Walter Russell Mead, who is one the better thinkers around, wrote a piece entitled Listen Up, Boomers: The Backlash Has Begun in the Nov 13 The America Interest. He is pretty blunt. The boomers - the generation that has been running things for the past few decades (and actually the generation just after mine) - has made a royal mess of things, and now we are beginning to suffer the the consequences.
After reciting a litany of lousy choices the boomer generation made, Mead says
All of this was done by a generation that never lost its confidence that it was smarter, better educated and more idealistic than its Depression-surviving, World War-winning, segregation-ending, prosperity-building parents. We didn’t need their stinking faith, their stinking morals, or their pathetically conformist codes of moral behavior. We were better than that; after all, we grokked Jefferson Airplane, achieved nirvana on LSD and had a spiritual wealth and sensitivity that our boorish bourgeois forbears could not grasp. They might be doers, builders and achievers — but we Boomers grooved, man, we had sex in the park, we grew our hair long, and we listened to sexy musical lyrics about drugs that those pathetic old losers could not even understand.
What the Boomers as a generation missed (there were, of course and thankfully, many honorable individual exceptions) was the core set of values that every generation must discover to make a successful transition to real adulthood: maturity. Collectively the Boomers continued to follow ideals they associated with youth and individualism: fulfillment and “creativity” rather than endurance and commitment.
The second relevant piece is one of Fareed Zakaria's TV specials in his CNN series Restoring the American Dream. This one is called "Fixing Education". If you missed it when it aired on TV this week and last week, the transcript can be found here. I have been hunting around to try to find a site where one can replay the video, but haven't found one yet, but excerpts can be seen here.
Previous posts have mentioned repeatedly that US students score dismally against other developer nations, despite spending more money per pupil than all but one nation. Zakaria mentions that, as well as the terrible dropout rate from US schools, but this piece also highlights some new successful approaches that the country could adopt, if it could free itself from the straitjacket of local and national politics in education.
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