"Kids these days" is a time-honored cliché. The cliché is getting new traction with the oncoming student loan crisis and the popular sentiment, among established adults, that indebted college graduates brought the problem on themselves (and on the whole nation) by studying useless things like English and art history instead of learning how to develop software programs or magically becoming entrepreneurs at the age of twenty-five. With Christmas upon us, I want to change gears and defend today's young people. As someone with degrees in classics and English, who teaches Greco-Roman mythology and American literature, I'm also defending myself, hopefully without being defensive. As long as humans have written, they have compared new generations unfavorably with older ones. The Greek writer Hesiod's Works and Days includes a description of the five ages of man. The long-passed golden age was the best; the iron age, Hesiod's own, the worst. Hesiod enshrined the golden age as a bygone utopia, while placing the horror-stricken iron age at the end of a hopeless slide....
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