"Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter a room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers."
Who said that? A) Winston Churchill B) Shakespeare C) Socrates D) U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
The answer is Socrates, who like so many other adults in the roughly 2,400 years since he died in 399 B.C. was convinced the younger generation would ruin the world.
We certainly hear those words today: Young people don't care. Young people are lazy and selfish. Young people are going to you-know-where in a video game hand basket.
At the News-Sun, however, we know that kind of thinking is nonsense. The next generation is doing just fine.
We know this because we witness young people going about their lives every day. We get to watch what they are doing, saying and feeling.
Take three sixth graders at Sebring Middle School. Three salt-of-the-earth, delightfully normal children; not a whiz kid or delinquent among them -- Jameka Fields, 11, Chayanne Iglesias, 12, and Gavin Szoka, who is 12-years old today (happy birthday, Gavin). They are the type of students who inspire hope for the future.
The three of them entered experiments in the science fair at Sebring Middle School when they had the choice of skipping all the hard work.
Much more important, each of these students thought about the world, coming up with a question they wanted to answer. The exercise wasn't about grades for them. They worked to solve a mystery.
Listen to them: "We drink water everyday. I wanted to know what we were drinking," Gavin said, explaining why he tested water for chlorine content. His brother works for the water department, which got Gavin thinking about the subject. He discovered chlorine only appears in trace amounts in all of the samples he tested, which surprised him.
Volcanoes and chemistry fascinate Jameka. She wanted to find out which ingredient -- sugar, salt or baking soda -- would power the best simulated eruption when added to vinegar. "Baking soda was the best," Jameka said, which is what she had thought. "It erupted, heated, and sizzled."
Chayanne wondered about the decomposition of materials. "The climate is changing and people say there is too much plastic. I wanted to find out why," he said.
He dug a hole two feet deep and buried a garbage bag, a sandwich bag, a block of wood and a piece of paper for a week. He expected to see considerable decomposition in the organic materials when he dug everything up.
"Nothing decomposed in a week. I was really surprised." Chayanne said. "I did research after the week. What people predict and calculated is that plastic takes 500 years to decompose, and a piece of paper 10 years, although that depends on if you wet or it not."
Our point is, these students are quintessential examples of the young people coming up. From what we have seen, we already know Gavin, Chayanne and Jameka will be thoughtful citizens; expanding knowledge and helping solving problems.
Frustrating at it is, we need to remember that young people gobble food because they are growing, contradict adults because they learning to think for themselves, and that their ceaseless chatter is, heaven help us, age appropriate and healthy.
We've seen the future in (gasp) middle school, and the future is promising.
Wednesday, December 12, 2012 - www.newssun.com/edt-121212