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The Ambitious Generation: America`s Teenagers, Motivated but Directionless

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Having two teen sons leads my nose of curiosty to all sorts of helpul books. No one source is a panacea. However, I am happy to know I am not alone in this wonderous yet sometimes bothersome Generation X. Baggy pants, booming music, wild hair colors, peculiar body piercings all are cries for individuality. But is there any sort of ambition under those generational masks? Yes--boundless ambition, in need of direction.

This book by David Stevenson and Barbra Schneider comes in hardback and paperback. I suggest the paperback. You are going to want to refer to it time and again. One theme I have noticed in many books including "The Devoicing Of America", is that of isolation. Teens today are wrapped into computers & video games so much, they have gotten away from a guiding hand. They are alone and lost.

Surprisingly, compared with the 1950's generation, today's teens have fewer long-lasting relationships and spend much more time alone. Many stay in college longer in lieu of leaping into marriage. They need more guidance than ever before. Would we expect a lone traveler to be told you must reach point A and not give them any map, or ideas or support? No, everyone needs some direction.

The study these adolescence experts did of over 7,000 teens shows this generation to be the most ambitious of them all. These teens expect to go to college, graduate and find high paying jobs. On the other hand, when asked how, few had answers. They just expect it. And some of the blame rests on we parents and teachers. Teens take the wrong courses, choose the wrong colleges and then enter college with unrealistic expectations.

Through this book, we can find helpful ways of directing teens and even pre-teens of today without adding pressures. I found the following of several students ( Grace, Elizabeth, and Jake) throughout their high school years and then re-visiting them in college interesting case studies of comparison of tools which can be implemented by any care giver.

Again, getting back to basics is a central theme. Of course it does not solve everything. It is a first step. It is a way of beginning a successful trip through adolesence to positive adulthood. A way to make dreams come true. Be there for your teen. Communicate. Listen.

Of course, you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink--leave the book out, you'll see, the ponies of today will also quench themselves and find help in becoming strong stallions of tomorrow.

--CDS--

This book is an interpretation of a nationwide longitudinal study of American teenagers done by the Alfred P. Sloan Center. The thesis of the book is that today's teenagers (or at least, the teenagers of 10-15 years ago, when the study was done) are more ambitious and motivated than ever before in their vocational aspirations, but a disturbingly high percentage are directionless in that they have made inadequate plans to attain their vocational goals.
One of the most interesting parts of the book is the comparison that is made between the teenagers of the 1990's and those of the 1950's. 1990's teens are much more likely to aspire to careers as professionals, managers, and entrepreneurs that Silent-era teens, who had less ambitious goals, such as factory work or being wives and mothers without outside employment. Partly because of this, 1990's teens aspired to a higher level of education than their grandparents, usually a bachelor's degree at the minimum.
Schneider and Stevenson acknowledge the great changes in American society and the economy in the 40+ years covered in this book. A high school graduate in 1957 could reasonably expect to find a good stable job that would support a family and allow him to buy a house, with no further education. This is clearly not the case in later decades.
The authors apparently feel that the problem is not the changing society itself, but that students are preparing inadequately. They proclaim that the majority of high school students have "misaligned ambitions", that is, that they are planning to obtain too much or too little education for their proposed vocation, or that they are barely planning at all. Several case studies are given of students with "aligned" and "misaligned" ambitions. In particular, those with misaligned ambitions are made out to be clueless idiots.
The authors highlight the role of parents in forming proper alignment. For example, there is the case of Paul Cheng, a son of Chinese immigrants in New York. Paul's parents clearly want him to make something of himself, and have helped him select a career (medicine) and have supported him financially and in selecting friends, high school subjects studied, colleges applied for, and in finding work in the medical field as preparation for his career. It seems to matter little that Paul is not sure he wants to be a doctor; he is "properly aligned."
The authors also note the role of work in the teenager's life. They note that the large majority of high school students have part-time jobs, but they analyze this fact not from the point of view that work cuts into teenagers' studies, social life, or family ties; nor even from the point of view that most kids work to acquire spending money and the consequences of having it. Teen jobs are analyzed only from the point of viewpoint of whether the work helps or hinders teenagers' vocational ambitions.
This points to the biggest failing of this book. The authors view teenagers solely as future units of economic production. "Ambitious" is defined solely in terms of occupation; if a teenager wishes to travel or fall in love or feed the homeless or save the whales, that is not considered a valid ambition. It needs hardly be said that this reflects ambitions that are important to adults and perhaps not to the teenagers themselves.
The fact that these are adult ambitions certainly colors the way teenagers responded to the questions. After a lifetime of hearing adult society tell kids that they must get a college degree and make a lot of money, few teenagers will tell an interview that they want to be a barber or a truck driver. I suspect that most teenagers had no clear idea of what they wanted to be doing vocationally at the age of thirty, and gave the interviewer the first higher-status occupation that came to mind. It should then be no surprise whatever that these same teens had only vague and "misaligned" ideas of what it would take to achieve this spurious goal.
There is nothing that I am aware of developmentally that suggests that a young person must have his or her entire life planned out by the age of 17. The underlying assumption of this book that this is so does not help adolescents; rather it reinforces the abandonment and "hurrying" that is characteristic of our society since the 1960's. I am ashamed that I helped enrich these authors and their publisher by buying their book.

