According to the Daily Telegraph, the latest research suggests that modern students have less empathy than those of twenty or thirty years ago. See what you think.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/7779290/Generation-me-stu...
Angharad.
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Comments
A sad result but ...
... perhaps not surprising. However, I'm not sure what students were like in the 60s when I was one. Though I never went to college full time - all my post 16 education was at night school - most of my friends were fairly easy going and tolerant.
But there's worse. Out of curiosity, I clicked on the 'Do you smoke?' survey advertised on the same page (I don't btw). What did shock me was some of the English, especially as it was connected with a British University. Respondents are asked to answer the questions '... as good as you can.'. I despair ... and my education was in engineering :)
Robi
Laura Doyle
The notorious "Surrendered Wife" submissive, has a book out: Things Will Get As Good As You Can Stand... When You Learn That It Is Better to Receive Than to Give . Mind you, it's a minority opinion, in both contexts.
4,580,000 instances of the phrase "As Good As You Can" show up in Google.
17,500,000 instances of "As Well As You Can" should at least partially restore your faith in humanity,
The fact that Laura Doyle's husband quit his job to work as her secretary to help her put her motivational empire together should help as well.
Cheers,
Puddin'
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Your first example ...
... is a reasonable use of the construct, though, being neither a dom nor a sub, I'm not much in favour of the implied sentiment. And, of course the phrase 'As good as you can' may be OK in the right context but in the example I quote it really is awful and ugly too.
The sentence I tend to think of is "In order to do good it may be necessary to do well first." :)
Robi
btw I've never heard of Laura Doyle nor her book. To get back to the original post, I wonder if her husband is empathetic to her feelings. I'm not sure if I hope he is or not.
I'm not fond of "get"
...used as a vague sense of futurity, essentially replacing "become."
>> Things will get as good as you can stand...
...is particularly ugly and unfortunate, not to mention almost terminally passive, which I suppose is appropriate for a "surrendered" spouse.
In the first place, the "to be" is elided, as "things will get to be," which is charmingly terse, but seems to beg the question, and perhaps several.
The bundle of words clustered around "good" in the tail of the sentence disguises the fact that the sentence itself is essentially illiterate. The author obviously hopes that we've forgotten the beginning by the time we reach the end.
I think Tarzan said that very line to Jane in the Johnny Weissmuller film, Tarzan of the Apes.
As it stands, these phrases are inherently ambiguous, and read something like a Chinese menu, "Pick one meaning from column A, and one from column B," iterating until you discover a meaning that makes sense. In any decent dictionary, there are roughly sixty meanings for the word "get," so there are quite a few possible permutations.
Cheers,
Puddin'
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
I'm not of the
I'm not of the 'generation-me' era - I think I'm technically a Generation X / Y crossover - but it's no surprise to see this sort of story. And of course violence in video games is to blame for everything. I don't think it's less empathy but rather a more realistic approach to life. I was at uni in the 90's and the students union organised a sit in for several weeks in the library building. They never achieved anything other than make the rest of us late for our assignments! It's can't be 1968 for every generation.
"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."
We've destroyed our social infrastructure.
Well, I am not too surprised and have been shocked to see what has happened to the nuclear family. In the 50's it was a real stigma to have been divorced. Once I was married, we insisted on a very steriotypical two parent family; family dinner together at night, regular church, family activities, no video game obsession, no heavy drinking and certainly no Pot or anything of the sort, and all that rot. That was from '65 to '04 for us. There was no sanctimoniousness about it, rather we just tried to give our children a stable environment.
Most of the College age kids I know have no idea about what might constitute a family. Most people I now know sit in front of the TV to eat their meals. Many are not married but live together, and plenty of them have had one or more abortions. So, here these kids come home from school with one parent living with them. Often they don't see a parent until late at night. They don't get their cuddles, or even hear the words "I Love You" more than once a year if ever. Often Mom and Dad are focused on getting that promotion, that big boat, that new appliance, or pushing their children to be the best at Soccer, or cheering. Some parents even doll their little 4 year olds up like cheap whores and parade them on the stage as models.
