They aren’t taught how to deal with what real life will throw at them.
Instant gratification, no responsibility for own failures, etc.
They have absolutely no clue as to how to become self reliant, how to pick themselves up, dust off their pants, and start afresh, when they are pushed down.
I don’t mean all, but a majority.
That's horseshit. I don't know what you want to do, put them in the corner with a dunce cap again? Laugh at whoever gets the lowest grade in the class? Turn them all into cutthroat competitors like the Japanese, who have an annoyingly high suicide rate among their students for not being able to measure up?
Life teaches us to overcome obstacles. It is total horseshit that schools are "coddling" them by letting them leave the school doors with a halfway positive attitude.
They need some adversity though. If they fail in school, they need to actually fail in school. If they finish the race sure, here is a participation ribbon but they better save the trophies and shiny stuff for those who finish top 3.
Look, we don't want a jaded world, but I'm listening to youth who are so ill prepared and uninformed that they embrace socialism, some, all to happy to have them even vote as kids!
No way on earth they embraced that because of some curiousity or appreciation of the system or it's consequences. We've all been young and dumb, I'm not expecting perfection. I am at least expecting them to understand you get what you put into life.
This is why some of us are libertarians. Stay out of the life of kids and citizens, provide guidelines and let us all rise to our personal potential. Or not. Much better than the alternative.
Look. I don't know what interactions you have with what group that makes you draw this conclusion. The young people I deal with don't have that problem and they are competitive as hell. Most of them these days that I work with have had their failures so deeply banged into their psyches that some of them will never be able to stand up again. That's not doing anyone any favors. That's a missed opportunity for a citizen to rise to his/her personal potential.
I remember a handful of professors from my college days. One was a history prof that I took Ancient Roman history from. Some of the texts we were reading, by ancient Roman historians, were mucky going. Yet I never heard him say "No, wrong" in response to a question. He was amazing. I never left his class feeling like an idiot. That is skill.
Why do folks feel that everything wrong with "kids today" is the fault of the schools, anyway? Ever think of the people raising them, such as yourself?
I've got a great example that I have cited many times.
Long about the turn of the century, it was very popular on the teacher blogs to "do away" with the simple elimination games of childhood. In the area I teach, I have a zillion of them--singing variations of "eeney meeny minie moe". The kind of games we all played on the playground where EVERYone was eliminated in the end but one, and that child was "it".
The advice coming out of whatever Bad Advice Machinery at the time was that these games were 'exculsionary' and 'hurt feelings'. When I read this advice, I already had about 5-8 years of teaching under my belt. I had watched my students handle the fleeting disappointment of being "out" and quickly recover. I had watched them buck up under that disappointment. I had watched the few students who could not LEARN to buck up under POSITIVE peer pressure...."stop crying, it's just a game!"
So I rejected that advice, closed my door, and kept up with the games. I knew I was going against the grain however. The "new" wisdom was that we were to protect these students delicate feelings like tender little eggs.
15 years later--look at the mess we have. A mess of anxiety, depression, incapacity on campus, perpetual childhood. Children not allowed to fail or feel disappointment in anything--so every failure it cataclysmic. It's awful.
What happened, btw, this new instinct to coddle their delicate feelings--was an outgrowth of the self-esteem movement. Which has been de-bunked as a theory, and is largely hogwash. At best, if you teach a child to feel good about himself just because, you raise an empty-headed narcissist. At worst, you raise a crippled neurotic who relies entirely on the opinion of others for validation. In either case, it hobbles people.