This is the situation: there are few things more difficult than talking to a young person about the future. It wasn't always like this. We associated our youth with rebellion, nonconformity, replication, not usually respectful of previous generations – especially with parents – and, above all, with the will to be and create something different. We wanted a new framework for a different landscape.
But something went wrong: now young people react when they see their comfortable status, their comfort zone, as the corny people say, they complain to a society that idolizes them, pampers them and takes care of a minimum of materials to survive with more or less hardship. And they ask it of this same society that has kidnapped their stimuli and left them anesthetized, insensitive, detached. Pure passers-by, as if the mere fact of being young was a value in itself. “May they have what we didn't have.” The market society and the multinational see them more as clients than people. And the politicians, more extras than voters, indifferent.
Something, or a lot, has failed. We have done something, or a lot, wrong. Have we been, or are we, bad references? The world has changed very quickly, without almost warning, and generations have overlapped. The girls and boys with better preparation, presumably with more possibilities, find themselves with the concrete that blocks any professional insertion. Labor rigidity, a deficient educational system that can lead to social exclusion and therefore to the abyss. Some will leave. And others, with the eternal headphones in place, the cell phone and the screen, will swell that huge group of apathetic, sleepy, self-excluded citizens.
Bearing –as victims?– with the worst of the technological avalanche. An autistic fog hovers over many adolescents with possible mental and adjustment disorders. Doctors also warn of an increase in cases of myopia, and what will come with the absolute dependence and loss of judgment that social networks lead us to.
To the point: these are just essays, but fortunately some teaching systems are beginning to discourage the use of mobile phones in classrooms. And with good results in sociability, oral and literary expression... We'll see.