I'm not having much trouble understanding why we have raised merciless bastards; where did they see it modeled?
Much Peace
Khadijah Gwen
Just One Point...
...about television viewing during dinner. Given the popularity of six o'clock television newscasts (and radio ones before that) back more than a half-century ago, I'm inclined to doubt that today's kids are unique in that respect. Americans of Gen X and earlier will also remember that for decades after the frozen precooked dinner was introduced in the fifties, Swanson's brand name was TV Dinners -- to the point where the term became generic.
Our family turned the set off when dinner started, to the point where it irritated me when I was expected to eat with it on when I moved in with contemporaries after college. I couldn't treat it as background as the others did; it tended to take too much of my attention. (Perhaps oddly, my parents now watch the PBS Lehrer report during their dinner unless they're with other people.)
Not that I necessarily disagree with your main point. I do think that the shorter attention span of recent generations and the modern expectation that nearly everyone constantly multitask ought to be factored in here. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't believe that empathy is an instant process.
Eric
Are we kidding ourselves?
Look at the sadist's handbook that is 24, or Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter, which offered us the wisdom of rape as a suitable punishment for a woman who "disrespected" a man, and let us know that she really liked it. Brutality and rape, or near-rape, are staples of television drama, cleverly cut away from the money shots on TV, and usually somewhat raunchier and more violent for cable and cinema theatres. There are less violent examples, but the relentless message of "manly" violence and control was and is a constant din.
Cheers,
Puddin'
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
I'm going
to agree with the sentiment behind the article. I work with University kids and age factors aside they are incredibly self absorbed and have been getting worse over the last decade. I also see way too much of just horrid manners on both sides of the gender lines and are just getting worse.
I grew up seeing the me generation all around me except for a few of us. I'm not an unselfish saint by any means but this generation of 20 somethings are the kids out of the 80's generation that was to me the start of the Me generation.
The perpetrators of the current market crash BTW as well.
I see the kids in this age group and really fear for our futures.
Bailey Summers
Who Cares???
eom
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Completely accurate
I'm approaching my late 20's now (...talk about disturbing to me...) and as someone who grew up in the generation they're observing I say it's completely accurate. I remember in college even having guest speakers who suggested that it was a good thing to be at the time. To some extent in the university I attended you needed to be that self-centered, focused, and driven to ensure that you got the best education you could. Considering everything to be about yourself... well I'm not sure that I was always like that, but certainly sometimes. I participated in groups to which I devoted a lot of time and service to... but to say it wasn't without hopes of gain/glory for myself would be untrue.
Personally I give 190% effort in anything I do... but I'm not necessarily normal in that for my generation. I can see many of these differences in view with people I know and work with that aren't even a decade older than I am. I think computers may define our generation in many ways... I mean I've been using computers since kindergarten and had one at home since the same age! Internet came into being while I was in late elementary school, and really began coming into itself when I was in high school. By the time I got to college we didn't know what to do without it. A day without AIM was like cutting off my arm!
I'm curious more though to see how the newest generation that's been born since 2000 ends up. Cell phones are so ubiquitous among kids as young as elementary school now. The constant texting, not calling, has got to change things further I think.
All of us though from my age and under suffer from one thing though... We were told we were special at every possible turn. We had praise showered on everything, whether it deserved it or not, and from that I think we all gathered a form of delusion that nothing we did stank. I think this continues to this day, and I think that's where you see the turn to the current narcissism that runs so rampant in under 30's. The parents of our generation thought we did no wrong at a rate I think that's higher than previous generations. I don't think that's going to improve.
Of course it doesn't help that we've extended adolescence to age 22 now with college just being a second high school to go to in the US. Most of us don't completely grow up until well after that now.