Teaching Today's Generation Part II
PrintBy Gerson Moreno-Riano, October 2, 2008 in Uncategorized
Another way in which to consider this question may be through the lens of David Frum, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. In his April 2, 2008 op-ed piece (http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2008/04/why-the-gop-l-1.html) in the USA Today, Frum argues that the reasons the GOP lost the youth vote are the following:
1. Young people react to the success or failure of the first politicians they know. The twentysomethings of the 1980s, for example, associated the Democratic Party with the malaise of Jimmy Carter — and the GOP with the triumphs of Ronald Reagan. Today's Republican Party is associated with a wave of disappointments and embarrassments: Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, congressional corruption scandals, the mortgage crisis.
2. The Reagan years were a time of prosperity for young workers. Unemployment plunged, wages rose, housing became more affordable. The Bush years have not been so favorable. The cost of a college degree rose faster than pay for college graduates. New college graduates saw their wages actually drop after inflation. And the costs of housing have outpaced incomes for just about all young people.
3. The Republican Party has become increasingly identified with conservative Christianity. Younger Americans are becoming more secular and more permissive. In particular, young Americans have become increasingly tolerant of homosexuality and increasingly willing to have children outside marriage. While unmarried births have dropped among teenagers since the welfare reform of 1995, unmarried births have actually been rising among women in their 20s.
4. Today's twentysomethings are browner and blacker than those of the 1980s. Hispanics and Asians both tilt strongly Democratic, as of course do African-Americans.
Frum's suggestions are that to reach the young (i.e., Millenials) you must focus on economic interests, the interests of our posterity, the environment, and success at the polls. This, Frum seems to argue, will undercut arguments based on class, race, and social agendas.
I am interested in Lee's early response post regarding the importance of the economy. Is a way to reach Millenials in our classrooms to focus on economic wellbeing and the power of some ideas to advance or retard this? Here, thus, I am addressing questions of curricula and relating them to basic human desires for wellbeing. Is good economics the way or one of the ways to reach Millenials?
Frum is a thoughtful and perceptive writer -- well worth paying attention to.
Two observations: 1) Is it safe to assume that college students are attuned to the economic strains young workers are facing? Few of my classmates were paying their own way through college, and most of those had so resigned themselves to falling into debt that it made little difference whether it was $30K or $60K. I'm sure every student hopes that her classes will contribute to her economic well-being, but I wonder how many students are paying close enough attention to economic concerns to evaluate what they're being taught in that light. I'm sure this varies greatly from college to college.
2) Some things are worth knowing even if they don't contribute to a student's economic well-being, but college students often don't yet know how to discern between what's utterly valueless and what is just not immediately reducible to economic value. For this reason, I think it's certainly worthwhile to raise questions about economic well-being, even when the subject at hand is of a transcendent value.
Am I out of touch, or do these observations ring true for others too?