What Millennials Want
What we think of education, employment, and politics.
“I worry there is something broken in our generation; there are so many sad eyes on happy faces.”
~Atticus
For generations, tradition dictated that following their academic accomplishments, people must enter the workforce and contribute their talents and newly-developed skills to society. They enter the real world with the promise to better it, and come out with a monthly paycheck as a “thank you” for adding to the manual and intellectual labor of a corporation intended to make someone else rich. Society is designed to give you as many problems as necessary to keep you worried, and just enough of an income for you to make half of those troubles disappear each month, so rather than living up to your potential, you bow your head, take your payment, and keep your dreams to yourself. Unfortunately for millennials, we don’t play by the ideologies of a thousand years ago — we perceive life as simple and certain people in it as the cause of our complications; your traditions are about as outdated, hollow, narrow-minded, and mechanistic as the people who invented them and those who currently maintain them because they know nothing else.
WHEN IT COMES TO OUR EDUCATION, millennials want to see more teachers that care for and motivate the individual, and less instructors that continue to promote the same restricting classroom environments that they tolerated when they were young. If you didn’t like the way you were taught, why the hell would you teach others using the same methods? We need less lectures and more interaction to share our ideas; less discouragement and punishments over our mistakes and more positive feedback on how we can improve; less “Wrong answer” and more “There’s more than one way to do this”; less schedules that enforce a “time wasted” mentality if we’re not in class before the bell rings, and more of an opportunity to discover and even advance our own talents like painting, writing, music, dance, sports, etc..
The educational system of the Industrial Revolution served its purpose over 200 years ago, but we’re no longer teaching just reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic to get us by. From a young age, we seek opportunities for teamwork, but you encourage competition; we find creative and innovative ways to solve a problem, but you dismiss it as wrong because the solution is not done your way; we barely keep our heads up through an entire class period because classes start earlier and earlier each and every year, but you condemn us as “lazy” or “distractive to the classroom environment” when we’re forced to behave like adults before we could even drive; and, you preach on developing new classroom settings, but you still have our desks arranged like we’re products on an assembly line. Our education system has failed many generations, but just because this same problem existed even as far back as Albert Einstein’s time, it doesn’t excuse the root of the problem that educational institutions continue to fail to address:
“School failed me, and I failed the school. It bored me. The teachers behaved like Feldwebel (sergeants). I wanted to learn what I wanted to know, but they wanted me to learn for the exam. What I hated most was the competitive system there, and especially sports. Because of this, I wasn’t worth anything, and several times they suggested I leave…I felt my thirst for knowledge was being strangled by my teachers; grades were their only measurement. How can a teacher understand youth with such a system?”
~ Albert Einstein
Millennials live in an age where we believe half of what we read and nothing of what we hear. When half of writing — let alone teaching us — history is hiding the truth in textbooks, when novels that hint at our past shames and promote authors’ philosophies have been censored or banned, when you make us targets the rest of our lives by claiming we have learning disabilities just because you lack the patience to care about students’ academics individually, and when your curriculums teach us nothing that we could use outside class, like balancing a checkbook or knowing the basics of law to defend ourselves, do you blame us for dropping out of school or turning to technology to answer our questions? You try to democratize and average our talents and skills so that everyone can be “exceptional” in a subject, but you deny us the abilities, wisdom, and skills to care for ourselves, our finances, and our safety. Knowledge has been limited to the select few because we still categorize intellect and exceptional abilities based on a household’s income or a school’s back-to-back stress-inducing exams that keep record of kids’ advances just to pluck out those to be used for intellectual labor and manual labor later on — in other words, those who call the shots and those who pay the price.
IN REGARDS TO MILLENNIALS’ EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES AND FINANCES, this is not an era where a college degree guarantees a job. At times, millennials wonder if it’s even worth having an education since more and more of the labor force demands experience, and colleges don’t teach us what we would need when we finally do start working. Even if we want a higher degree for a better chance at a position, keep in mind that millennials have been dumped into a weak economy with unaffordable living costs, poor career prospects and even lesser pay, unstable environments, and nagging parents and grandparents telling us to do “something” with our lives. By the time we even complete our next degree, we won’t have enough of a work experience under our belts to land that dream job or even get our first promotion before we reach our mid-thirties. We are the best educated generation in history, but we’ve been taught and continue to teach that we must adjust to our nation’s labor force, and yet there is no labor! Is it any wonder then that we’re more reluctant to spend what little money we do make, and we don’t invest in credit cards, consumer products and leisurely activities?
We are not motivated by money as much as we are by the opportunity to put our talents to work, to have on-the-ground experience, and to learn from someone that allows us to see their abilities first-hand. Too many businesses are already focused on their own personal agendas and though they argue they’re doing it to better social issues or the environment, they don’t do enough to convince the rest of us that they care. You don’t provide co-leadership opportunities or mentoring, you place more value in our flaws than in our innovations, and you underestimate us because of our age or inexperience. How can you promise or provide a better future when you don’t give the future a chance to create itself? We want to know and see with our own eyes that our efforts have made an impact on the world so as to make it a more compassionate, innovative, and sustainable society — we want a damn purpose in what we do, not a promise you can’t deliver! Millennials have a better chance at creating start-ups of their own and working for themselves than slaving away at a 9-to-5 desk job.
MILLENIALS ARE NOT INDIFFERENT TO POLITICS, especially when our future is decided by the very people whose generation is responsible for what plagues our society today: wage gaps, women’s reproduction rights, immigration policies, racial discrimination, Islamophobia, etc. But your focus continues to be based on how much further we can separate the population so as to achieve an ideal society for the select few that you deem worthy. Today’s political arguments just don’t leave a lasting impression on how our country can be better; politicians just fight over who’s more successful and who achieved the most in their lifetime. We are tired of hearing centuries-old political promises and excuses when we seek results and action. Our minds perceive a world without borders or hierarchical top-to-bottom representations of society that you already set up. Millennials seek collaboration, a balance between conservatism and liberalism, and a unification to co-exist as human beings rather than be classified or separated by nationality, class, religion, and other categories you created just to keep track of your own stereotypes. No millennial is attracted to unchanging traditions, branded loyalties, or the premises set up by baby-boomers, so we can’t relate to politicians’ arguments and are left in the dark when it comes to our own futures.
Millennials’ individuality is slowly and gradually being killed off by those who are taking away our objectives, our purpose, and our talents, and demand that we behave and adapt to the mannerisms and traditions of those before us. An entire generation is going unnoticed for the ideas and inventions they can contribute to the world, which could alter the next thousand years just by partaking in more peaceful, eco-friendly, and humanitarian practices during the first hundred years. We stand a chance…but only if and when those before us are willing to give it to us, instead of telling us we’re incapable and continue to take control of situations themselves. No tradition or kingdom was meant to last forever, and fighting to maintain the values and practices of the past means that we as a people cannot evolve, because more effort is placed in our stagnancy than in our growth or in the growth of the generations to come.
This piece was written by Theodora Karamanlis. Follow Savvy on Twitter, Facebook, subscribe to our newsletter or email us. We love feedback!
