The importance of groups for young adults
The importance of groups for young adults
All of you are in close contact with young people. All of you must surely be impressed with the potential of our young people, their enthusiasm, their energy, their sophistication. And all of you are probably conscious of the perilous road they see ahead for themselves in a world grown much harsher than it was in our teen years. I do not, therefore, presume to tell you much about your teens. What I want to do is to look at a few major trends that are sweeping our whole society and that have a significant impact on youngsters who are thinking about their first jobs. I hope it will help you focus on how young people see the world today, so that you can better assess how they are likely to see Junior Achievement (JA). In some of these trends, I cannot avoid commenting on how young people appear to me or to the people with whom I have discussed this project, but for the most part, I will stick to discussing the trends and leave it to you to judge how they will affect these intelligent, rational people.
There are so many fundamental things that are changing in our society that it’s impractical to draw scenarios that reflect even a small part of the richness of the teenagers’ world. So what I have done is pick a single aspect of teenage behaviour that is critical to their absorption into the world of work and then examine the major trends that have a direct impact on that aspect. The context, then, of my remarks is teenagers’ ability to function in groups, both as leaders and as team members. This is critical because there are very few things that can be achieved by individuals acting in isolation. The group is the basic organizational unit in careers, in social life and in community activities. Societies that teach their children well how to operate in groups build a strong foundation for their country’s future. Societies that neglect this task sow the seeds of a dissipation of the energies and dreams of the next generation.
This context is important for JA. The challenge of promoting and preserving the free enterprise system exists at more than one level. The primary level is persuading young people that the system is the most effective way of delivering whatever society needs. However, it’s even more important, nowadays, to recognise that teenagers need to be convinced that work in the capitalist system is also a social challenge that offers them marvellous opportunities for self-fulfillment. If we sell the young on the social benefits of business, they will commit themselves to exploring the free enterprise system. Only then will they be able to acquire the social skills to operate effectively within it.
The nature of groups
Let me talk for a minute about groups. Our culture does not equip us well to think in terms of groups. The British and American traditions both glorify the individual – the frontier cowboy who single-handedly settles the problems of towns, states or even countries; the eccentric who stands up for his beliefs against incredible pressure to conform – and is proved right in the end. This culture might look, at times, more like an incitement to lawlessness or blind stubbornness in the face of reason, but it is deeply ingrained in our rhetoric and our role models. Horatio Alger’s colleagues and employees have not got a lot of press.
On the other hand, in a society like Japan, the concept of groups is as deeply ingrained to the opposite extreme. But we must not deceive ourselves about the Japanese and their consensus: In the process of forming a consensus, the individuals in the group will often push their point of view fiercely, indeed emphatically. The conflict, however, is channelled by a unanimous commitment to find what is best for the group. An individual’s worth is judged by his or her effort for the group, not by how many of his ideas are adopted. There are no winners or losers, because if there is no settlement of differences of opinion, nothing is done. The group acts only when everyone is satisfied with the consensus. The group, then, is not the opposite of individualism, it is the extension of individualism into a positive plan of action.
Naturally, not all groups live up to this ideal, just as not all individuals are as heroic as our mythology would suggest. Some groups are defensive, motivated by fear or anger: unions, for example, were originally developed to fight heartless exploitation. The earlier trade guilds, on the other hand, were developed to exclude people who lacked the requisite skills, as were gentlemen’s clubs: these groups offer standards or values that members can hang their hats on; they are not defensive but they aren’t goal-oriented either, seeking rather to exclude outsiders and consolidate the status quo.
The groups that can change the world are quite different again, because they are not passive or exclusive. They exist to pursue external goals, and therefore have the capacity to exert influence outside their own circles. They still retain elements of exclusivity or even defensiveness, but their external orientation dominates. They aren’t always positive, either. They can be destructive, like organised crime. But, when they are constructive, like useful social or community organizations, or like so many businesses, they become powerful instruments of change. Their external orientation gives them such breadth of purpose – which the defensive or exclusive groups cannot match — that their members have ample room for self-development in a dynamic environment, liberating their energy and commitment.
I have spent some time on groups, because businesses cannot operate effectively without people who know how to work well in groups. So we know a lot about groups, leaders and teamwork. For their part, teenagers have needed, since time immemorial, to belong, to be part of a group. It’s a good match, but we must understand that teenagers assess business in general, and JA particular, in the context of an array of groups which are all competing fiercely for members. And just because businesses provide jobs doesn’t mean we have an edge against other groups in attracting their attention – business and work are two different concepts. Our competition is peer groups.
