At the beginning of a new school year, it is the perfect time to reflect on another year gone by... we are all at least one year older, the kids in our schools seem so much younger, and the gap between old and cool appears to be getting wider (just ask my daughter). Again this year, a Wisconsin school, Beloit College, has compiled their annual Mindset List reminding all of us just how old we are becoming and how young and inexperienced college freshman really are.
Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List. It provides a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall. The creation of Beloit’s Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride and former Public Affairs Director Ron Nief, it was originally created as a reminder to faculty to be aware of dated references, and quickly became a catalog of the rapidly changing worldview of each new generation. The Mindset List website at www.beloit.edu/mindset, the Mediasite webcast and its Facebook page receive more than 400,000 hits annually.
The class of 2014 has never found Korean-made cars unusual on the Interstate and five hundred cable channels, of which they will watch only a handful, have always been the norm. Since "digital" has always been in the cultural DNA, they've never written in cursive and with cell phones to tell them the time, there is no need for a wrist watch. Dirty Harry (who’s that?) is to them a great Hollywood director. The America they have inherited is one of soaring American trade and budget deficits; Russia has presumably never aimed nukes at the United States and China has always posed an economic threat.
Nonetheless, they plan to enjoy college. The males among them are likely to be a minority. They will be armed with iPhones and BlackBerries, on which making a phone call will be only one of many, many functions they will perform. They will now be awash with a computerized technology that will not distinguish information and knowledge. So it will be up to their professors to help them. A generation accustomed to instant access will need to acquire the patience of scholarship. They will discover how to research information in books and journals and not just on-line. Their professors, who might be tempted to think that they are hip enough and therefore ready and relevant to teach this new generation, might remember that Kurt Cobain is now on the classic oldies station. The college class of 2014 reminds us, once again, that a generation comes and goes in the blink of our eyes, which are, like the rest of us, getting older and older. (Source: Beloit College Mindset List, 2014)
My favorites from this year's list include:
(This month, almost 2 million first-year students will head off to college campuses around the country. Most of them will be about 18 years old and were born in 1992.)
1. For these students, Benny Hill, Sam Kinison, Sam Walton, Bert Parks and Tony Perkins have always been dead.
2. Few in the class know how to write in cursive.
3. Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail.
4. Los Angelenos have always been trying to get along.
5. “Caramel macchiato” and “venti half-caf vanilla latte” have always been street corner lingo.
6. With increasing numbers of ramps, Braille signs, and handicapped parking spaces, the world has always been trying harder to accommodate people with disabilities.
7. Had it remained operational, the villainous computer HAL could be their college classmate this fall, but they have a better chance of running into Miley Cyrus’s folks on Parents’ Weekend.
8. Entering college this fall in a country where a quarter of young people under 18 have at least one immigrant parent, they aren’t afraid of immigration…unless it involves "real" aliens from another planet.
9. John McEnroe has never played professional tennis.
10. Clint Eastwood is better known as a sensitive director than as Dirty Harry.
11.Doctor Kevorkian has never been licensed to practice medicine.
12. Colorful lapel ribbons have always been worn to indicate support for a cause.
13. Korean cars have always been a staple on American highways.
14. Fergie is a pop singer, not a princess.
15. They never twisted the coiled handset wire aimlessly around their wrists while chatting on the phone.
16. Woody Allen, whose heart has wanted what it wanted, has always been with Soon-Yi Previn.
17. Cross-burning has always been deemed protected speech.
18. Leasing has always allowed the folks to upgrade their tastes in cars.
19. Unless they found one in their grandparents’ closet, they have never seen a carousel of Kodachrome slides.
20. Computers have never lacked a CD-ROM disk drive.
21. They’ve never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day.
22. “Viewer Discretion” has always been an available warning on TV shows.
23. The first home computer they probably touched was an Apple II or Mac II; they are now in a museum.
24. Czechoslovakia has never existed.
25. Second-hand smoke has always been an official carcinogen.
26. Bud Selig has always been the Commissioner of Major League Baseball.
27. Pizza jockeys from Domino’s have never killed themselves to get your pizza there in under 30 minutes.
28. There have always been HIV positive athletes in the Olympics.
29. American companies have always done business in Vietnam.
30. Russians and Americans have always been living together in space.
31. The dominance of television news by the three networks passed while they were still in their cribs.
32. Nirvana is on the classic oldies station.
33. J.R. Ewing has always been dead and gone.
34. A purple dinosaur has always supplanted Barney Google and Barney Fife.
35. Beethoven has always been a good name for a dog.
36. Having hundreds of cable channels but nothing to watch has always been routine.
37. Their parents’ favorite TV sitcoms have always been showing up as movies.
38. The U.S, Canada, and Mexico have always agreed to trade freely.
39. They have never worried about a Russian missile strike on the U.S.
40. It seems the Post Office has always been going broke.
Bonus… the nation has never approved of the job Congress is doing (and my guess is they never will).
Thanks to Mike Smith for the idea -
http://www.principalspage.com/theblog/
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