The other day I was watching a teenage couple as they walked by my porch.  Her in baggy pants, tank top showing her navel, which was pierced, along with her lip, nose and eye brow. He in pants held up by magic, but his boxers pulled up so you knew he had them on. He also wore a white tank top, showing off his tattoos, his hair shaved. The “I just got out of prison” look. That started the internal rant: I hate the way kids look today, the way they talk, their music, and so on. 

In other words, I became my dad.

And that’s OK. I’m sure his dad felt the same way, and his dad’s dad and so on. It is an age old story; literally, I found this quote the other day from Socrates:

“Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.”

It is the job of children to outrage their elders; it is how they establish their independence and identity. It is our job as parents to endure and survive to rub their noses in it when they become parents. My mom loves that part.

Back in the ‘90s, I worked in a rural Georgia high school. One day I noticed a number of my students cracking up over a high school year book from 1976. Many of their parents, uncles and aunties were in the book. They were dressed up the height of cool in 1976, Disco outfits. The boys in platform shoes and flaring bell bottoms, the girls in mini skirts and halter tops. All had huge afros. 

I asked them what they thought their kids would think when they looked at the 1996 year book. They paused for a moment and one said “what’s wrong with our style?” And then they let it go, as they often did when I offered social commentary. What would I know?

What would they know? Just wait…

The inspiration for this column comes from an article I had to read in a class I took last week: “Digital Native, Digital Immigrant” by Marc Prensky.  You can find it by clicking here.

The term “digital native” means that you were born in and after the ‘80s, the age of computers and video games. “Digital immigrant” refers to the rest of us born before then. Mr. Prensky postulates that digital natives actually think in a fundamentally different way than digital immigrants. Brought up on a diet of computers, video games and the Internet, they process information differently. They prefer movies and images to the written word. They want the information in smaller pieces. They choose a more random sequence in researching information. They’d rather peek at the end of the book and then read the parts that lead up to it.

If any of this proves true it has tremendous implications for education. As the article points out, many of the complaints and “failings” of education today can be traced back to our digital immigrant leanings. We are simply not speaking the same language as our children.

I myself remain unconvinced. I’m sure if you had asked my teachers about me and my peers, they would have said similar things. My generation was the one that “turned on and tuned out”, we were the TV babies. We had to be taught differently. I bet it was true of my father and his father and so on.

Still it’s an intriguing idea. At the very least we are witnessing a paradigm shift in how information is being distributed and consumed. I reckon it to be as significant as when Guttenberg got the idea to print Bibles and thus made information portable and available to the masses. Now the equivalent of a library is at your finger tips, instantly available and updated constantly.

So, while I am skeptical about how truly different the children I teach are, it is food for thought. It will be interesting to see how it plays out and more interesting to see what the next generation brings.