Maturity - short supply in our "young adults"?
Our friend DCE from Weekend Pundit (and frequent guest on Meet The New Press) has a post that caught my attention a few days ago where he marveled at the maturity shown by a couple from Ireland.
Maturity - A Contrast
Today was BeezleBub's last day working full time at the farm. From now on he'll be working on Saturdays until the farm work ends in October.
As part of the end-of-summer process, many of the college students and foreign workers have departed for school or home.
Two of the foreign workers, Andrew and Trudy, a young Irish couple in their early 20's, became fast friends with BeezleBub. It was our pleasure to take them out for an early evening cruise on the lake on the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout. It was a leisurely cruise, allowing us plenty of time to talk with these friends of our son.
It was eye opening.
The biggest impression I had was that these two seemed far more mature than their contemporaries here in the US.
I don't know if it was because they were well traveled, well schooled, well raised, or some combination of all three. It could also be that we in the US have a tendency to extend adolescence well beyond what many would consider healthy.
I've seen far too many 'kids' in their early 20's here in this country taking little responsibility for themselves or their actions. Oh, they may be attending college or working, but their actions outside of those venues are more like those of kids still in high school hoping that their parents won't catch them doing something they know they aren't supposed to be doing.
The contrast between this young Irish couple and our own “post-adolescents” was quite illuminating. I'll be far more observant of our youth from now on, hoping to see that my impressions of them were in error and that the examples of our post-adolescent citizens that I have seen were atypical.
This was reinforced for me this past Saturday in talking with long time friend (and former employer), Larry as we met at Old Home Day. He now teaches at the Concord, NH campus in the Community Technical ("Vo-Tech") college system of NH. His subject matter ranges from digital circuits to microprocessor to broadband communications.
Sidebar: Larry is a very smart fellow, he used to work at Bell Labs dealing with a range of things, especially that of actual costs (lower revenue / higher maintainance) of mis-maintained trunk lines between Central Offices due to the perceived quality by subscribers of phone calls. I know, I wrote the first quanitfiable DBMS system for his theories using his Monte Carlo simulations and then aggregating N runs via N links of N parameters. There were times when he would try to explain some esoterica until my eyes would glaze over. Best time I ever had working.
Anyways, he was remarking that he had a lot of foreign students in his classes. Not only were they often times MUCH better prepared academically than the American students, but they had this sense of maturity that he couldn't quite put his finger on. They are willing to put in the time, do the hard work, show that work, and willing to do more. He also said that outside of the classroom the foreign students would carry and comport themselves in what seemed several years advanced than what their American counterparts do.
Part of it, I believe, is where our society is going. Take a contemporary topic - the extension of the S-CHIP program which was originally designed to cover poor school aged children. Now, there is radical (nay, socialistic) attempt to extend this program from school kids from poor families to grown adult children in households with incomes over $80,000.
Forget about the family income range (with which I disagree) but the age? At what point should kids start acting like adults? My take is 18 - they are of majority age, take on the responsibilities of such. Delaying that up to 8 more years can lead to the philosophy of "why should I be responsibile and take care of me? Someone else is for me!". As one wag pointed out, it could be possible for a family of four to be all covered by this extension.
Take what Mayor Bloomberg did in NYC - banned trans-fats. Now, busybodies all over have said "it is a good idea that I take this away from you. Being an adult, you should know better, but since you don't, I will do it for you". Ditto for smoke free environments (e.g., business owners are not responsible enough to make their own decisions).
Now with interest rates going up, mortgage rates have gone up. Adults that should have known better are losing their houses because of greed (yup, I had an ARM, and when rates started upward, I converted to a fixed. And there are a lot of people out there that will attest to the fact that I am not the fastest CPU in the lot - if I could do it, so could they!) where they thought that a lower rate was better than a secure future. Now politicians blame evil lenders and want to bailout consumers. Right....so much for self-responsibility. I (or you!) could go on and on and on with examples.
Or, keep on with situations people get screwed and that they are not at fault and not responsible.
Then ask youself - does this attitude make it more or less likely that people would start to lean towards acting more like an adult, or less?
