Chalcedon Blog

In May of 2007, Nadira A. Hira, in an article titled Attracting the Twentysomething Worker writes,

When it comes to Gen Y's intangible characteristics, the lexicon is less than flattering. Try "needy," "entitled." Despite a consensus that they're not slackers, there is a suspicion that they've avoided that moniker only by creating enough commotion to distract from the fact that they're really not that into "work."

Never mind that they often need an entire team - and a couple of cheerleaders - to do anything. For some of them the concept "work ethic" needs rethinking. "I had a conversation with the CFO of a big company in New York," says Tamara Erickson, co-author of the 2006 book "Workforce Crisis," "and he said, 'I can't find anyone to hire who's willing to work 60 hours a week. Can you talk to them?' And I said, 'Why don't I start by talking to you? What they're really telling you is that they're sorry it takes you so long to get your work done.'"

With the focus in education on the needs of the child, we have raised a generation of selfish brats. From the time they were born until the day they graduate from high school, they have been told that they are special and they deserve to get whatever they want – and they believe it. When they played on the local sports team, everyone one, on every team, got a trophy. It did not matter if you were the worst player on the worst team in the league. No one is to be denied their fair share of self-esteem building limelight.

Today in college, if the student does not like the grade his professor gave him on, well, anything, out comes the cell phone and an angry, “My Mom wants to talk to you!� This really happens. Shannon Colavecchio-Van Sickler, in her article, Mommy, tell my professor he's not nice!, writes,

Parents of University of Florida students log on to their children's personal Gator-Link accounts to check grades, then call deans when they don't like what they see.

University of Central Florida parents call administrators to complain when their kids can't get into classes they want.

At Florida State University, parents of graduating seniors haggle with job recruiters. They want to make sure Junior gets a good salary and work schedule.

…

"Our students are graduating," says Jeanna Mastrodicasa, associate dean of the UF honors college. "But they are not ready to go into the real world."

We now have an entire generation of children entering the work force and real life in general that can not understand why everyone does not constantly gush all over them. I recent heard a radio interview were the interviewee gave examples of companies who have to act like the soccer coach of their employees' younger days; they have to shower their employees with confetti and hand out trophies. For if they do not, the twenty-something employee will find a company who will.

Once again, Rushdoony’s books of 40 years ago read like the morning paper. Why? Because Rushdoony read, understood, and expounded upon the Word of God. In 1961, R.J. Rushdoony wrote in Intellectual Schizophrenia,

[C]hildren brought up on a concept of life, not as battle but play, and with an emphasis on their needs, can neither labor nor wait.

For the emphasis now is on the needs of the child, not on the demands and expectations of the culture. Once the literature of youth abounded in an emphasis on what the young man needed to know, what his spiritual armor was, what made him a complete man, a complete farmer, cobbler or apprentice, all on the premise of his responsibility to the culture and his personal incapacity if he failed to meet the requirements of manhood and faith. But the approach now is radically different…. To have a child now is no longer an act of nature but a matter of painful research. “Essential� education is in terms of the needs of the child, not in terms of the requirements of God and society. The consequences, of course, are children who are group-directed and consumption-centered, whose attitude towards life is one of appetite rather than responsibility. (pg. 75, emphasis added)

Building the life of the child on the needs of the child is destructive to the child and to society as a whole, not just because it does not work, but because it is unbiblical and anti-Christian. Instead of being concerned about the child’s self-esteem, the Christian parent needs to teach their child to recognize who he is before God:

(1) a creature fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God, and with awesome responsibilities, and yet (2) conceived in sin, that is born with a predisposition to sin, in original sin, which radically tainted every aspect of his being. “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all,� New England school children were once taught. In this concept, in terms of this twofold aspect of the child, education involved two fundamental facts, one created in God’s image, and, second, discipline in the realization that this responsibility could not be met unless the old Adam was mortified.

R.J. Rushdoony, Intellectual Schizophrenia, pg. 74.