Education Then and Now

Some may say that in the 1960s the majority of the youths were the known to be hippies and that they would not very interested in attending school and getting a post-secondary education, when in fact there was only a minority of the population of youths that became to be the counterculture hippies.

The youths of the 1960s who did participate in a post-secondary education was almost 75% of the native born males and females of Canada and almost 80% for foreign born males and females.  I think that there is a great misconception about the 1960 youths that they were only the drug-using and un-motivated individuals that the hippie image had portrayed. As it usually does the extreme examples of a certain case usually become the image of the whole because that is what people will remember, the outside of the box case. Remember when your grand-parents used to tell you about the kids in their days? You almost never hear them talk about the kids who were studying and going to school but always about those darn kids who kept causing a mess and smoking drugs. This really bothers me as many of the now adults of that time are really hard working and deserve recognition for their studies when most of what they get is, “Oh yea you guys had lots of fun in the 60s leaving us with all the problems to deal with now.”

Hippies in a demonstration (http://vietnamartwork.wordpress.com/hippies-anti-war)

I feel a lot better for those attending post-secondary areas of education in our time as the percentage of people 15 years and older without a secondary education has gone down immensely from the 1990s and older.  This is a great phenomenon for the youths of today as with more educated population there will be many more ideas and inventions in the years to come. It will also only incite more young people to continue on as there will be more resources and information available to them. The youths of today value education a lot and I think the media has done a better job at portraying that and not only the extreme cases. While also the notion of critical thinking has helped and has been developed a lot in the past few years and more and more people take the information that they receive and judge whether or not to believe it.

Photo of student in a library (http://www.wageningenur.nl/en/Education-Programmes/Current-Students.htm)

I think that the youths of the 1960s and the youths of today value post-secondary education equally but there were some mishaps along the way that demonstrated otherwise.