cost of homes have increased exponentially. My wife and I were extremely lucky to get the home that we did, and her parents helped us out with the down payment. Student loans are another huge difference. People used to be able to work their way through college, but the cost of tuition has gone up a ton since even I was in college. There is an entire generation of kids who have a ton of student debt right now, and that affects everything else. The ability to buy a home. The ability to live off one income. Etc A bachelors degree isn't worth what it used to be. People are being paid less than they should be after leaving college. People need jobs and companies are extremely stingy. They're unwilling to give pay increases so people have to leave and go somewhere else to get paid fairly. I'm getting paid about $10k less than I should be. My wife is getting paid about $10k less than she should be, so collectively we're making about $20k less than we should be. That's based on market value for the work that we do. To get that money I would have to leave my job. We live in a very different world these days. Very different from when our parents were our age. Hard work can only get you so far.
A lot of this is true. Where I part ways with is not mentioning how we fund our schools. I was going to Cleveland HS when a bunch of boomers decided they wanted lower property taxes and passed measure 5. Now, remind me why we use this idiotic way (property taxes) to fund our schools.... Nvm... The boomers set it up that way... Then when it didn't suit them, they pulled the rug out from under us.
Maybe older Gen X, but millenials are 25-35 right now, and Gen X is 40-50... it's younger boomers who raised the millenials.
I'm not sure the boomers deserve the blame for this (I certainly don't, since I wasn't living in oregon at the time). But if my math is right the oldest boomer was 44 in 1990. People who voted for Measure 5, were (I am asserting without looking it up, please correct me if I'm wrong) skewed significantly towards the elderly. I blame the 'greatest generation', not the boomers, for measure 5. barfo
Fair enough. Just like people refer to most young folk as millenials, I'd say the same thing applies to boomers. But if you didn't think that it was WAY easier to own a home in Portland then I'd say you'd be mistaken. I'd wager to say lots of boomers voted for it too. They owned homes too and majority of them are opposed to taxes.