The trends I’ll touch on today are not an exhaustive list. They fall into three categories — the Big three of family, school and church; peer groups, new and old, including employment; and a batch of trends that do not centre on groups but which influence attitudes relevant to groups because they pervade our whole society. Some of them have run their course even though we may not appreciate fully their effects. Others are trends that have barely begun. I will start, however, with two that are not trends at all. They are constants that serve as touchstones for understanding our young people:
The first is that human nature doesn’t change. Today’s teenagers sound a lot like you and I did, and like our grandfathers did. The Teen Environment study put together by the Robert Johnston Co. for JA in the U.S. has an amusing section that breathlessly reports how teenagers are both impulsive and self-conscious; preoccupied with their own popularity, or peer approval; charged with energy and self-doubt; light-hearted to shield their deep anxieties; plagued by rapid mood swings; desperate to appear adult. It certainly sounds familiar. Their vastly greater sophistication and exposure to some of the less salutary activities of their elders haven’t changed their search for identity. This is, I’m sure you’ll agree, mighty reassuring.
Also, kids are not fools. They never have been. They form perceptive and rational judgements on the world around them. Some of those judgements suffer from insufficient input because they lack experience but we should not confuse this with their ability to form judgements per se. When the inputs are right, the insight can be devastating to adults who haven’t bothered to think about some of their assumptions in life.
Now let’s look at the Big three.
The family
The family, it’s worth reminding ourselves, is the most important of all groups in the long run. Everyone is lumbered with their families, for better or for worse. We don’t choose them and we usually can’t walk away from them when we get frustrated. Therefore, they offer the sternest test of our ability to work out the problems through which we mature: developing self-discipline in handling conflict, understanding love and developing self-confidence. Numerous surveys have documented the reduced influence of parents and families on today’s teens. There’s no need to detail them all, but four particular developments have had the strongest impact on teenagers’ ability to perform in groups. First is the increase in the number of single parents, either from divorce or births out of wedlock. Second, a significant proportion of families now have two working parents. In both these cases, the parents cannot possibly devote the kind of time to bringing up their children that their parents did. Notwithstanding claims that the quality of time spent with children is more important than the quantity, absentee parenthood does make a difference to how children perform in groups. In the hours away from both parents, the child forms other attachments and varying commitments. This is exacerbated by the decline in community bonds because of the incredible mobility of North American families. How can children be expected to go out and aggressively form friendships with other kids on the block, when they know they’ll probably be moving on in two or three years?
These three trends all contribute to the fourth, which is the reduced role parents play in the education of their children. Part of the explanation for this lies in the growth this century of government-run education, which has eliminated much of the variety of available schools. With less choice on where to send the children, it has been a natural step to worry less about what the school is doing – why fight the system? Children have always been strongly influenced by their school environment, of course, but the balance has shifted perceptibly toward schools and schoolmates in the past 30 years, lessening still further the role of the family.
The family is not about to lie down and die, as some like to suggest. A quick visit to any bookstore will demonstrate how much more parents are studying the techniques of bringing up children nowadays. And they’re starting to become involved again in the schools – more about that in a moment. It is unlikely, however, that the prevalence of single parents will change much in the near term.
The schools
Not long after the schools started assuming this greater role, of course, they started losing their authority. Government-run schools may have brought free education to the masses, but they also brought monopoly power and in its wake, inevitably, the dead hand of bureaucracy. As change swept through our society, the bureaucrats were unable to adapt to new needs, depriving their best teachers of their greatest motivation – a sense of social purpose, worthy of selfless commitment. Unionization followed and it wasn’t long before the teachers lost their credibility in the eyes of the students. Once that was in decline, it was only a short step to poor discipline and lower standards. The teachers responded – with the support of the parents – by espousing value-free education that would allow the children to choose for themselves the course their education should take. In the process, the schools changed their perception of their role from the provision of a broad-based education to prepare children for life, to a narrower responsibility for preparing children for the workplace – giving them skills that are directly useful when they left school.
It’s worth reminding ourselves that schools should, at the very least, teach young people the concept of learning from others. It’s easy to learn from peers. It’s far more important to learn from those with more experience – because experienced people are the prime source of so many of life’s lessons later on. The message of the teachers’ lost authority is that students don’t need to listen to people with more experience than they have.
