You might have read or heard something about the current generation of young workers being aimless, self-centered, hard to manage and not very loyal to the task at hand.
Given that not everyone can be a worker-god with the commitment and focus of a Cohen the Columnist, I find the youngsters in the labor force today outstanding — and there’s a reason for it.
By “outstanding,” of course, I don’t necessarily mean creative in a pushing-the-envelope sort of way. I also don’t mean creative in a way that would allow them to write columns even approaching those of Cohen the Columnist. No, I mean these young workers are outstanding drones; they do what they are told. They don’t blink at heartache or outrage; they don’t flinch at demands from a miserable boss.
Consider the very newspaper that you are reading right now. When the young staff is commanded by the editor to write stories with a quill pen and a bottle of ink, because “that’s the way we’ve always done it here,” no one brings up the matter of computers. They dip, and they write.
No Choices Allowed
Most young workers are like that now. The reason? The public schools. By the time members of this generation were six or seven years old, they were on the long road to despotism — to the point where they have come to believe that it is normal.
Are these children taught at school to make wise food choices; are they taught how to balance taste and health, pizza and broccoli? No, the teachers and nutritionists and that ilk are too lazy and despotic for that. They simply eliminate out-of-favor food from the school cafeteria — and congratulate themselves on “teaching” the kids to make “good food choices.”
While I am free to wear suspenders and cowboy boots to the Hartford Business Journal to make myself appear less threatening to the editor, the kids of today are trapped in school/prisons that mandate dress codes and school uniforms and bans on T-shirts with messages and logos that irritate the school administration despots.
In East Hartford, for example, the school system despots and the school board and the parents have been mulling a proposed dress code for so long that many in town have requested a debate about sex education, just for a change of pace.
The best high-security-prison story to come out of the Connecticut public schools in recent years emerged in Milford in 2003, where the school despots banned “belly buttons” — seen as a hopeless distraction to the serious business of learning algebra and stuff. As a former city alderman conceded, “it doesn’t mean you’ll get a better education by instituting a Taliban dress code.”
No, all this banning of food that tastes good, and banning choice in apparel and banning backpacks and cell phones and all other manner of freedom and flexibility and frivolity, has little to do with actual education. Despots impose strict regulation because they can — and because the American economy is in need of tens of thousands of young laborers who will do what they are told.
Well-Schooled
And when these kids grow up, they’ll be ready to commit to a lifetime of tyranny, inside and outside the classroom, despite occasional rebellions. In 2007, a proposed ordinance in Pine Bluff, Ark., to ban the wearing of apparel that showed off your “men’s briefs, long johns, boxers, women’s panties, briefs and thongs,” failed for “lack of support” — or, perhaps, for sagging support.
In any event, I’m off to the Business Journal newsroom to order the young reporters to wash my car. There will be no problem. They’re well-schooled.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
