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The Daily Signal
What Happens
When We Don’t Raise Kids to Become Adults
Sen. Ben Sasse
May 31, 2017
When I was little, mom would leave detailed lists of chores on the
kitchen counter each summer morning for my siblings and me to complete
before we could play baseball, ride bikes, or go swimming.
And when I arrived at college, basically everyone with whom I became
friends, a group from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds, had
also done real work growing up.
Not everyone had worked in the field like I had—most had spent summers
in retail or taking orders at a fast-food place or sorting the mail or
doing some other kind of grunt work at a local office—but it was at
least a job with certain expectations and set hours.
I didn’t presume everyone was as gritty as Elda Sasse, but I knew that
my siblings and I hoped we would one day prove as perseverant as she
was—and I honestly believed that this was a universal aspiration.
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Without deliberate reflection, I assumed that basically all young
people everywhere had similar placeholder role models in their minds,
and thus that the transmission of a work ethic to each next generation
was more or less inevitable.
My passive assumption that all kids have some meaningful work
experiences as teens was shattered in late 2009 when I arrived as
president of Midland University.
The university’s board of directors had hired me, as a 37-year-old, not
because I had any special insight into shaping 18- to 22-year-olds, but
because I was a “turnaround” guy who specialized in helping troubled
companies become solvent.
This liberal arts institution was in big trouble, in terms of both
finances and enrollment, the latter at its lowest point in a century.
My job was to tackle the college’s unsustainable deficits, skyrocketing
debt, enrollment shortfalls, and flagging morale among faculty and
staff. None of my initial charter had anything to do with current
students and their emotional health.
Immediately upon arrival, however, it became apparent that in addition
to dealing with other so-called “big picture” concerns of a university
in crisis, I would also have to reshape the student affairs leadership
and structure.
When my team and I arrived at Midland, the school had been on the verge
of missing payroll four months in a row, which would mean that families
would miss mortgage payments. That’s a pretty urgent crisis.
Yet finances might not have been the biggest problem at the school.
More stunning to me was that it was an atypical experience for an
incoming freshman to have done really hard work, not even the sorts of
elementary farm tasks common to Nebraska kids from the homesteaders of
the 1860s until just a few years ago.
Teenage life, I soon learned, had been stunningly remade in the two
decades since I’d gone off to college. Elda’s and Elmer’s childhoods
were far removed from these kids’ experiences and understanding.
Let’s be clear that there were many wonderful human beings and
delightful students at Midland, but many of the teens I met upon
arriving on campus also had an outsized sense of entitlement without
any corresponding notion of accountability.
For example, a student staged a sit-in in my office one day, announcing
that he would not leave until I resolved a scheduling problem for him.
He was upset that the registrar wouldn’t be offering a particular
course he needed the following semester.
Obviously, college presidents don’t usually solve the Rubik’s Cube of
course scheduling.
The student was emphatic that he wasn’t leaving, and while I was clear
that the course registrar had a job to do and that she did it well, I
realized it might be a teachable moment, a chance for the student and
me to have a conversation.
At one point he proclaimed, “You need to figure this out. I pay tuition
to go to this school, which means I pay your salary. So you work for
me.”
Well, ummm… no. That isn’t how it works at all. My job did include
serving him, but in a defined way. It was not my job, for instance, to
wash his car or fetch him pizza on Friday night.
I patiently explained that Midland exists for many people and many
purposes; the board of directors hired me; and I serve at their
pleasure—but that my leadership of the institution as a whole relies on
my empowering a team of people to fulfill their specialized vocations.
I then gently pointed out to the student that he was attending the
university on scholarship. In truth then, he worked for—or had a debt
to—the generous donors who made his scholarship possible.
But even if he’d been paying for his education himself, the college is
a living institution of partners, with thought-out, intentional
divisions of labor.
He was approaching the situation and this whole living-learning-working
community only as a consumer. He was not thinking or talking or acting
like a maturing young man aware of the dignity of the work of the many
other people in the equation.
During the five years I was president, we conducted surveys annually
about the highs and lows of students’ university experience.
The survey takeaway that repeatedly woke me in the middle of the night
was the aching sense not just that the students lacked a work ethic,
but more fundamentally that they lacked an experiential understanding
of the difference between production and consumption.
Dispiritingly, students overwhelmingly highlighted their desire for
freedom from responsibilities. The activities they most enjoyed, they
reported, were sleeping in, skipping class, and partying. A few
mentioned canceled classes as the best part of their four years.
I too love a good Midwestern blizzard, but I loved them in college so
that we could explore the beauty, or ski, or snowmobile—rather than
merely be free from class.
Almost nowhere did the student surveys reveal that they had the eyes to
see freedom to categories—to read, to learn, to be coached, to be
mentored in an internship.
If you have done any real work, you begin to see a broad range of work
differently. And if you’ve been reflective about your and other
people’s work, you start to ask questions about where goods and
services come from.
Who did the work that got these non-Nebraska items to this store in
this Nebraska small town?
As hard work is baked into your bones, you begin to feel great
gratitude for the other workers who built the stuff and plotted the
distribution system that got these toasters and sneakers and books to
this place.
On the other hand, if you’ve never worked, you are more likely blind to
the fundamental distinction between production and consumption. And
these students, I learned from interviewing many of them, had mostly
not done any hard work prior to arriving in college.
Although it is not universally fair, millennials have acquired a
collective reputation as needy, undisciplined, coddled, presumptuous,
and lacking much of a filter between their public personas and their
inner lives.
As one New York Times story about millennials in the workplace put it,
managers struggle with their young employees’ “sense of entitlement, a
tendency to overshare on social media, and frankness verging on
insubordination.”
“Well, what’s the alternative? Are you asking us to be fake?” one young
woman asked me after a speech in which I’d made a passing comment about
the virtues of “deferred gratification.”
No, of course not. Of course we all struggle with selfishness, and of
course there are times to simply have fun, avoid responsibility, and
seek escape—or perhaps, as noted in the last chapter, to pause the
daily churn to reflect.
But growing up involves coming to recognize the distinction between who
we still are today and who we seek to become. Our hope is that our
young people will begin to own the Augustinian awareness that not
everything we long or lust for is something we should really want.
Healthy people can admit that there are unhealthy yearnings. It is not
“fake” to aim to mature. And it is not fake to begin modeling the
desired behavior even before it is a full and fair representation of
who you are in the moment.
I remain selfish and impatient today, but it is surely not fake or
wrong to seek to sublimate these traits. I want to grow beyond who I am
today, and I aim to begin better modeling that idealized future right
now.
Read this and other articles at The Daily Signal
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