These trends are now in reverse. Parents are starting to fight for free choice in their schools, through either separate schooling or private schools like Montessori. They are also becoming a much more powerful voice in Boards of Education. It will take years, but the bureaucracy is being beaten back, inch by inch. As alternate schools grow, teachers who seek a worthwhile purpose, rather than comfortable work rules, will find homes for their talents. The education system is returning to a stronger mandatory core of basic disciplines. There is even a growing demand for province-wide examinations.
The removal of a neutral and standardised measure of academic achievement for school-leavers is, in my humble opinion (which I know is not shared by many), the biggest single disaster to have overtaken our education system. It removes the consequences of students’ actions in the classroom – and what does that do to prepare young people for what my housemaster used to call the “cold, hard world”? The proof of the pudding is in the eating: universities have had to provide emergency courses in basic English, because the standard of their freshmen has sunk so low.
An interesting aspect of the effects of these trends has been young peoples’ perceptions of style and content. The theme of the essay that won this year’s JA essay competition was that the most important single asset of young people is their personality. What a terrifying prospect! A trend that appears to be deeply entrenched in today’s schools and universities is that students think the best route to good grades is to ingratiate themselves with the teacher or professor. The students are not off base. It works – because the teachers are that way. Hence the belief that personality is everything. Personality is important, but when the chips are down, it’s worse than useless in a cold, hard world that demands performance and expertise.
Allied to this is another disturbing trend – the greater importance attached to careers, at the expense of doing a good job. Task-orientation has become a bit of a bad word in modern management theory, but it is the foundation of successful economies like those of Germany and Japan. If our basic assumption is that a well-done job will advance our careers, our primary decision becomes what task to take on, and our approach in the workplace leads naturally to quality output. If we assume that we cannot rely on a well-done job to advance our careers, it becomes very difficult to devote much effort to doing a good job.
The church
Finally, Christian churches as institutions are in a state of collapse. They used to be important because they offered an unsullied ideal for teenagers searching for identity and values. (The same could be said for adults.) Teenagers need religion as much as ever, but they have found it in cults, while the mainline churches have become peripheral. The reason is simple – the traditional churches diversified out of the business of saving souls, into the service of negotiating ideals. When churches sought modern relevance, they tried to change society, as arbitrators of social conflicts. It didn’t make them more relevant, however, it destroyed the purity of their idealism. Thus ended another forum for young people to work through their inner conflicts in a supportive environment contiguous with family and school.
Peer groups
We can move now to the second category of trends – peer groups, new and old, and employment.
To replace the hole left by the decline of the Big Three, there has been a remarkable proliferation of peer groups. Sociologists say there are about 20 types of peer groups now vs 3 or 4 a generation ago. The nature of these peer groups, moreover, is much changed from earlier generations. Punkers, druggies or boozers define themselves totally by their peer groups – their lifestyle, their values and the way they spend their time. These tight rules enforce sometimes rigid conformity (which may be necessary to counterbalance the insecurity of having to choose from so many peer groups in the middle of an identity crisis) and they breed intolerance for competing groups. It’s a far cry from the loose camaraderie that used to allow members of peer groups room for some individuality. The strict conformism also frustrates the development of teenagers who can’t question group values. Accordingly, they tend to be less loyal to their peer groups than their parents were as teenagers. They’re readier to switch. This mobile attachment is not only a teenager phenomenon, of course: higher divorce rates, frequent inter-city moves of families and the greater volatility of industrial employment all tell the teenager that adults aren’t too loyal to their groups either. The critical point about these trends is that teenagers have never been keen on committing themselves in the first place, because of their deep-seated fear of making fools of themselves. So the proliferation of peer groups has been welcomed by teenagers who are quite comfortable drifting between shallow involvements. This translates into the rising popularity of fads, at the expense of values. But, there’s a downside, of course – teens preserve their insecurities longer when they hide them.
One peer group that has always featured prominently is sports. Apart from their value in promoting physical fitness, they have traditionally played an important role in teaching teamwork. That, too, is in decline. participation in sporting activities dropped drastically from the 1960s. Worse, professional sports – the role models for teen sports – degenerated into show business. The emergence of over-paid superstars has played to the fantasies of the young (and not so young) while their teammates have slipped into obscurity, mere ciphers providing a backdrop for the stars. There is hope here – amateur participation is increasing again, but we still have a lot to regain in teamwork.
