For the sixth year, Beloit College has distributed to
its faculty and staff a “Mindset List,” a
compendium of information about the cultural, social and
technological “mindset” of the traditionally
aged Class of 2007.
“These entering students were born into a world
that had developed a screening test for AIDS and where
managed health care was gaining its first foothold,”
said Tom McBride, a Beloit humanities professor. “The
Middle East had replaced the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe
as our greatest challenge to security. It is a generation
which believes in technological innovations and solutions,
and where digital devices, pin numbers and calling cards
are an integral part of their lives. Despite the fears
associated with AIDS and divorce, we should remember that
this is a generation that has grown up in a largely successful,
prosperous society.”
But here’s some reference points to amuse and instruct:
Ricky Nelson, Richard Burton, Laura Ashley, Orson Welles,
Karen Ann Quinlin, Benigno Aquino and the U.S. Football
League have “always been dead” to these students.
They know how to pop a Popple and trade a Pog. Paul Newman
has always made salad dressing, and Bert and Ernie from
Sesame Street are old enough to be their fathers. Garrison
Keeler has always been live on NPR, and Lawrence Welk
has always been dead on PBS. They have never been able
to find the “return” key, and “test
tube babies” are now having babies of their own.
The Mindset List, McBride said, is a reminder of a world
that makes education a tougher yet more fascinating job
than ever. In saying hello to a new crop of students,
which faculty and staff labor mightily to understand,
those who work in education, much like Mr. Chips, are
also saying “good-bye to themselves.”
“There is something of wicked and addictive interest
in that. I myself am part of that very generation. There
is, for me, a bittersweet pleasure in knowing that cherry
Cokes didn’t always come in cans, and there are
millions of first-year students who will never know how
delicious it was when it didn’t.”
In April of 1985, the year most members of the Class of
2007 were born, Joseph Lelyveld complained in the New
York Times that “conversations with some young people
around the country about the war in Vietnam will find
their impressions of it to be remarkably dim.” High
school juniors and seniors could not identify Ho Chi Minh,
Robert McNamara or the Chicago Seven. “Each generation
brings a clean slate into the world,” waxed The
New Yorker that year. ”But the world itself is not
a clean slate, and what happened before needs to be learned
and remembered.”
http://www.beloit.edu/%7Epubaff/releases/2003/03mindsetlist.html |
