Let me give you a heartening counter-example. I teach CS 428 (“real-world software engineering”) at Brigham Young University and have been doing so for six years. It’s an elective class, not required, but I get anywhere from 30 to 80 computer science seniors each semester, fall and winter. I teach it as a ‘survival’ course to prepare them to work in the real world. I have them read some classic works in the field, as well as some of my own posts and articles, and I tell them lots of stories from my industry experience verifying all the things they read.
Oh, and I turn 70 next month. That “industry experience” spans almost 50 years.
The CS department has already asked me to teach this coming fall and winter as well. I’m happy to keep doing it as long as I can, because I’m passionate about the subject, and because I keep getting emails from former students that say, “It’s true. Everything you said is true.” 🤣
Oh, I fully agree. and there is frankly a lot of ageism in the information technology industry. That's a major reason why we have literally billions of dollars in failed IT projects each year; far too many organizations push out the experienced engineers and backfill with younger, cheaper ones.
I came to the comment section to say something similar, but maybe from the negative example. I have been a software engineer for 20+ years in industry, and I've started mentoring a FIRST Tech Challenge team at my high school alma mater. When talking to new mentors/coaches, they love to say, "the important lesson they learn is to be self-sufficient." And they brag that in the experienced teams they brag that on the experienced teams they are only there to unlock the doors and in case someone gets hurt. I decided to do things their way and watching it happen was horrible. I would never leave a junior engineer as isolated and alone as that. Doing code reviews, requiring them to use particular tools and processes, focusing on iterative processes, dividing work up for them, and all the other things I do at work are not just for how to make my job easy, but how to solve problems in general. They don't know what version control is, so they don't know there's a solution to the problems they think of as "just how it's done." I'd let them "learn to learn," and it doesn't occur to them to look it up (obviously). I'd try to step in, and it's looked at as interfering, micromanaging in opposition to the spirit of the competition, and the learning curve on the tools is considered too high to be worth it so it's ignored and each iteration of the bot takes weeks longer than it should. All of the teams that do well are the big schools, not because they have money, but because they are more likely to have at least one student who knows some of these things.
I'd never leave an employee this isolated, and I'd never tolerate them ignoring the use of things like version control, which is why the ultimately understand why we use it. I'm not supposed to teach anything, so I can't show them things like the State Machine Pattern, so I watch them struggle debugging code that's inherently buggy in ways I know the solution to. I'm seriously tempted to leave the league and just pick a robotics project every year and be more active. They may not learn "leadership," but right now they aren't learning much robotics.
I did the same thing at the medical school from which In graduated in 1966. I did this for 15 years after I retired. It involved teaching clinical skills and learning how to talk to patients and take their history. Fortunately, I quit just before the medical school went Woke. I did meet the new Dean of Diversity shortly before I left.
This is the best of your Substack posts that I have read. It could very easily be turned into a head-turning book. But does anyone read books these days? Am I the last?
Honestly, a lot of it comes from a passage in "The New School," which I was thinking about as I heard undergraduates saying that a 22 year old dating a 19 year old is "creepy," which started me wondering about extreme age segregation. But yeah, there's a lot to unpack about how and why this happened, too.
Ezra Levant (don't recall the year): “Universities are now just daycare for millennials who don’t want to grow up, whose only real purpose is to become little soldiers of political correctness and radical activists. I’m not calling for a ban on anything. Except a ban on forcing the rest of us to pay for this crap.”
One of the first benefits we noted in having a neighborhood homeschool years ago was the blessing of diversity of ages in the kids. Everyone got along and enjoyed each other with an age span of almost 10 years. The kids enjoyed the variety of lessons at different levels as they got to "sit in" with the lessons of the older kids. Overall it was a hoot with about 20 kids meeting at different homes during the year. I believe every one of "our kids" saw it through HS graduation and succeeded to voc-tech, community college or local university. And every one is now a person who is pleasant to be around.
This age ghettoization occurs when parents allow it to occur. My first job was at 16, during the summer before my senior HS year. In a department store stationery department, I was paid $1 an hour to reunite greeting cards and their misfiled envelopes. Admit it, you do it, too - you look at a card and then put it back in the wrong slot. Because we were poor, I never felt demeaned by this work and I was very happy to get paid each week. My next job, summers between college years 1 and 3, I was a switchboard operator. Think Lily Tomlin and the wires and plugs. For $2 an hour. I was proud of that job and did so well, my boss "promoted" me to sorting the office mail and paying the bills. It never would have occurred to my parents for me not to have a job. I was surrounded by adults of all ages and persuasions and learned from them. Fast forward, when my son came along, he started working at age 4. He made 25 cents per chore - putting away all his toys every evening, bringing in the mail, taking out the garbage - and he had to pay for his own toys (no allowance). He learned the value of money at that tender age. The moment he could get his working papers (14), I persuaded him to get a job teaching little kids how to swim at the local YMCA. He learned to deal with little kids and their obnoxious, overbearing parents. Within 2 years, he was a lifeguard, although he still picked up shifts as an instructor. He actually saved someone from drowning. He's a stable Millennial now; good job, own apartment, more savings than most of his contemporaries. It would never have occurred to me for him not to get that first job at 14. See, it is the parents who either encourage their children to grow up and become a productive part of the community, or not. Sure, as a society we should be un-ghettoizing the age groups, but my society starts in my home. Think globally; act locally.