A changing world of work
Finally, the world of work has changed irrevocably. This last recession marked the end of easy mediocrity for Canada. In the post-war years, we had an easy time of it. You only had to show up for work to be guaranteed promotions and a rising standard of living. With an abundance of jobs to choose from, people could reach for the moon, literally. That’s ended, probably for good. The combination of drastically squeezed profit margins, tightfisted, value-conscious consumers, and the invasion of quality products from Asia has terminated the easy ride for Canadian businesses. The private sector demands performance now from its employees – and among the casualties have been young people looking for their first job. The Catch 22 of jobs available for experienced people only is not new, but it was never so pervasive.
Many of the young people today have risen to the challenge. There’s been a rapid increase in the rate at which new businesses are being formed, by the young as well as the middle-aged. They are accepting that business can’t provide them with an income so they are going out and creating their own. Others are showing remarkable perseverance in landing their first jobs and moving into the jobs they really want. But too many are staying at home, studying (free) for a couple more years, and enjoying their leisure while they lose their hunger for work. In the process, they are trivialising work. If business and government aren’t interested in the most important person in the world, it doesn’t say much for their judgement, does it? Work is cynically dismissed as a sterile source of funds for the activities that really count.
If this is ever allowed to settle into permanent perceptions, it will lead to the European whirlwind of disaffected youth. It’s nowhere near that in Canada – except in pockets where parents are particularly disadvantaged – but it colours perceptions in youth as a whole. If work isn’t perceived as a promising group with which to identify and grow, our workforce will gradually deteriorate.
This leads us to the third category of general trends that cut across all our lives, but which affect, as well, the way young people perform in groups:
The media
First is the media. Since the advent of TV, the nature of print and radio has changed dramatically, necessitated by their need to be more competitive against all-dominant TV. The attention span of viewers has shrunk progressively to an estimated 30 seconds for today’s children, and TV has responded by giving them a “hit” every so-many seconds. It may be a murder or a scream, but it has to rivet the viewers’ attention. In the course of this, of course, TV viewers have been totally brutalised. Children regard death and murder as commonplace, but, worst of all, they lose the capacity to appreciate subtlety. TV can be subtle – the British have demonstrated that – but North American TV has abdicated its role as entertainer and stimulant to become slave to sensationalism and trivialisation. The print media have regrettably responded by abandoning their strongest suit of subtlety, replacing the thoughtful explorations of investigative journalism with the sensationalism of scandal.
All this has led to a media in which there is no good news. Everything you read or watch is about death, destruction, ruin, failure, anger, tragedy, injustice, freakishness, etc. The argument sometimes advanced that readers and viewers want that kind of story is a cop-out – they want human interest, and, while the tragic events provide easy and fast access to human interest, they are by no means the only source. What about the many successes of groups that successfully seek to better their communities? What about the businesses that make breakthroughs in the treatment of their employees? Or products? What about stories that provide a positive role model for adults and children alike to follow? It’s not the viewers’ and readers’ fault. The media is too lazy or lacks the resources or lacks the intellectual courage to pursue good news. The effect on teenagers is devastating. How can they respect their elders or the world in general when they are faced every day with such consistent and dramatic evidence of their elders’ gross incompetence?
Coming out of this is a second worrying trend – the slippage into hopelessness. When everyone’s talking about Armageddon, it’s pretty tough for a l6-year-old to worry about his career and pension. When the job market is appalling and the experts say it’s going to be like this for a decade or more, it’s tough to dream about success or wealth. Again, this trend is much more developed in Europe, but it does exist here, too. We should be watching the pockets of hopelessness carefully, and make sure we avoid these groups influencing the colouring of perceptions in the general teenage world.
Music
Moving on to less apocalyptic trends, music has become a more important arbiter of lifestyle. Since Joan Baez, it has also become more political, often painting vivid pictures that revolve around drugs, raw sex, unemployment, attitudes toward policemen and so on. To a greater degree than ever before, the music a teenager likes defines that person, not the other way round.
Multi-culturalism
A major change in Canada since the second world war has been the extraordinary growth in multi-culturalism. Our citizens are not basically Protestant Anglo-Saxons any more. Catholics are in the majority in Toronto. We have important minorities of practically every race in the world. That adds immensely to the rich variety of our society, but it also makes it a great deal more difficult to form harmonious groups. No society in the world has managed to get white and non-white racial groups to work well together, and even races with the same skin colouring find it difficult to work together. This has thankfully not become much of an issue in this country, but as the economy gets tougher, it will. Our teenagers strike me a marvellously tolerant – perhaps we can succeed where so many others have failed – but let us not underestimate the challenge for our teenagers. In the context of this speech, multi-culturism also has the effect of proliferating even more the choice of peer groups for young people.
