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About Those Younguns
I was having a conversation with my wife this morning about all that ails this great country of ours. One thing that I think is a real problem, and you all tell me if I’m right or wrong, is the deference we give young people. I’ve heard it time and again: “Let’s listen to the kids!”
Might part of the problem be that we are listening to the kids too much? I mean look, they are dumb! I mean, we are all were dumb when we were young, coming up with dumb ideas, and doing dumb things. And as we grew older and learned from our mistakes and grew wiser. What got me thinking about this was a statistic on some podcast I heard about how many young people have a favorable view of communism. So what? Who cares? They don’t know what communism is!
Maybe part of our problem these days is we give young people too much credit, and they don’t listen to their elders.
Or maybe I’m just a curmudgeon.
Or maybe both!
Published in General
Or not seriously enough!
So many people have written kids off as too immature to teach and then the left comes along and fills them up with stupidity.
My God. Teenagers are capable of good thinking, good morals, and mature outlooks. Teach the little punks.
The book of Timothy was written to a 16 year old boy. Equip your little maggots to be Timothies and quit your whining.
It’s always the age of Aquarius to the left.
Leftists believe that humanity is innately good and by getting rid of the society that makes people bad, people can become better. Kids are useful to tear down societal institutions so they are loved by the left. Furthermore, young people have more emotion and drive and those feeling are loved on the left. The reference to the Cultural Revolution is apt.
Some of each, I suppose. We ask too little of our children, expect too little of them. This starts when they are very young, fussing about food or television time or whatever else consumes them.
But Spin’s observation in the original post did not have to do so much with discipline and teaching as with taking children’s views seriously. It’s worth noting that, in Paul’s letters to Timothy, Paul was giving advice, not asking for it.
Unfortunately you are now enrolled as one of the People I Listen To. Let me me tell you something you will thank me for one day, whippersnapper. If you don’t want to be listened to don’t say intelligent things.
Another thing that has changed is the rate of technological change. As such, the young are sort of ‘born’ into a fat knowledge base that many adults flounder over. This engenders a smugness hard to attain in an agrarian society.
But mostly it’s the bloody Boomers.
Well, that is the age we are supposed to hold people accountable as adults.
College kids are not held accountable as adults, to the degree that many of them think they shouldn’t have to pay their literal debts.
Absolutely.
Some of the teachers in our schools actively pit their charges against the previous generation with their ‘they’ve already ruined everything’ stories.
I used to believe in academic freedom, until I realized that too many of the people who claim it aren’t bothering with the academic part.
~dismounts hobbyhorse, sticks landing~
I could go with that.
Or this.
Stina, I have a couple of comments.
First, as a father of four, I find that it is not always easy to teach the little punks. They do have minds of their own.
Second, your report of Timothy’s age doesn’t seem accurate to me. What is your source for this? My impression is that Timothy was young to be a bishop, but not that young. Wikipedia reports that he was born in 17 AD (based on an apocryphal source stating that he was 80 at the time of his death in 97 AD). He was with Paul on the second missionary journey, around 49 AD, which would make Timothy about 32 at that time. I don’t have a precise dating for 1 Timothy, but a good estimate is around 5 years thereafter, somewhere around 55-60 AD, which would make Timothy about 38-43 at the time.
I have a comment, or perhaps question, about the OP. My impression is that the promotion of the (silly) idea of the wisdom of youth dates to the 1960s. Does anyone have information suggesting an earlier date for this?
The Children’s Crusade in the early 1200s might qualify.
Paul told Timothy not to let others look down on him because of his youth.
Apparently my information came from not so well sourced places. Some have him 16 and others have him early 30s.
As to teaching, it’s hard, but not impossible. Maybe treating teens like they are capable of making sound decisions rather than treating them like they are incapable of it would be a good place to start.
Check out what Jonah Golberg had to say about John Dewey. Rousseau probably started this nonsense.
So, roughly Hamlet’s age.
I should add. I haven’t raises mine that far. I have a 10 year old doing morning bible studies, chores, and reading good books. He’s got a good under-pinning to start teenage life.
