Okay, so am I the only one that saw this one coming from like, a MILE away? I mean really, this should have been apparent since the invention of GOOGLE that kids were going to get lazy.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The story here is that University proffs. are complaining that their first year students are too lazy, immature, reliant on wikipedia, the works. Essentially, they blame the students who blame the high school teachers and the high school teachers blame the elementary school teachers who blame the parents who are really at a loss as to why little Johnny (who had $20, 000 invested in him so he could go to U of T ) is now failing every class he's taking.
The real problem here isn't where to place the blame. As aforementioned, its a vicious cycle that gets nowhere and leaves the accused angry, scared, and at a complete loss. Personally, I think that its the combined effort of lazy parents, elementary and high school teachers that leads in turn to the kids themselves being lazy.
Think about it: our parents generation was the one that was told to go outside and play all day by themselves. Back then, kids would go out at 9 AM, run around the neighbourhood with their friends until 5PM (aka supper time). If they got hurt ..... then they got hurt, and a lesson was learned from it. Whats that, son? You fell out of a tree and sprained your wrist? Well I guess you now know not to climb that high, stupid. Now lets go take you to the doctors, dummy.
There wasn't such a fear of rapists, molesters, etc. Because our parents were raised with this mentality of 'everything will be okay, let them go off on their own' from such an early age, they vowed that they would never, ever let that happen to their kids. So when they themselves actually did have kids of their own, they raised them entirely differently from how their parents raised them:
Kids were kept inside at all times so that their parents could monitor them 24/7, cell phones were bought for them at the ludicrous age of 7 so that they could always be in contact, hell, even little GPS chips were put into their fingers so that, heaven forbid they leave their parents sight for a second, they can use satellite technology to track them down.
See what I'm getting at here? We as a generation were babied! Our parents gave us what they never had: un-conditional love and support, all day every day. Now I'm not saying that our grandparents never loved our parents, I'm just saying that they always wanted more love, and are now over compensating for it by throwing it at us.
By the time we get to school, our parents are sweating buckets with worry about us. Leaving their kids all alone with a bunch of other kids in a huge building with strange and different teachers? Just the thought of it makes parents want to faint. Parents also like to think that their spawn is quite possibly the best thing to ever grace this earth. Stuff White People Like mentioned this, but really, it holds true to most parents. They are under the misguided impression that their kid is the smartest damn kid in that school, and that if you as a teacher don't fully recognize that fact, you're dead.
SO when the unthinkable happens, and Tommy gets a D- on a math test, his parents hit the roof, they go nuts, they hulk out, they loose their sh**, to say the least. They storm the school, report card in handing, demanding to know why their little angel is failing geometry (or whatever the hell it is that you take in math during the 3rd grade). The teachers are corned. They can't very well argue with the parents in fear of loosing their jobs, so in the end, Tommy either gets individual attention, or the curriculum is dumbed down in order to accommodate a bunch of kids who are stupid and can get away with it.
So what does this have to do with the fact that first year University kids are lazy? Well it doesn't take a genius to connect the dots: between our parents babying us all our lives, and the fact that essentially, elementary school teachers and high school teachers do the same, and to add that to the fact that we have technology at our finger tips that makes research excruciatingly simple, it all sums up to the fact that by the time we're 18, we are completely unprepared for life on our own!
It's not really any ones fault, its just happenstance, and it's the way things are. I for one think that we as students have to accept the fact that yes, we are lazy. It's not something that anyone likes to admit about themselves, but it's true. Our best course of action is to suck it up, get the board of education to stop babying kids, and prove the professors wrong by showing them that this wave of first years isn't going to be a bunch of sloth-like, wiki-addicted students. Well... it's that, or we all google 'good freshman students' and see what search results come up. And after that, how about asking good old Mom and Dad for a raise in your allowance, eh?
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