Women’s lib
Another trend that is being faced for the first time by our young citizens is the “emancipation” of women. In a society where most of the institutions are based on female and male roles that are simply no longer appropriate, it will take a lot of creativity to build new, appropriate institutions. Young people see a situation in the society around them that is out of synch with what they are being taught and what they believe to be self-evident. Women are better off than men because it’s so obvious that men are not intrinsically better than women and because there are a lot of feminists who can give them a lead. But men have few role models and they are the ones who have to make the biggest adjustments. For the young men, it’s a hard slog.
There are a couple of trends that are still forming:
The end of the youth cult
The demographics are no longer with the young. In the 1960s, when the baby boom was transforming our society’s age distribution, the world belonged to the young. At the same time, the economy was growing in leaps and bounds. When the economy’s good, we can afford mistakes, so the inexperience of youth is not a significant drawback – while their energy is a big plus. Now, however, squeezed profit margins mean we can no longer afford mistakes. Demographically and economically, young people will have a much tougher time of it for the next 10 years. They will have to lower their expectations and learn to appreciate at least some of the wisdom of their elders, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Computers
Computers, obviously, are having and will have an enormous effect on us all. First of all, they change the way we think. Watch a young person playing a computer game: there is no careful aiming; it’s bang, bang, bang – throw as many rockets at the target as possible and hope some of them hit. Random choice wins out over rationality. The kind of programming in most software is also designed to be idiot-proof, leaving the operator with little need to display initiative. Secondly, the computer will change the workplace dramatically. It will allow more people to work at home, reducing the influence of the office. It also reduces human interaction as man and machine develop a close relationship. Lastly, the computer is a fantastic tool for creativity. For those who take the trouble to master its potential, it will enable them to extend their talent many, many times further than anyone has been able to in history. All these trends depend on how we treat the computer. It’s still a challenge, not a fait accompli – but it will radically change our lives, for sure.
Growing up rebellious
Finally, it has become difficult for teenagers to identify with the continuum of their lives, the evolution from student to spear carrier to executive to wise elder. The strengths and value of each stage are lost on young people who are taught, whether we are aware of it or not, that they don’t need to respect authority. And the authority, which used to be derived from status in the traditional groups around which our lives revolved, has lost its power, perhaps because it degenerated too often into insensitive paternalism when challenged. This is not necessarily a boon for teenagers. They can no longer rely on being able to grow up in peace, listening politely (then going their own way) , until it’s time to rebel, then sowing their wild oats for a couple of years before settling down. Now, they can rebel from day one. And parents can’t make it easier for them by imposing discipline, because they are themselves rejecting authority in the workplace and in government. Child rearing has become more democratic, birching has withered, children’s rights have blossomed. It’s made parenting infinitely more difficult and, because we’re human, we all make a lot more mistakes. It’s difficult to know which is tougher – being a teenager or a teenager’s parent. But in effect, we’re delegating to adolescents the responsibility for learning their own lessons. We’re not doing them any favours. Self-discipline is hard enough to learn as it is – it’s the key to acquiring the authority to lead later in life, in a world where status no longer confers the right to lead. We may just be lengthening the time it takes teens to discern between freedom and licence.
Conclusion
Our teenagers are the most sophisticated in history. As people, however, they are no different from all the previous generations of teenagers. Yet, they face choices much more difficult than their parents ever dreamt of when they were teenagers. And they deal with these challenges with reason and courage. That doesn’t stop them making the mistakes that serve as the building blocks for their development, but it does demand the respect of adults. They are the raw material for our future and we have the responsibility to help them develop their talents.
For JA, they represent an immense and exciting challenge, because business really has something of value to offer today’s teenager. Businesses have a structure that is tailor-made for self-development. The external orientation of business, coupled with its neutral – and therefore disciplined – arbiter of the bottom line, makes it naturally receptive to dynamic groups in which members can fulfill themselves in striving for a worthwhile goal. In a world where such structures are becoming rarer, even as less desirable, competing structures expand, that’s no mean product. JA cannot single-handedly change the world. The situation that teenagers face must be accepted as it is. We have to work within its limitations. While that makes it more difficult for JA to attract a teen following, it also makes the project even more worthwhile for our country as well as for our businesses. You all know the material you’re working with. I suspect you feel they’re worth the effort.
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