The university grounds are covered in slush -- left over from melt-downs of all the snowflakes in First Year. First Year students, so the journalists tell us, mark the beginning of the fall term by having a "difficult transition" from high school. They are "encountering obstacles" and must "manage stress not previously experienced". They must "make personal decisions not part of the high school landscape" and "do a lot of reading" with "unfamiliar words and complicated sentence and paragraph structure". (Yes. Really.) They will need help from an Academic Adviser, say the media advice-merchants, if not also therapy and medication.
Baby-boomers were so lucky. For us, transition to University was liberation. We wouldn't have gone near an Academic Adviser. Our parents never set foot on campus until the day we graduated and got a degree.* Nobody told us we were going to have "obstacles and difficult transitions" and "stress not previously experienced" … so we didn't. What we experienced was adulthood. (And maybe a bit of S,D & R&R -- but that's a different topic ...)
And we already knew how to read. It started with "phonics" back then, and left most of us quite used to "complicated sentence and paragraph structure". That was what grade school used to teach -- not inclusion, diversity and victimhood lessons.
Here's the paradox: it seems kids who have grown up in daycare since birth, spending little time at home or with parents, often not knowing grandparents who got lost in the step-family roundabout, have ended up without independence. They're without the emotional hardiness of past generations like their ancestors who made it through World Wars I and II, surviving bombing, poverty, immigration, and learning trades (or becoming scholars) to become financially independent. (Did today's kids got lost in a virtual digital video wilderness?)
Of course, every generation says how great the earlier fore-mothers and -fathers were ... but we do have to wonder what's going on when the media make "starting university" sound like transportation to an Australian outback prison camp in the 18th century.
* SEE ALSO: https://satiricalscene.blogspot.com/2020/09/first-day-never-do-anything-by.html