All I have is going on my experience as a teen. There must be some ingredient in my raising that produced a responsible teen. I refuse to believe otherwise.
“Teenage” is a relatively new thing. It used to be that at 13 or 14, a boy would be apprenticed to a trade. In the Eighteenth Century, when the sons of British soldiers reached fourteen, they had to choose between joining the army or finding their own way in life, probably being apprenticed. Likewise, the daughters of soldiers could marry another soldier in the regiment or go become a prostitute or actress or some such, but if she didn’t marry into the regiment, she was on her own.
In wealthier families, such as the gentry or nobility, the sons would have three choices. They could become a young gentleman in the Royal Navy, they could be bought a commission as an ensign or cornet in the British Army, or they might attend Cambridge or Oxford, where one might go into the priesthood or take up another gentlemanly profession. Many of these last might have an MA by age eighteen to twenty.
The quicker you start doing something productive the better.
Voluntarily?!
Sounds like a form of punishment. That’s got to be even more frustrating than reading the opinions of the New York Times. And probably with terrible grammar too.
I think part of the left favoring youth and the right favoring age is that people of the left seem to be instinctively biased toward “change to something new is always good” (even if the “something new”is something old that has been tried and failed several times already, and people of the right seem to be instinctively biased to keep things the way they are until we can be certain of every permutation of what might happen if we do something new.
The young (especially if they have not been well taught about history) are inherently up for trying something new, and so make natural allies with those of the left who are already biased toward believing that the “new” is always good.
People of the right often stick to what is known because we have seen or experienced enough unintended and/or adverse consequences of trying the “new.” The younguns haven’t been burned by enough bad unintended outcomes to accurately anticipate what those unintended consequences might be. Why should we listen to the younguns who haven’t experienced enough to be able to predict what the consequences (intended and unintended) of their ideas might be?
I have judged competitions of young inventors. Occasionally I see some really intriguing ideas come from children who are willing to try things because they haven’t yet run into “we don’t do it that way.” Sometimes the idea has some real promise. But most of the time the idea is doomed because of a host of practicalities with which the child inventor is unfamiliar.
So it’s a good idea to have youthful enthusiasm and then have it be checked by adult experience? I’d be down for that. I just don’t want to defer to youth. They are wrong most of the time after all.
Exactly. We should be tolerant of their fatuous antics and reward the clever ones with a money biscuit and a pat on the head.
Maybe I’m a bit more unconstrained in your vision than you. Sometimes, the vision of the youth is correct and needs to be rigorously tested but a different interpretation fo the world might be right. That requires more than a pat on the head. But the presumption should be one what has worked in the past.
Look, I have good kids. They try to do the right thing. Some more so than others. Not one of them are “bad”. They do stupid [expletive] sometimes that bugs me, but they are good…no, they are great kids. My oldest is 25 and my youngest 13.
But I’m not at all interested in their opinions on how to run the country, how to manage money, how to make good relationship decisions, etc. They just aren’t wise. They will be someday. But they aren’t now.
Whether Timothy was 16 or he was 30 isn’t really the point, though, is it? I mean, I’m interested in what Paul has to say. Not that he’s saying it to Timothy. I think there is value in understanding who Timothy was, to a degree, but even if I didn’t know much about him, the value is in what Paul is saying. Right?
Yes, voluntarily. :) I spent my career on the college campus, and so I like to keep up with what’s going on there. I have to say, I don’t know that I would have survived this generation of students.
In one of my courses I used as a text Thomas Sowell’s “Economic Facts and Fallacies.” There was a chapter on racial fallacies, one on male-female fallacies, and one on 3rd world fallacies. I can imagine being reported to the bias committee every single day by one woke student or another.
That is one of the most important books I’ve read. Sowell has been guiding my thinking for years now.
To you, but what about those who Timothy is ministering to who don’t have Paul’s words?
Wisdom comes in several ways:
Only one of those requires age in order to acquire it.
I didn’t need to get pregnant outside of marriage to figure out promiscuous sex was a bad idea. I figured that out by observing the experiences of other people. Guess how much experience on the subject that required?
Very few of us learn by reading of other’s experiences. It DOES take age to learn that!