It's a decent read. There are several case studies of individual students and their scenarios. Essentially a student's goals need to be aligned with the realities of their occupational desires. It talks about what that means in regards to the responsibilities of the schools, parents, workforce, etc... I chose to read this book for a class in Workforce Education. I would recommend this book to be read by all parents about to enter their child into high school so that the expectations are clear from the beginning. If there is one drawback from the book, the studies compare students of the 1950's to those of the 1990's. The data is over 15 years old. It would be expected that the trends have grown in the same directions as they have from the 1950's to the 1990's but it's still an unknown.

Despite I'm currently living out of USA I can write about this book which I did fully read. Please note when I say "fully read". The former reviwerer neither understood nor fully read it. A crazy situation since he shold be native English-speaker and I am not. Anyway, he dared to crash this book. Amazon.com advices not to comment on other reviews (these are editable) but a great unjustice has been done to this book which is a great start to get away from so many guys making fat money from education: private counselor, media-college-ranking publications, trips to colleges and on top of everything sky-rocketing tuition. These problems are spreading worldwide (even in poor Latin America) in part because despite the eternal news on Anti-Americanism, most of the world still follows what USA does. If you stop these porblems, other nations could follow you.

Just as the book says, teenagers from today realize that a high school diploma won't get them good jobs. However, they don't want to be technitians like electrcian or plumber which provide both decent or even great salaries and decent number of jobs, you just go see for yourself the jobs classifies. So, most teenagers only think of college as an option in life. Unfortunately, at the time of printing their book the authors coudn't be more right when predicting most of teenagers from the 90's would not find jobs by the time they graduated from college because most new jobs are minimum-wage, like clercks. Actaully, their prediction were actually soft compared to how low the job market fell from 2001-2004, 8 or 9 million peole were looking for jobs.

Some teenagers are made look like clueless idiost just as the former reviewer direly complained. Dealing with problems requires facing harsh realities, like the fact that too many teenagers are indeed clueless and, sorry, idiots. (Imyself was one of them) But hey! There's no reason to be that sentisitive since only fake names were used! And we can't even whine about the "political rightousness" (being over-sensitive) since that reviewer is a conservative person! I know he is conservative because I read other reviews of him.

The authors proposed solutions for teenagers to make better career decisions, especially more communication with their parents. Sometimes they sound kind of paternalistic or maternalistic, but they acknowledge that most parents also struggle to find good choices for thier teenagers since there's so many careers today. In fact, the authors didn't prove parent advice really works because they didn't show the final outcomes of them when finishing college and facing real life. Other advices of them look more down-to-earth, like just doing what the parents (or someone else) did to reach the middle class. I strongly agree with the authors on this: pursuing Master's and PhD's are not as good keys to sucess as the media claims.

What the authors utterly proved was that not following their suggestions do lead to trouble: dropping college while wasting big time and money just to end uo in deep frustrations and misery. The very begginig of the book shows one these cases of tragedy, you can see those first pages of the book right here below the picture of the book, click on the icon "look inside this book". Over there you'll see a typical example of today's teenagers who, despite dreaming about elite colleges and becoming successful professionals, don't take the proper and obvious steps to succeed; harsh realities nobody wants to admit. These steps are getting a taste of those jobs by working in places where they would see how those jobs really are and talking to those who already have such jobs. It can be an internship, part time job or even volunteering. The example in the books talks about a girl who wanted to become an editor. However, instead of working her way up wit activities like getting any job within a local publisher, the girl only cares about the colleges rankings, visiting them, etc. Her parents don't participate in her decisions other way than paying her expenses. Please read the rest of the story, it's too sad. I myself saw several cases like this when I lived in USA and was a teaching assistant.

By the way, the last reviwer critized the book with many of the same ideas of the authors. His last paragraph states that teenagers may not have known what they wanted to be when older and therefore said to pollsters that they wanted to become professionals just because they always heard from adults collge is the r ight path in life, no wonder they usually came across as clueless. This is exactly what the book goes against, teenagers going to college just because of sloppy information, mostly from teachers. And the 6th and 7th paragraphs actually ask the authors go off their topics. Yes, the authors only analyzed teenager's jobs from the point view of how it shapes their ambitions which is the topic of the book. And yes again, by "ambitions" they only talked about how they wanted to become finantially succeesful in life which is what most people (whether you accept it or not) also understand. Feed the homeless or save the whales is also ambitious (as the that reviewer says) but it will hardly be a way to earn a living for millions of teenagers and people.

This book is must-read for teenagers. Teachers should have students read it and parents leave it in different parts of the house for a while until the kids start getting curious about that book and eventually start getting real by reading it.