“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
Society is designed to give you as many problems as needed to keep you worried, and just enough of an income for you to make half those troubles disappear each month. Tradition dictates that following our academic years, we must throw ourselves into the workforce and contribute our talents to the rest of society. When we put aside our graduation caps, we put on our hard hats and enter the real world under the illusion that we can fix it, only to realize that our monthly paychecks are just a “thank you for being a part of the manual and intellectual labor of a corporation intended to make someone else rich.” So, rather than living up to our potential, we bow our heads, take our payment, and keep our dreams to ourselves. For those of you who prefer to keep this archaic industrial system oiled and running, here’s some wisdom that the younger generations can provide you with: life is simple, people are complicated. The traditions of centuries-old standards that most of you uphold are about as outdated, hollow, and mechanistic as the people who invented them in the first place, because they couldn’t imagine the world we we live in today or the future we could become.
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 “destructive to the classroom environment” when we’re forced to behave like adults before we could even drive. Then, you preach on developing new classroom settings, but you still have our desks arranged like we’re products on an assembly line. Teachers, your jobs are not to convert us into obedient servants of society or to promote your lifestyle techniques, but rather to motivate us to create ourselves by learning from your mistakes. If you didn’t like the way you were taught, why the hell would you teach others using the same methods?
Millennials already understand and seek the benefits of a student-centered education, where knowledge revolves around exchanging ideas and questioning existing theories, not memorizing and repeating texts like they’re religious concepts. Understanding that each student is different is not the same as acknowledging it, otherwise you’d care more about changing restrictive classrooms and not stigmatizing slow learners as deficient. If you truly want to see a change, start by being the change — your students are watching. What kind of an example do you want to set for them, as a guide, a mentor, a teacher, and an adult? How about less lectures and more interaction to share our ideas? Less 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? Our education system has already failed dozens of generations, and to this day it still refuses to address the root of the problem: itself. Is your paycheck so much more important than the futures of the young faces that look to you for advice?
Knowledge has already been limited to the select few because we still categorize intellect and exceptional abilities based on a household’s income, or by a school’s back-to-back stress-inducing exams that record kids’ abilities just to pluck out those you want to use for intellectual labor and manual labor later on — in other words, those who call the shots and those who pay the price. It’s bad enough that you democratize and average our talents so that everyone can be “exceptional” in a subject, but to top it off, you even deny us the abilities, wisdom, and skills to apply our knowledge or to care for ourselves, our finances, and our safety. With technology abound, we’re forced to believe half of what we read and nothing of what we hear. So when half of writing and teaching us history is hiding the truth, 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 the internet to answer our questions?
We are the most educated generation in history, but we’re taught to adapt ourselves for a labor force that has no room or use for us. We’re no longer living in an era where a college degree guarantees a job, so we often find ourselves wondering if it’s even worth having an education since more and more of the labor force demands experience which colleges don’t provide us with. Even if we get a higher degree in hopes we land a better position, the fact remains that you’ve dumped us 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 forties! Is it any wonder then that we’re more reluctant to spend what little money we make, and we don’t invest in credit cards, consumer products, and leisurely activities?
Our motivations don’t lie in money but by the opportunity to use our talents, to have on-the-ground experience, and to learn from someone that lets us see the job done first-hand. As it stands, 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. Too many businesses are already focused on their own personal agendas and though they claim 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. So, 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 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.
Our futures are determined 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. Every couple of years, you find a new scapegoat for your problems. 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 youdeem worthy, based on your own self-determining standards. None of your arguments leave a lasting impression on how our country can be better when you just continue to fight over who’s more successful and who achieved the most in their lifetime. To us, it’s the same crap, just a different day — try less talk and more action.
Imagine a world without borders, hierarchies, or top-to-bottom representations of society that were set up thousands of years ago ; a future balanced between conservatism and liberalism, a planet that respects all living beings and ecosystems, a unified co-existence as human beings, rather than as classified or separated by nationality, class, religion, and other categories you created just to keep track of your own stereotypes. Time moves forward, not backward, and you can’t unring a bell once it’s rung, so how do you expect us to see the world through the eyes of men and women who are attracted to unchanging traditions, branded loyalties, or the premises set up by grand-parents and great-grandparents responsible for the societal decay we’re experiencing now? If you’re inflexible to our needs as a people, you can’t expect us to be flexible to yours.
We are the products of your actions. If you have a problem with our generation, remember who raised it — you did. Whatever your shames, fears, troubles, worries and failures as parents or grand-parents may be, you’re only worsening matters for yourselves if you continue to judge us as an embarrassment. Sure, we’ll fail and we’ll make mistakes along the way — just like you — but it’s more important to know how to get back up. Your time may not be over, but you also don’t allow ours to even begin. Instead, 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 taking part in more peaceful, collaborative, and humanitarian practices during these first hundred. Millennials’ individuality is slowly and gradually being killed off by those who criticize our objectives, take away our purpose, abuse our talents, and demand that we behave and adapt to the mannerisms and traditions of those before us. We stand a chance…but only if and when inflexible institutions and mentalities are willing to give it to us, instead of telling us we’re incapable and casting us aside. No kingdom lasts forever, so 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.
Originally published at www.huffingtonpost.com on March 31, 2017.
