I came across this video today, which is supposed to show “some of the most important characteristics of students today — how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime.”

The video means well, and I definitely think educational institutions need to continually change to better serve their students, but this video really paints today’s students in a poor light. I hope that they’re better than the whiny little brats this video makes them out to seem.

My response to the pieces of paper they hold up in the video:

• My average class size is 115: Umm, yeah, and my class size in elementary school in China was 52. I have little sympathy for Americans — students and parents alike — who complain that their educational experience sucks because they have a “large” class. If you’re serious about knowledge, you seek it out instead of sitting there waiting for someone to spoonfeed it to you and whine that there are too many mouths around you waiting to be spoonfed.
• 18% of my teachers know my name: A legit complaint, depending on the situation. At the same time, my experience has been that teachers know the names of students who take the initiative to seek their help. Any kind of classroom environment where it’s one teacher and many students makes a poor setting to form personal connections.
• I complete 49% of the readings assigned to me: And this is the teacher’s fault, how? Don’t complain about not getting something out of your education if you’re not going to put in the work.
• Only 26% (of the readings) is relevant to my life: Ever heard of learning for the sake of learning? If you’re expecting every line of text you lay eyes on while in college to be directly related to helping you find a job, you’re missing the point of college. It’s not just about picking up job skills, it’s about picking up knowledge of the world around you, which will, hopefully, mold you into a better and wiser person. Dump the tunnel vision.
• I buy hundred dollar text books that I never open: If the way that the class is taught makes opening the text books unnecessary, then yes, this is a problem. But if it’s just because the student is too lazy to open the book, then whose fault is that? And yes, textbooks are overpriced, especially now, when technology has made it possible to produce digital versions at significantly lower costs.
• My neighbor paid for class but never comes: Again, whose fault is that? If you aren’t even going to make the effort to learn, your teacher can’t teach you, no matter if it’s lecturing in a classroom or offering online, face-to-face interaction that you can participate in from your room.
• I will read 8 books this year, 2,300 Web pages, and 1,281 Facebook profiles: Apples and oranges. How many pages are you going to read from a book this year? That’s a better comparison.
• I’ll write 42 pages for this class this semester, and 500 pages of e-mail: Again, another apples and oranges comparison.
• My daily activities add up to 26.5 hours. I’m a multi-tasker. I have to be: Whoop-de-doo. Pat yourself on the back for something that everyone else has to do, too. Let’s look at the breakdowns of those 26.5 hours:
  • 7 hours of sleep
  • 1.5 hours watching TV each night
  • 3.5 hours online
  • 2.5 hours listening to music
  • 2 hours on my cellphone
  • 3 hours in class
  • 2 hours eating
  • 2 hours at work
  • 3 hours studying

  So let’s see: (24 hours in a day) – (7 hours for sleep) – (3 hours for class) – 3 hours for studying) – (2 hours for work) – (2 hours eating) = 7 hours to do whatever you want. That’s called having a lot of free time on your hands.

• I’ll be $20,000 in debt after graduation: Yeah, debt sucks. It’s called a tradeoff: You trade not being in debt for gaining knowledge and qualifications that help you get a better job and make more money.
• I’m one of the lucky ones. Over 1 billion people make less than $1 a day: Since you know this, don’t your complaints seem trivial?
• This laptop costs more than some people in the world make in a year: See above.
• When I graduate, I’ll probably have a job that doesn’t exist today: That’s not a bad thing, and it sure as heck is better than being in a job that won’t exist tomorrow. You’re going into a growth industry instead of a dying one.
• (Holding up a scantron) Filling this out won’t help me get there, or deal with (pointing to bunch of signs with world problems written on them): No, but that’s missing the point. Is your goal in college to ace tests (most of which are not great measurements of learning), or is it to gain knowledge? If it’s the latter, then the effectiveness of the whole testing system is a trivial point — merely an imperfect way for educators to get some sort of gauge on if you are learning what they’re teaching — and what you should be more concerned about is how much you’ve actually absorbed — and that’s something known only to yourself.
• I did not create the problems, but they are my problems: Which generation did not inherit problems of the previous generations? Every generation fixes problems left by their predecessors and create new ones that will outlast them. Young men in the 1860s didn’t create slavery, but they had to fight a war to abolish it. Young people in the 1960s didn’t create segregation, but they had to live with it, fight against it, destroy it, and spend the next 40 years repairing the racial divide it created, to the point where a black man can become president. This is not a new phenomenon.

Don’t take this post as bashing the younger generation. Take it as bashing a video that paints them in such a poor light, fulfilling basically every negative stereotype. And in the end, what you get out of your education is up to you. Those who want knowledge will seek it out. Those who sit on their hands expecting to have it delivered to them will miss the whole point of college.