For as long as human hair has turned gray, elders have looked at their successors and frowned. "Children nowadays are tyrants," goes an old quotation widely attributed to Socrates. "They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers." In 1855 a professor at Davidson College described college students as "indulged, petted, and uncontrolled at home … with an undisciplined mind, and an uncultivated heart, yet with exalted ideas of personal dignity, and a scowling contempt for lawful authority." Albert Einstein opined that while classrooms are many, "the number of young people who genuinely thirst after truth and justice is small."
Also from the same piece:
Over the last decade, commentators have tended to slap the Millennial label on white, affluent teenagers who accomplish great things as they grow up in the suburbs, who confront anxiety when applying to super-selective colleges, and who multitask with ease as their helicopter parents hover reassuringly above them. The label tends not to appear in renderings of teenagers who happen to be minorities, or poor, or who have never won a spelling bee. Nor does the term often refer to students from big cities and small towns that are nothing like Fairfax County, Va. Or who lack technological know-how. Or who struggle to complete high school. Or who never even consider college. Or who commit crimes. Or who suffer from too little parental support. Or who drop out of college. Aren't they Millennials, too?
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