I spent forty years teaching college undergraduates and living in college-student neighborhoods; and for thirty-five years I lived down the block from a consolidated high school.

            So if you tell me that Americans thirteen- to twenty-two-years old can be loud, discourteous, criminal, and generally obnoxious, I shall concur. What I've insisted upon is that older American teens are generally, in their social pathologies, a normal adult American population — or doing better than their elders. All Americans can be horrible some of the time, and some Americans can be horrible much of the time — but all American teens just are not horrible all the time, and they shouldn't be singled out for abuse for failings widely shared.

            My main topic here (however) is the accusation that kids today feel entitled.

            My friend Howard, who has a lot of experience teaching high school, says that the kids he's dealt with feel entitled to nurturing.

            That feeling was a problem for me as a teacher since I'm not the nurturing type and tried, on the college level, to challenge more than nurture. Still, Howard thought there was just a cultural difference here, and a legitimate one, since the kids who expected nurturing also nurtured others. They reciprocated.

            Howard expands the point to more general (sub)cultural differences: e.g., with courtesy. At least one older worker at Howard's school thought the kids terribly rude. By this older man's standards (and mine), these high school students were rude. By these high school students' standards, however, they were not rude to the older man: they just didn't accept him as superior just because he was older. They were as polite to him as they were to each other and maybe would have been as nurturing — which I suspect would have pissed him off even more since I'm sure I would be mildly enraged by fifteen-year-olds who failed to treat me as at least marginally superior, and then attempted to "nurture" me.

            The manners issue gets complicated by class, ethnicity, and even region. Applying my Midwestern standards in my travels, New York City dwellers came across as rude and crude and Southerners as insincere; but my standards just weren't appropriate in dealing with New Yorkers and Virginians.

            Anyway, my approach in this essay won't much involve complexities like subcultural variations.

            Here I'll defend current teens this far: If too many of them have "a sense of entitlement" to, say, high grades without putting in a lot of effort and/or demonstrating much competence, they still often do not feel entitled to a lot of stuff I, and many of my generation, took for granted: e.g., education, respect as young adults, privacy, and decent employment upon graduating college or even high school.

            When I was a kid, Article VIII of the operative 1870 Constitution of the State of Illinois mandated that “the General Assembly shall provide a thorough and efficient system of free schools, whereby all the children of the State shall receive a good common school education.”

            I took for granted that I'd go to a decent grammar school and high school and "receive a good common school education." I also took for granted that I could go to the University of Illinois and get a more-than-good education at low cost.

            I recall paying $300 a year in tuition and fees, and even if I misremember and it was $300 a semester, we're still talking a service charge.

            The people of the State of Illinois paid for my undergraduate education.

            I attended graduate school after that, and in the mid-1960s the student saying went "Only rich idiots pay for graduate school." There were fellowships available and teaching assistantships — and that support, too, we took for granted.

            We also took for granted that even with claims of "in loco parentis" by the colleges and universities — that the deans were like unto parents to us — that we'd be treated more or less with respect and as adults.

            In part, that was the upside of being eligible (increasingly eligible as time went on) for military conscription at age eighteen. If we weren't adults at eighteen, then the US government was guilty of drafting children into the military; therefore, in some sense, we had to be adults at eighteen — as eventually recognized in the Twenty-sixth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States and later denied when "the drinking age" was raised back to twenty-one.

            "Old enough to fight, old enough to vote; old enough to vote, certainly old enough to drink." And if today's eighteen-year-olds don't often drink responsibly? Well, new drinkers usually have problems; today's teens usually haven't been taught to drink; and the youngsters aren't that much worse, drunken-assholewise, than their elders.

            I'm old enough to remember being confused the first time I heard (ca. 1967) a teaching colleague talk about "my kids" and mean not his biological children but his students. And I'm old enough to remember having to make a conscious decision about writing anti-war pieces with the usefully alliterative phrase "the kids vs. the cops."

            The ambiguity of "kids" was useful for conjuring up images of police bashing and gassing children, but the usage was problematic: children don't have and shouldn't have the rights of adults, and reinforcing the idea of students in their twenties as children laid the groundwork for some problems today.

            Also back in the 1950s and 1960s we took for granted some rights to privacy. We came to suspect spies and provocateurs at anti-war meetings, but not in everyday life. High school students have less privacy than we had, and, frighteningly, they don't seem to expect it.

            This bodes ill in a country where adults have increasingly sacrificed rights of privacy in the War on Drugs, War on Crime, War on Terror, and the "Security Theater" of airports.

            Indeed, it is striking that grammar school and high school students feel so little entitled to privacy and respect that they can talk casually of "lockdowns" and even "shakedowns" in their schools.

            "Lockdowns," and "shakedowns" in the sense of thorough searches, used to be methods for handling convicted felons in prisons; now they're ways for dealing with school kids.

            For the kids' protection, right? That's what they told us about curfews for young people. Curfews were starting up when I was in high school, and my response to being told that my risking arrest for being out on a street was for my own safety was, "Do me one favor: Don't do me no favors."

            Curfews are far less to protect kids than to reassure nervous adults, but curfews were still controversial when I was a kid; nowadays they're accepted: kids don't feel entitled to work out with their parents when they'll be home.

            And taking off from the word "work" — that's all the transition you're going to get — today's kids are told that "Society doesn't owe you a job." Yes it does. Not any particular job, certainly not any job you want — but if you follow the rules and get at least some education and get your credentials and want to work, yeah, society owes you some decent job.

            If you screwed off a fair amount but then straighten up and want to work, then, too, society owes you a chance to work at something and earn a living.

            The job market in the English-Professor business went bad in 1970 and never really recovered, but I felt I should get some work and work in my field. And I took it for granted that if I worked hard and well and long, then I could retire with a pension.

            And I did. I loyally served the State of Illinois and then the State of Ohio, and they were loyal to me: with their help I saved and retired with a "defined benefits" pension. I took it for granted that I could retire and have enough money to work "on spec" in the movie business and contribute a bit to society sharing my old-fart wisdom on ListServs and blogs and the occasional guest-column journalism.

            (I'll further defend my non-salaried existence by noting that my putting money for thirty-five years into the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio helped capital formation, praised by Republican Presidential campaigns as essential for job creation [so, gentlemen, You are welcome — stop bashing teachers and pensions]).

            Young people today generally do not feel entitled to a pension, and many suspect — probably incorrectly — that there won't even be Social Security for them.

            So, to sum up: Kids are necessarily inexperienced. Some kids today are often horrid little people: rude, undereducated, ignorant of many important things, irresponsible, immature. Some of them feel themselves God's gift to the world and entitled to success with minimal effort. So were kids yesterday; so are many of their elders today. However, kids today often do not feel entitled to many things that I and many of my generation took for granted.

            Of similar benefits they should feel entitled, and the "Occupy" movement in the USA and comparable movements abroad may indicate that the little buggers are catching on.