John Taylor Gatto, educator and education scholar, argued that age-segregated schooling was a Prussian innovation--to create soldiers and bureaucrats who would take orders. In mixed-aged schooling, older kids take responsibility for guiding the younger ones. Not good for Bismarck’s vision.
When I was in junior girl scouts, in the late 70s and before they went woke, I took an official Red Cross babysitting class. I remember that the guidelines were that you could babysit during the day at age 10, and at night at 11. Today, if your parents let you out of their sight at that age, they'd be arrested and you'd be in foster care.
I think the discussion needs to expand to include expectations. We were expected to have a paper route around age 10, to wash cars, mow lawns, shovel snow, all to earn some money. After school and summer jobs normal. In turn we expected to be outside all day unsupervised, to ride the bike to the lake or river, or take a long hike. Always have a dime in your pocket for a phone call, and be home for dinner.
Acting responsibly is a response to being expected to behave responsibly.
Who benefits from the current segregation? The teachers and those who manage the stratification. Back in the day there were 92 kids in one class in First Grade, and all Grades were in the same school. Recess had hundreds of kids outside. Way to hard a problem for the teachers, although the students were well behaved. Everyone packed their own lunch, just like Dad did. Discipline was administered on the spot, and parents respected that role for the teachers.
Short summary: Expectations matter. We need more of them at all levels.
One great thing about things as diverse as fraternal orders (say Masons or Eagles) and martial arts (traditional styles) was the range of ages. Both had people from 18 (fraternal) or mid teens (15-16) through to their 90s. And in both, to be part of the club, you have to work hard and do it right. The ability to talk to someone 1o to 50 years older on an equal footing help a boy grow a lot.
These observations are unquestionably true, especially when you contemplate that as recently as the Second World War we were sending troops into combat who were overwhelmingly 17-20 years old. The average age in the Eighth Air Force was 19, and a pilot who was 22 was “Pops”. Teenagers were driving tanks, launching torpedos, parachuting into hostile territory.
Today they fall into a fetal position if subjected to a micro aggression.
At the age of 20, I was a corporal and tank gunner. That was in 1987. In 1991, I was a sergeant and tank commander in combat. I was 23 years old (wouldn't turn 24 until after the war). And the modern GWOT has been the same. It's just that we are now the minority of 20 year olds. In 1941, we were the norm.
Made me think about my own growing up time. My parents had some means, but at age 12 I still had a lawn mowing business (10 yards every week). At age 14, I had a 70 customer paper route. I’d also caddy at the local golf course. At 17, I pumped gas and cleaned windshields at a gas station. I didn’t think this was unusual. It’s just what one did! Having good work and money making habits are very positive things to develop. (My adolescence was in the 1960s.) [My parents came of age during the Depression and I heard many, many stories about the tough times of the 1930s.]
Without getting too political its clear to me that Dems first weaponized age differences to appeal to seniors and fear monger "pushing granny off the cliff", Social Security etc, then tribalized and trivialized youth niches from Occupy to Antifa, to climate apocalyptic cultist, and now that progtarded marxist tribal alliance is going after them...the despised Boomers who screwed them over and killing the planet.
It wont end well.
Granny Pelosi and Crazy Auntie Maxine got some 'splainin' to do...
Very eye-opening article to me as a parent of a 19 yo college student. It opened my eyes to greater differences between the youth of today and my part-time jobs in high school and college, where I was always the youngest employee learning from others with decades of experience. I (and he) will benefit from the insights you gave me. Thank you!
I agree completely Glenn. I learned way more from working around older adults than I ever did in concrete jungles of school where the most savage were respected. We need to break up age segregation again and let the young learn alongside their elders who set a good example.
Let me give you a heartening counter-example. I teach CS 428 (“real-world software engineering”) at Brigham Young University and have been doing so for six years. It’s an elective class, not required, but I get anywhere from 30 to 80 computer science seniors each semester, fall and winter. I teach it as a ‘survival’ course to prepare them to work in the real world. I have them read some classic works in the field, as well as some of my own posts and articles, and I tell them lots of stories from my industry experience verifying all the things they read.
