Kids today — a failure of perspective taking.
Yet another discussion of today’s “entitled” youth.
Personally, I don’t buy it. I was a bit worried in moving from the University of Illinois to the University of Michigan that I’d see more of this phenomenon, and I really haven’t noticed it.
Teachers and students have fundamentally different perspectives on the performance of an individual student in a classroom, a dynamic that Mr. Rogers has nothing to do with. When students receive a poor grade for a paper or exam, they note that they have often received better grades for work that required less effort or thought from their perspective, and they’re probably right. Hence it seems unfair. The instructor notes that other students in the class did better work, and so the grade seems fair.
My guess is that any instructor who believes as the author of that newspaper article appears to, that students who feel their work was graded unfairly have no basis other than “entitlement” for doing so, was probably once the same kind of student who couldn’t acknowledge that his instructor had different evidence and, hence, a different perspective.
This issue received a lot of research attention in the social psychological literature back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, although I’m out of town and can’t think of a citation now. Perhaps someone could add one to the comments.
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