Sciences Participating with Arts & Culture in Education

Let us be that change

Illustrated by JAN VIMAR AMAMEDA

In the last few years, Generation Y, which includes persons born between 1980 and 1999, has been maligned by older cohorts, writers, and the media for being a self-entitled, technologically obsessed, knowledge-deficient generation. Faced with this clash of generations, the students of a BXE class known as "Know Thyself" took it upon themselves to address and refute their older critics in a structured speech, using classical figures of rhetoric. To understand the workings of a rhetorical speech, they had to read and pull apart speeches by Socrates, Maximillien Robespierre, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, George Bush. Jr., and Barack Obama. Their speech, "Let Us Be That Change," makes the argument that older generations need to face the inescapable fact that the world is changing rapidly, and that contrary to popular belief, Generation Y is ideally prepared to meet today's challenges and to do it with heart, too.

Dear present, future, and past generations,

We are assembled here today to introduce ourselves as a generation that has been arbitrarily named “Generation Y.”

That as a generation we are unable to adapt to the rigours and demands of this world is the tag with which some of the elders of this evolved society have burdened us.  We are unprepared for the real world, we are told.  But our tolerance toward the challenges brought on by diversity and difference is what makes us one of the most adaptable generations in recent history.

Our critics have apparently forgotten that they have taught us to be what we are.  We embrace and understand diversity, whether it be religious, spiritual, or cultural; we have been taught that in difference lie both open-mindedness and equality, and our faith in equality has taught us to fight for our values, as well as for our brothers’ and sisters’ beliefs and aspirations. We may be individualistic, but we are not selfish.  We work with the understanding that to work for ourselves can result in improving the lot of others.  We certainly wish to better ourselves, but we also desire a better society and our work attempts to achieve this goal.

As members of Generation Y, we have been in contact with so many different cultures and belief systems that, unlike other generations before us, we have learned to live together in peace.  Our generation as a whole is open minded and interested in creative and peaceful solutions, and this had led to our ability to adapt to different circumstances and views.

Yet we have been accused of inflexibility and rigidity, but how can anyone doubt that drastic changes in technology have forced and allowed us to use that very technology in ways undreamt of before, so that we now have the ability to access any information we want from halfway around the world in a matter of seconds.  We have adapted well to that.  And we are a generation that is compelled to pursue new answers to new problems, because the simple old answers of the past no longer suit our present predicaments.

And so we come together today to denounce that new tendency among some of our elders to publish books and articles deprecating our generation and accusing it of not being fit to adapt to or become productive within society.

Authors like Mark Bauerlein and Jean Twenge allege that we—the young women, men, boys, and girls born between 1980 and 1999—are shallow, ignorant, uninformed, delusional, vain, inadequate, inexperienced, self-centered, and self-entitled.  We ask you:  how can we ever hope to be successful in this world when we are burdened with these labels even before we have been able to mature and prove ourselves? 

Our generation has been compared to a dark cloud over the workforce, a “great [. . .] darkening, a reverse enlightenment, where mutual respect, fraternity, hard work and curiosity are extinguished” (Stacey).  We are accused of possessing an overpowering sense of entitlement and focusing solely on self-promotion. Our predecessors believe that our overuse of technology has lessened our intelligence, and that our pursuit of knowledge is not as strong as their own. They say that we fail to value traditional learning, that we disregard the past to focus on our own selfish needs, and that we are demoralized because we lack religious faith. They say that we are stagnating in our own apathy, and we are often warned that unless we acquire the knowledge our predecessors believe we must have, we will remain in a state of ignorance and passive acquiescence.

But we are far from passive or apathetic.  Members of Generation Y are head-strong; they are go-getters and doers, overachievers and multitaskers, activists and entrepreneurs.  Critics certainly disapprove of this generation, but instead of attacking it, they should join hands with its members to create a larger community for the greater good.

We are, after all, the future.

Without good faith and willpower, nothing may be achieved.  And good faith and willpower we certainly have.  This generation has developed exceptional and unusually altruistic skills in the utilization of rapidly developing technology. In 2011, the Egyptian people created a Facebook page that brought awareness to the community at large about the human rights and political abuses of the Hosni Mubarak regime. That Facebook was created by Mark Zuckerberg, a member of Generation Y, seems to have escaped our critics’ notice.  The Egyptian push for democracy and freedom was but the start of a profound desire for change that would inspire the world and lead to numerous other uprisings for social justice.  Due to technology and our ability to communicate rapidly and effectively on every social medium, our generation has found the power to unite the planet.

Other than our ability to utilize technology, we have been promoting the very pursuit of that knowledge so many tell us we lack. Malala Yousafzai, a young 16-year-old activist from Pakistan and a member of Generation Y, was shot by the Taliban while defending girls’ right to education.  Despite having been physically harmed for her convictions, she found the courage to stand before the United Nations this past July and speak up for freedom and equality in the quest for education and peace for all.