Oh, and I turn 70 next month. That “industry experience” spans almost 50 years.
The CS department has already asked me to teach this coming fall and winter as well. I’m happy to keep doing it as long as I can, because I’m passionate about the subject, and because I keep getting emails from former students that say, “It’s true. Everything you said is true.” 🤣
I think there's a lot of desire to learn from older, experienced people. But the system is set up to make that difficult.
Oh, I fully agree. and there is frankly a lot of ageism in the information technology industry. That's a major reason why we have literally billions of dollars in failed IT projects each year; far too many organizations push out the experienced engineers and backfill with younger, cheaper ones.
I came to the comment section to say something similar, but maybe from the negative example. I have been a software engineer for 20+ years in industry, and I've started mentoring a FIRST Tech Challenge team at my high school alma mater. When talking to new mentors/coaches, they love to say, "the important lesson they learn is to be self-sufficient." And they brag that in the experienced teams they brag that on the experienced teams they are only there to unlock the doors and in case someone gets hurt. I decided to do things their way and watching it happen was horrible. I would never leave a junior engineer as isolated and alone as that. Doing code reviews, requiring them to use particular tools and processes, focusing on iterative processes, dividing work up for them, and all the other things I do at work are not just for how to make my job easy, but how to solve problems in general. They don't know what version control is, so they don't know there's a solution to the problems they think of as "just how it's done." I'd let them "learn to learn," and it doesn't occur to them to look it up (obviously). I'd try to step in, and it's looked at as interfering, micromanaging in opposition to the spirit of the competition, and the learning curve on the tools is considered too high to be worth it so it's ignored and each iteration of the bot takes weeks longer than it should. All of the teams that do well are the big schools, not because they have money, but because they are more likely to have at least one student who knows some of these things.
I'd never leave an employee this isolated, and I'd never tolerate them ignoring the use of things like version control, which is why the ultimately understand why we use it. I'm not supposed to teach anything, so I can't show them things like the State Machine Pattern, so I watch them struggle debugging code that's inherently buggy in ways I know the solution to. I'm seriously tempted to leave the league and just pick a robotics project every year and be more active. They may not learn "leadership," but right now they aren't learning much robotics.
I did the same thing at the medical school from which In graduated in 1966. I did this for 15 years after I retired. It involved teaching clinical skills and learning how to talk to patients and take their history. Fortunately, I quit just before the medical school went Woke. I did meet the new Dean of Diversity shortly before I left.
Are your lectures recorded and available online/ YouTube? Like J. Peterson, there exists a wide audience hungry for useful Truth.
You mean my classes? Nope. Sorry.
This is the best of your Substack posts that I have read. It could very easily be turned into a head-turning book. But does anyone read books these days? Am I the last?
Honestly, a lot of it comes from a passage in "The New School," which I was thinking about as I heard undergraduates saying that a 22 year old dating a 19 year old is "creepy," which started me wondering about extreme age segregation. But yeah, there's a lot to unpack about how and why this happened, too.
Man, that just drives home the point about age segregation.
I'd buy it and read it
Ezra Levant (don't recall the year): “Universities are now just daycare for millennials who don’t want to grow up, whose only real purpose is to become little soldiers of political correctness and radical activists. I’m not calling for a ban on anything. Except a ban on forcing the rest of us to pay for this crap.”
One of the first benefits we noted in having a neighborhood homeschool years ago was the blessing of diversity of ages in the kids. Everyone got along and enjoyed each other with an age span of almost 10 years. The kids enjoyed the variety of lessons at different levels as they got to "sit in" with the lessons of the older kids. Overall it was a hoot with about 20 kids meeting at different homes during the year. I believe every one of "our kids" saw it through HS graduation and succeeded to voc-tech, community college or local university. And every one is now a person who is pleasant to be around.
This age ghettoization occurs when parents allow it to occur. My first job was at 16, during the summer before my senior HS year. In a department store stationery department, I was paid $1 an hour to reunite greeting cards and their misfiled envelopes. Admit it, you do it, too - you look at a card and then put it back in the wrong slot. Because we were poor, I never felt demeaned by this work and I was very happy to get paid each week. My next job, summers between college years 1 and 3, I was a switchboard operator. Think Lily Tomlin and the wires and plugs. For $2 an hour. I was proud of that job and did so well, my boss "promoted" me to sorting the office mail and paying the bills. It never would have occurred to my parents for me not to have a job. I was surrounded by adults of all ages and persuasions and learned from them. Fast forward, when my son came along, he started working at age 4. He made 25 cents per chore - putting away all his toys every evening, bringing in the mail, taking out the garbage - and he had to pay for his own toys (no allowance). He learned the value of money at that tender age. The moment he could get his working papers (14), I persuaded him to get a job teaching little kids how to swim at the local YMCA. He learned to deal with little kids and their obnoxious, overbearing parents. Within 2 years, he was a lifeguard, although he still picked up shifts as an instructor. He actually saved someone from drowning. He's a stable Millennial now; good job, own apartment, more savings than most of his contemporaries. It would never have occurred to me for him not to get that first job at 14. See, it is the parents who either encourage their children to grow up and become a productive part of the community, or not. Sure, as a society we should be un-ghettoizing the age groups, but my society starts in my home. Think globally; act locally.
