They’re a Good Bunch Really

One of the side effects of getting old, besides the hair growing out of your ears and a propensity to complain about various bodily functions, is that one feels a curious inclination to whinge about the ‘youth of today’. Of course we don’t actually interact with much of this youth so commentary is limited to encounters in the shopping center and on public transport.

It’s on that basis that we had despaired of the future as badly dressed, loud and sweary teenagers kick back with their feet on the chairs on the trains (when they’re not drawing on them with markers), sipping alcopops, cataloging cigarette supplies and generally being offensive in weird mock-Californian accents which seem to be all the rage. It’s, like, bullshit dude.

So when I headed back to university, particularly in full knowledge that the one I had chosen was pretty much a big zero for mature students (or non-school leavers as they like to call us), I expected to be holed up in classes with these same folk, this time with their feet up on lecture theatre seats. This was, I find myself delighted to report, not the case at all…

I suppose one must qualify it a little. The youth we tend to complain about are invariable high-school students. They are identifiable by the appalling behavior precisely because they congregate in closely knit groups where they complete with eachother to show just how rebellious they are.  I’ll return to that later.

At UniMelb, I suppose we’re also talking about kids that have scored some seriously big high-school graduation scores too. I think it’s about 1 in 3 that applies to UniMelb that gets in. The median ENTER score is 93.9%, in other words you have to be a swot to be there. Otherwise you’re at Latrobe

Still, my point is that I’ve not so much been pleasantly surprised but had my preconceptions turned on their head. The people in my tutes, notice how now they’re actual people, are bright, educated, interesting and actually pretty darn mature by all accounts. Particularly the girls (which is most of them, Arts is around 3/4 girls) or I should say women, for that’s what they are. Even talking about girls, kids, and the sorts of language I tended to have in mind before being at uni, now feels uncomfortable. I also find it kind of hard to believe that a lot of these women are 18 or 19 and graduated from high-school the year before. Well, often they didn’t, a lot seem to have done a gap year.

Either way, if you saw them you’d say they were 20-something. Some indefinable youthly but not teen-ly age. Of course there is still some age and attitude culture shock. A decent percentage of the people in my classes really aren’t motivated in any sense other than turning in exactly what is required to do well. They’re not going to speak up at a tutorial. They’re not going to discuss the subject matter enthusiastically, they’re not going to go out of their way to try reconcile what they’re learning with questions they have about the world. That’s still disappointing, for me, but then I only have to remind myself what I was like when I was their age. Sitting in a class in the University of Melbourne automatically has me substantially licked on that front.

So are we saying that all the bad kids on the train and in our shopping centers didn’t go to Melbourne? Well, probably most of them didn’t no but I’ve come to realise something further. There’s actually a massive amount of university students sitting on my train every day. I’d taken the train for some time before I went to uni and I never really clocked it before except when it was obvious, like students discussing work or flashing folders with university markings. My point is, they resembled everyone else just heading in to work.

I think it’s reasonable to suggest that the shift in environment also makes all the difference. I have no doubt that at least some of the big play-ups around are actually pretty good students. I can remember behaving like an absolute ass-hat with my friends in public, when in fact in high-school (up to year 12 anyway…) I was a ‘square’ or nerd in modern parlance. Teleported into an environment where they have none of their old school mates around, and suddenly and unceremoniously they’re treated like an adult. There really isn’t any other way to behave other than get your head down and figure out what’s expected.

In a nutshell I think the experience has already given me a far more understanding and tolerant view of the younger generation. And definitely a much more positive view of it too, which I think is full of promise for the future and not  something to be feared.

Even in pure educational terms I’ve been pleasantly surprised. I recently had occasion to peer review a couple of fellow student papers in one of my courses. They were well very competently written, showed a reasonable engagement with the material we were studying. The only think I got out of them was that they were lazy. They had chosen the easiest route, in this fieldwork report they were dangerously skirting with actually not having done what the question required, such was the manifestation of their laziness, but overall they strike me as bright, very well educated people.

It’s further becoming more clear that where proper hard work and enthusiasm can be seen in my classes, more often than not it’s actually the foreign students. That certainly gives pause for thought.