Our generation is by now known for strong and positive characteristics; such as confidence in action and language, a thirst for justice, and lastly a love of freedom. We are confident because we can extract pertinent data within a few seconds and understand the deep ramifications of that information. We fight for justice because we care about access to education for all through fair and reasonable tuition fees.  And we have learned our love of freedom from our predecessors, courageous men like Martin Luther King Jr., with whose writings and speeches we are familiar and to whom we are indebted.  We are strong defenders of freedom of speech in the classroom, in public spaces, and on the Internet.

We are a generation that has evolved in social and political realms. We have acquired rights by sticking together and fighting for what we believe so that all may benefit. We have fought and we continue to fight. We fight until we succeed. We fight for ourselves and we fight for others. We fight with a sense of ourselves as a community.

Now, Generation Y has been described as being overly self-confident and ambitious, so that its members are perceived as being arrogant. Still, they call us brainless, yet say we are the most educated generation to date.  And we are.  Generation Y members value their higher-education degrees and attend college and university, going farther in their studies than their forefathers. What our critics fail to understand is that each generation outperforms preceding ones due to the fast-paced and intense complexity of the modern world.

Additionally, society perceives Generation Y as being selfish, unknowing, unrealistic, dependent on technology and entertainment, and superficial. Society fears that Generation Y may use technology for illicit or illegal reasons, yet with only a few clicks of the mouse we bring awareness to relevant issues and are able to inform a larger audience faster than the conventional publishers of the past.  Through the Internet and social media, we can work together as a community, we can inform others, and we can educate ourselves.  Technology is a privilege that has been granted Generation Y by Baby Boomers like Bill Gates and Steven Jobs, to mention only a few; not putting this gift to use would be a waste and a sin.  Some counter that with all our access to information, we still can’t recall important historical dates, but that’s only because the speed of technology allows us to access those dates instantly, affording us greater time to solve other problems.  We have grown up with the skills and expertise that the Baby Boomers and Generation X supplied, and sadly they have failed to accept that we are better, faster, and more cunning at using technology than they are.

Some may say that Generation Y is failing society, but it is society that is failing Generation Y.  We are being criticized for using the very gifts that have been bestowed upon us.

Still, we, as a generation, will continue to push forward not only for ourselves, but for our parents, our children, and our children’s children. We owe it to them to do the best that we can, just as our parents did for us. For this we must give thanks to our elders; they provided us with the tools that have allowed us to acquire the practical abilities necessary to thrive in a skills-based society. These tools have made it possible for us to unite and become one with our brothers and sisters around the world.  Together, we can and will accomplish great feats.

To those who accuse us of over-reaching, we ask:  is it so wrong to aim for the stars? As children we were told that we could be anything we put our minds to.  We are not maladapted; the world is still trying to adapt to our vision.  Every year, more and more members of our generation find their way into the workforce, and every year our society evolves and becomes more technologically inclined than the year before. We are also on the march towards greater justice and a better education.  We are not falling behind. We are moving forward at a pace never witnessed before.

You, our elders, have given us the power to make a change: trust us with that power and let us make that change.  Let us be that change.

The students of “Know Thyself” (603-BXE-DW, section 04):

Gerardo Andres Alcaine Aviles, Kristopher Augustin St-Juste, Andrew Nelson Azevedo, Tessia Balenzano, Liam Barnes, Diana Bavas, Bethany Biernat, Kallina Blanchette, Éric Bourcier, Sabrina Calderone, Mariana Caucci, David-Widmeyer Charlot, Amanda Cloutier-Santos, Claudio Dagostino, Danilo D'Agostino, Alexander De Francesch, Jorge Andres Delgado Mesa, Nahum Fanor, Daniel Gabrielli, Giulia Gaudio, Juliana Hamori Berrio, Olivia Horge, Jean-Christophe Imbeault, Navdeep Jawandha, Elizabeth Lancaster-Deliyannakis, Kelsee Makuch, Andrew Mancini, Mary-Ann Manea-Huaman, Christina Martins, Shequinah Nanshanapa, Kahlila Paul-Cole, Felicia Scavia-Rupi, Jake Silverman, Olivier Long Su, Katherine Torres Escalante, Rochelle Umali, Emily Wheeler

Works Cited

Bauerlein, Mark.  The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (or Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30). New York: Tarcher, 2009.

Stacey, Daniel.  “The Real Problem with Gen Y.”  [url=http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/dl-opinion/the-real-problem-with-gen-y-20130628-2p0z8.html]http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/dl-opinion/the-real-problem-with-gen-y-20130628-2p0z8.html[/url]

Twenge, Jean.  Generation Me:  Why Today's Young Americans Are MoreConfident, Assertive, Entitled--and More Miserable Than Ever Before. New York: Atria, 2007.