This History Buff Defends Millennials After Someone Says They're the Worst Generation of Students
Jul. 23 2018, Updated 3:29 p.m. ET
At this point, bashing millennials is a terrible cliché. They're not entitled brats, and they're not even that young. Technically, people as old as 38 can be from the millennial generation. So we're not just talking about surly teenagers and entitled college students. Well, not entirely.
But the fight between millennials and boomers rages on. This week's argument comes courtesy of a blog from Times Higher Education, titled, "Millennials: The Age of Entitlement."
In it, assistant professor Vieno Vehko trashes the work ethic of millennials, accusing them of not being capable of critical thinking and saying they have no work ethic when it comes to studying.
There's been a pretty big backlash to the piece, but the publication only seems to be responding to one piece of criticism:
Okay! Setting the age range of millennials aside, there are a lot of things wrong with Vieno's assertions.
One academic named Jenny Bann decided to put her own ability to think and read critically to use, and decided to take on some of the accusations in the article.
It was once a part of Jenny's research to check out disciplinary records for students in the 18th century. She decided to share some of them to give people an idea of how much worse things could actually get.
There was lots of drunkenness and debauchery. Enough to put most Greek fraternities to shame, and that's saying something.
Plenty were lazy and unwilling to do the work—but perfectly willing to create a lot of work for someone else.
Some are rude about people's clothes:
In conclusion, it could be a lot worse.
Even if everything they say about millennials is true, we've still come a long way since the 18th century. Of course, back then all university students were rich white men, so maybe the pool of jerks has been diluted a bit.
