Occupy Trophytown

Instapundit provides this brief quote about the Occupiers by Andy Kessler from behind the WSJ pay wall:

Maybe this is all really about disappointment. I spoke to a young woman who had clearly bathed more recently than most. I asked her why she was at OccupySF. She told me she’d done all the right things. Studied hard. Graduated college. (She was an art major.) And now she can’t get a job. It didn’t matter. It’s all messed up. She was lied to.

Of course she was. She’s a member of the Trophy Generation. Win or lose, you get a trophy. We embraced mediocrity to an entire generation of kids during good times who are now finding themselves mediocre in bad times. There still is that American dream: Go to college, get a job, buy a Prius. But like it or not, studying art or humanities or gender studies won’t get you there. Marissa Mayer at Google complains she can’t find enough computer-science majors. Civil engineers are getting hired sight unseen.

Educating the whole child was bad advice. So was follow your passion. California spends months teaching ninth-graders how to build a waste-treatment plant with only a day or two on natural selection. I think Occupy Wall Streeters are as much disappointed with the route they all took as they are with “fat cat” bankers.

Well, with that scattershot list of observations as a jumping off point, I might add a couple.

I haven’t seen the valid survey that confirms everyone’s suspicion that the Occupy Wherever crowd is made up of mostly disaffected art majors, but we’ll take it as broadly accurate.

So is it really all about the trophy generation? My daughters are part of the trophy generation and grew up in one of the trophiest suburbs in Texas. Both were competent athletes but not out of the ordinary. They had the good fortune of several fine volunteer coaches (me not among them) who were reasonably demanding but never unkind. I can still remember Coach Doug, one of the kindest most positive people you’ll ever meet, pleading from the sidelines, “come on girls, stop standing around killing my grass”. Yeah, they got trophies but they still got gentle prodding or at least feedback and a clear idea of expectations.

The thing is, smart kids are smart even when they’re young. They know the significance of a trophy when everyone gets one. They’re not fooled, but neither are they necessarily damaged. I clearly remember my oldest, when she was about 8, having done something mildly impressive, I said to her, “I’m proud of you, sug”. She replied, “Why?”

I don't think she was being self-deprecating, I think she was somewhat baffled. The BS detector sets itself if the signal isn’t jammed by constant chatter.

Anyway, in the case of the OccupySF chick above, I bet it’s not that she was given empty rewards, but that so little was actually demanded of her in the first place. They’re not the same thing.

So why don’t more go into hard science, when it’s clear that it is one of the shorter paths to creature comforts, if not riches? Don’t blame the trophy culture. Blame the culture that denigrates and devalues anything scientific. Popular TV and movies - and increasingly churches - portray scientists as hopelessly evil or hopelessly dweeby - never well-rounded, never competent. It’s cool to be a CSI detective, but not a doctor, and dear God, never an engineer.

When my oldest was in 6th grade, she attended a Sunday school session at our Methodist church where the teenagers in charge did a skit in which a humorously mad scientist espoused evolution. The message was clear enough. These were not hand-in-the-air evangelicals or scripture-spouting Baptists in the rural backwater of your liberal nightmare but Methodists, in a suburb built on the backs of energy exploration, genetics, and engineering. She rarely went back.

In 1988 or 89 I watched Bill Moyers interview Maxine Singer of the NIH. Thanks to the art history majors at Google and the gender studies majors at the National Library of Medicine, I can find the transcript. Many of the problems among the occupiers and their inability to find their passion in science were predicted here (emphasis mine). Remember, this is 1989.

MOYERS: What does it say to you that our society has such a negative image of scientists?

SINGER: It says that science was not an integral part of most people's upbringing and education. As they were growing up, they didn't come to understand that science was one of the grand human activities. It uses the same kind of talent and creativity as painting pictures and making sculptures. It's not really very different, except that you do it from a base of technical knowledge.

MOYERS: Given the negative image of scientists, why did you as a young woman decide to become one?

SINGER: I’ll give you the answer that, in fact, many, many scientists give when asked this question. I had one marvelous chemistry teacher in high school. She was an exciting teacher, interested in me because I was interested in what she taught, and very demanding.

SINGER: It would be difficult to give a good scientific education without being demanding. There's a certain amount of hard work, but the pay-off is marvelous, because when you do the hard work and come to understand something about the way the world works, then the satisfaction is so enormous that it makes you willing to do more demanding work. But if the hard, intellectual work to understand is not demanded of you, then you can't have the pleasure of it either.

Later she bites down on the brutally hard nut at the center of the issue…

“Let me tell you a story that goes back to the days when my now grown up children went to junior high school. Each of them in turn came into a biology class that was taught by a superb teacher. Within two weeks of the beginning of the school year, on each of those four occasions, I began to get calls from parents of other children in the class asking whether I would join a delegation to the principal, to complain about the amount of work that this biology teacher gave. The parents thought she gave too much homework. They also didn't think biology was that important. They were shocked to learn that I wouldn’t join the delegation. Now these parents were highly educated and had great expectations for their children, although none of those expectations included science. They just didn't feel that it was worth the effort that was being demanded of their children.”

MOYERS: This happened not just with one child of yours?

SINGER: It happened each time, four times in a row. The parents didn't see the opportunities in being a scientist…. I think their response also indicated that they thought there was a free lunch out there, which there isn't. It was a very depressing experience.”

Indeed.

So what about “follow your passion” being a bad idea? I think I would phrase it differently, that is, “don’t confuse your passion with that which comes easily”. Biology and insects came easily; biochemistry and organic chemistry did not. Had I demanded more of myself in those areas, I might have found a greater passion. And, “don’t confuse your passion with fun”. I love music, video games, movies, etc. Hell, I even take my family to art museums in any new city we visit. It never occurred to me that any of these might be my passion.

Clichéd as it must be by now; I’m forced to end with quote from a book I’ve never read – seeing the movie was easier:

“My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him all good things-trout as well as eternal salvation-come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.”
― Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories