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[ 03-11-2002 ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/woodcock.html
The generation gap is wider than you think
By CONNIE WOODCOCK - Toronto Sun
November 3, 2002
This may seem like an ordinary weekend to you, but at my house it's one of those milestone times - our younger daughter's high school graduation ceremony.
She'll remember it all her life - while for her parents, it's just one more occasion on which to feel much, much older than we used to be.
By coincidence, I read a newspaper report the other day about the generation gap between 2002's first-year university students and their parents - and two schools' attempts to remind us all of where our kids are coming from.
Queen's University's campus newspaper last month published a mindset list - copied from a popular list that has been published at Wisconsin's Beloit College for the last five years - which points out the cultural differences between us and our children. It's an attempt to remind faculty and administrators that these kids have grown up in a different world.
It's quite shocking, when you stop and think about it. They only know about things like the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Berlin Wall from their history books. Ditto the Beatles, Vietnam and dial phones.
The changes between my parents' generation and mine were big, but those between mine and my children's are gargantuan. My mom taught me to do laundry with a wringer washer and a clothesline. My kids wouldn't know a wringer washer if they fell over it and believe dishes are washed by machines, not people.
According to the list compiled by the dean of student affairs at Queen's, these kids don't remember the $2 bill, a news anchor on CBC's The National other than Peter Mansbridge, or a time when water didn't come in bottles.
To them, the Dead Kennedys is a rock group; money has always come from machines and Lorne Greene is an actor from Battlestar Galactica, not Bonanza.
For as far back as they're able to remember, Queen's says, Nelson Mandela has been a free man, teenagers have always had cellphones and TV has always been available 24 hours a day.
They've never typed an essay without a spell checker and they think cappuccino is a bubblegum flavour. Cut and paste is something you do with your computer mouse, not scissors and a glue pot. To them, dis is a verb, not a prefix, and you listen to music with an MP3 player, not a record player. There has always been a Parti Quebecois and the Toronto Maple Leafs have never won a Stanley Cup.
The original Beloit Mindset List is interesting, too, although American. This year's version points out that to the class of 2006, the evil empire has moved from Moscow to somewhere in a galaxy far, far away. Big Brother is just a television show, Barbie has always had a job and George Foreman is a barbecue salesman. Ozzy's surname is Osbourne, not Nelson; cherry Coke comes in cans; genetic testing has always been available.
Scary, isn't it? The one item on the Beloit list that really floored me, though, was this: Julian Lennon had his only hit the year these kids were born. To put this in perspective, my generation can remember when Lennon meant the sisters, not John.
To both of these lists, I could add a few more items. These are kids who don't remember a time without computers. Tim Horton is a doughnut shop not a hockey player. Movies have always been rented. Anything black and white on television is difficult, if not impossible, to watch. Why would you bother?
It isn't a new experience for parents like me to be slapped in the face with the generation gap in the way the Queen's and Beloit lists address it. It's been happening to us for several years now, but we're still not used to it and we've never had anyone write it down in black and white before.
An acquaintance of mine tells a story about how it hit her that she really wasn't seeing things from the same perspective as many younger people. A few years ago, she went on a school trip to Ottawa with her son's class. As the group of students, teachers and parent chaperones paused in front of the eternal flame on Parliament Hill, she spotted the Centennial Year symbol and pointed it out to one of the teachers who was walking along with her.
"I haven't seen one of those in years," she said.
"What is it?" asked the teacher.
"Oh, come on," she said. "Everyone knows what that is."
And as the words came out of her mouth, it dawned on her with horrifying clarity: Centennial Year was 1967 - and the teacher wasn't born until 1974.
As we used to say in the '60s, isn't that a kick in the head?
Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com]
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