John Taylor Gatto, educator and education scholar, argued that age-segregated schooling was a Prussian innovation--to create soldiers and bureaucrats who would take orders. In mixed-aged schooling, older kids take responsibility for guiding the younger ones. Not good for Bismarck’s vision.
You forgot Sunday School...and children's church. Way too much "age graded" to develop well rounded people of any type.
True. Why have we become so intolerant of seeing and hearing children in church?
When I was in junior girl scouts, in the late 70s and before they went woke, I took an official Red Cross babysitting class. I remember that the guidelines were that you could babysit during the day at age 10, and at night at 11. Today, if your parents let you out of their sight at that age, they'd be arrested and you'd be in foster care.
I think the discussion needs to expand to include expectations. We were expected to have a paper route around age 10, to wash cars, mow lawns, shovel snow, all to earn some money. After school and summer jobs normal. In turn we expected to be outside all day unsupervised, to ride the bike to the lake or river, or take a long hike. Always have a dime in your pocket for a phone call, and be home for dinner.
Acting responsibly is a response to being expected to behave responsibly.
Who benefits from the current segregation? The teachers and those who manage the stratification. Back in the day there were 92 kids in one class in First Grade, and all Grades were in the same school. Recess had hundreds of kids outside. Way to hard a problem for the teachers, although the students were well behaved. Everyone packed their own lunch, just like Dad did. Discipline was administered on the spot, and parents respected that role for the teachers.
Short summary: Expectations matter. We need more of them at all levels.
One great thing about things as diverse as fraternal orders (say Masons or Eagles) and martial arts (traditional styles) was the range of ages. Both had people from 18 (fraternal) or mid teens (15-16) through to their 90s. And in both, to be part of the club, you have to work hard and do it right. The ability to talk to someone 1o to 50 years older on an equal footing help a boy grow a lot.
These observations are unquestionably true, especially when you contemplate that as recently as the Second World War we were sending troops into combat who were overwhelmingly 17-20 years old. The average age in the Eighth Air Force was 19, and a pilot who was 22 was “Pops”. Teenagers were driving tanks, launching torpedos, parachuting into hostile territory.
Today they fall into a fetal position if subjected to a micro aggression.
At the age of 20, I was a corporal and tank gunner. That was in 1987. In 1991, I was a sergeant and tank commander in combat. I was 23 years old (wouldn't turn 24 until after the war). And the modern GWOT has been the same. It's just that we are now the minority of 20 year olds. In 1941, we were the norm.
My kids are not like yours.
Wonderful article.
Made me think about my own growing up time. My parents had some means, but at age 12 I still had a lawn mowing business (10 yards every week). At age 14, I had a 70 customer paper route. I’d also caddy at the local golf course. At 17, I pumped gas and cleaned windshields at a gas station. I didn’t think this was unusual. It’s just what one did! Having good work and money making habits are very positive things to develop. (My adolescence was in the 1960s.) [My parents came of age during the Depression and I heard many, many stories about the tough times of the 1930s.]
100% on target Prof Reynolds.
Without getting too political its clear to me that Dems first weaponized age differences to appeal to seniors and fear monger "pushing granny off the cliff", Social Security etc, then tribalized and trivialized youth niches from Occupy to Antifa, to climate apocalyptic cultist, and now that progtarded marxist tribal alliance is going after them...the despised Boomers who screwed them over and killing the planet.
It wont end well.
Granny Pelosi and Crazy Auntie Maxine got some 'splainin' to do...
An excellent piece on an important topic.
But how to widen the discussion?
You've really touched on something quite important here, Perfesser....
Very eye-opening article to me as a parent of a 19 yo college student. It opened my eyes to greater differences between the youth of today and my part-time jobs in high school and college, where I was always the youngest employee learning from others with decades of experience. I (and he) will benefit from the insights you gave me. Thank you!
I agree completely Glenn. I learned way more from working around older adults than I ever did in concrete jungles of school where the most savage were respected. We need to break up age segregation again and let the young learn alongside their elders who set a good example.