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It’s all too easy to laugh at today’s generation of uni graduates as intolerant snowflakes, but, to paraphrase Tolkien, it’s increasingly likely to be pity that stays my mockery.
Today’s youngsters have been let down at every turn by their elders: mollycoddled by their parents, brainwashed by their teachers – and now facing a lifetime of struggle and exploitation by seniors.
It is going to be a tough year for students graduating from university, the first in three decades seeking work in a shrinking job market. Will they find the fortitude to step up, as other Australians have done in hard times? To dig deep into their inner reserves and create their own opportunities?
Possibly not, if a video posted by University of Sydney students last week is any guide to the pre-adult mindset.
Again, the temptation is to smirk. But, having been conditioned by their teachers and Boomer thought-leaders to regard a quasi-socialist welfare state as the natural order, is it surprising that they think as they do? Who is really to blame for the consequence of decades of school-room indoctrination and government policy?
These are the children of Julia Gillard’s higher education revolution, the first to matriculate not by merit but right. At the lower-rung universities in particular, they are deprived of the status of scholars and treated as paying customers.
Universities are no longer places to make the transition to adult life. Quite the reverse. They are quarantined safe spaces where no student should ever be confronted with contrary opinion or discordant facts. Their students are poorly prepared for the tough road ahead.
Both of those are the consequence of the Boomer generation Gillard belongs to. It was the Long March left of the 60s who infiltrated the academy, root and branch, with Marxist orthodoxy and stifling groupthink. At the same time, the economic rationalism of the 1980s right refashioned universities into profit-driven diploma mills.
Now, the young are going to be body-slammed with the cost of sparing the elderly from COVID-19 so that they can continue to live on in retirement in the taxpayer-funded fashion to which they’ve become accustomed.
As taxpayers [graduates] can expect to be paying off the debt from COVID-19 government spending until well into middle age.
By then fewer than four out of 10 Australians will be of working age and they will find themselves supporting many more retirees for far longer than any previous generation.
Again, while it might be tempting to blame the spoiled children, that’s letting off too lightly the adults who spared the rod.
Should the 20-somethings surprise us by rising to the challenge, it will be despite, not because of, their parents, who have shielded them from risk and deprived them of the resilience that comes from exposure to the friction of everyday life[…]
Adults have become infantilised and increasingly incapable of setting limits for their children. Children, on the other hand, have become adultified, hoisted to a position of moral command over their supposedly reckless forebears.
The apotheosis of this garbage was the absurdity of the most powerful supposed adults in the world fawning at the feet of a petulant, ignorant Swedish teenager.
[It was] a cry of enfeeblement from a generation that has been deprived of moral guidance and has a fatalistic conviction it has inherited a world on course for extinction.
“Our society is full of lost boys and girls hanging out at the edge of adulthood,” writes [Frank] Furedi. They were reared by a generation who believed it wrong to say “no” to a rebellious child and tried instead to negotiate.
Since Western societies have struggled to bestow the values of previous generations on the young, we should not be surprised that they emerge as confused and uncertain adults, lacking the resilience to deal with conflict in the workplace with little experience of the trade-offs required in a democracy.
Enter the grim spectre of the Woke Corporation.
Graduates who grew to rely on safe spaces and de-platforming to avoid conflict on campus are taking that approach with them into the workforce. Corporations, which should know better, comply with the muddled morality of a generation deprived of a deeper set of values.
Again, who is to blame, here? The bright young things in entry-level positions in big corporations, or the supposedly hard-headed businessmen who are pandering to their bullshit instead of giving the clip over the ear that their parents never did?
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