I hv a debate in school i want to ask where can i get good written matter on the topic today's teenager more worldlywise than their parents?

Answer 1

It is most likely that today's parents spell better than their children, and in the day and age of spell check, it is unimaginable that anyone would have such a problem with spelling and grammatical errors. Worldly is considered to be a form of wisdom and it is a frustration for both young and old that youth is wasted on the young and wisdom wasted on the old. Today's teenagers have more access to information than any generation before them but this does not necessarily mean that todays teenagers are accessing that information or that if they are accessing it that they are understanding what it means. Todays adults are often guilty of assuming that because we are a modern society we are smarter, even wiser than those generations that came before us. This assumption will lead many people to make assertions that Laws or doctrines written several hundred years ago are obsolete and have no real bearing on the modern world of today. Sadly, most people that make these kind of assumptions have not even read the Laws or doctrines they assert are obsolete and if they have not read that which they criticize then it is reasonable to suspect that they have not read as much as those people hundreds of years ago who discovered the Laws or drafted these doctrines. If we are not better read than Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Paine or Sir Francis Bacon and their access to information was more limited than our own. If we are not, as a whole better read and better educated than people who lived more than two hundred years ago, what difference does it make if teenagers today are more worldly than their parents?

As in many ways JJ goes straight for the jugular... & why not? I just wonder whether the (mis) typing of the question was deliberate on the part of the questioner..... But then I would trype that, wouldn't I, being the cynic that I am. I think the simple answer to the question is this means: the Internet, something our parents, even the parents of todays teenagers barely dreamt of. Failing that the questioner should sound out his or her peers and try to evaluate just how worldwise they are & then try to make a valued judgment with regard to parents & others of previous generations. But worldly wisdom is a very nebulous concept, so I wish you well in your quest.....

Addendum:

Thank you JR for your input. Any attack on the question itself was not intentional, but in my zealous plea that we all spend more time informing ourselves, it occurs to me after re-reading the original answer that I have not really answered the question at all. The question is, of course, where can good written material on the topic of the teenagers being more worldly than their parents be found? The internet is absolutely a place to find this sort of information and may I recommend starting with some of these web sites: pewresearch.org/pubs/808/writing-technology-and-teens or Washingtonpost.com and find the excellent article What Teens Really Think written by Richard Morin, October 23rd 2005. These are just two bits of writing that address the question directly, and if you ask Google if teens are more worldly than their parents Google has about 563,000 entries for this question alone. Whew! That's a lot of research.

It would be nice, however, if instead of spending all that effort reading what others are saying about the "worldlywisdom" of teenagers, if in this debate the questioner is on the advocacy side of teens being more worldly than their parents, perhaps it would be a stronger argument to present some world problems of today in this debate and offer real world solutions from a teen age point of view thus proving the worldliness of teens rather than appealing to authority. It seems to me a debate such as this could be a whole lot of fun if it were teens debating their parents in a formal debate.

Teenagers today are far too often dismissed as being a part of some overall problem rather than being acknowledged for who they really are, which is the future of this world and they are as much a part of the solution today as they will be long after JR and myself are long gone. They are every bit as powerful as their parents or adults and they are every bit as frustrating as many parents bemoan. In this debate of the "worldlywise" demeanor of teens vs their parents, I still plea for an effort by teens to embrace the classic literature, poetry, plays and philosophy that generations before you have embraced as knowledge is something we discover and not what we make. It is fine to enter into a debate about an issue if you are well informed on the matter, it is another matter entirely to enter that debate simply because you have an opinion.

In today's world too many people are satisfied with having an opinion and content to call that knowledge. I have debated people on certain issues and at some point find myself compelled to ask if they have read a certain writing on the issue only to discover that they have read very little in regards to the issue in debate. This phenomena is most noticeable when debating communism. When I ask people if they have read Das Kapital, most have not. Two people, at separate times, in separate debates, actually told me that they had read all the important parts of that book. Now there's a valuable technique for study. I would love to be able to discern all the important parts from the not so important parts of tomes such as Das Kapital as that would save an awful lot of time reading and re-reading Marx trying to understand exactly what it is he is saying. Perhaps if I read only the important parts I would be a Marxist too. Then again Marx himself is quoted as saying: "I am not a Marxist." and I suspect he is referring to the vast majority of people who joined that religion without reading that particular bible.

In terms of intentional misspellings and invented words such as "worldlywise", (which is a word like samelyredundant.), it is fine if u r 2 cool 2 use standard grammatical usage but this is merely style and does little to inform us of the substance of what it is u r trying 2 say. If u r a really cool then you know what u r saying and you say what you mean regardless of how it is u r saying it. If u think u r more worldlywise than ur parents cuz u have effectively mangled the English language i hope u at some point come 2 realize that style over substance does not make u worldlywise regardless of ur clever usage of letters and numbers. If u r worldlywise then u hv something to share with us all and I look forward to translating your wisdom from the worldlywise language of teens who text, e-mail and chat on the net into my old fuddy duddy language I have come to adore so, and rely upon so desperately. LOL! :)