Each and every generation thinks that the one that comes after it does things wrong. It’s just a fact of life that grown-ups can’t abide by how youngsters live their lives because they feel completely alien and out of sync with the way the world ‘should’ be.
If you’re one of the many, many people who think that millennials are part of the ‘worst’ generation ever, then it’s a good idea to read through Jenny Bann’s thread on Twitter for some perspective. Bann, who goes by the moniker calluna_ on Twitter, describes the raucous revelry and devilish dares that 18th century students were known for. From sword fighting to quaffing copious amounts of ale in taverns, these youths were known for being chaotic, loud and free. Which shows that what we have to deal with today might not be all that bad and that there was never a ‘golden age’ where everybody behaved properly. A real shame that sword fighting lost its popularity, though. Scroll down to read Bored Panda’s in-depth interview with Bann.
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It’s no surprise that lots of people don’t like millennials. However…
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…Jenny Bann proved that 18th century students were way rowdier than millennials
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Bann, an academic who now works at the Scottish government, chronicled the lengths to which youngsters from the past went to create chaos. She did this in response to a tweet by Times Higher Education about how millennials refuse to take responsibility for learning.
Bored Panda contacted Bann to learn more about 18th century students and her thoughts about millennials, as well as about the opinions different generations have about one another.
When asked why so many people nowadays can’t stand millennials, Bann said: “Oh, someone could write a book on that! My best guess: complaining about ‘millennials’ is a way to grumble about ‘young people today’ while kidding yourself that you’re talking about the faults of a specific generation. The oldest millennials were born in the early 1980s, they’re in their late 30s now, but people are still talking about ‘millennials’ and meaning teenagers and not people with children and mortgages and senior jobs.”
The unruly students Bann was talking about were from Glasgow, Scotland
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Bann revealed that punishments for unruly students in the 18th century varied, ranging from fines to expulsion. “Quite often they were fines (many of the disciplinary records we have are because some external party petitioned the university for compensation after damage to property, so the fines covered the damage). Sometimes students were expelled from the university.”
“One group of students set up a petition to formally complain to the university about a professor who hit a young student with a candlestick. They could have got in trouble for that themselves, but they obviously felt that the student who’d been hit had been very badly treated and they needed to stand up for him. I admire that,” Bann shared the most impressive thing that she had read about 18th century students doing in Glasgow, Scotland.
Students nowadays seem like saints, compared to students from the past
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According to Bann, “we all have a tendency to be nostalgic about our own generation” and every generation eventually learns to criticize newer ones. “But it’s also a way to make big societal changes less scary. So you get a lot of people complaining that young people today don’t take work seriously because they expect to move round employers. But there’s no such thing as a job for life anymore for most people — why should they act as though there is?”
“In the original discussion about this I heard lots of people calling millennials ‘entitled’, and that strikes me as a strange insult to use. Look at these 18th century students — they came from a generation that thought they were entitled to take over large portions of India with the East India Company, that thought they were entitled to own slave plantations in the Caribbean. Surely that’s more ‘entitled’ than any annoying student today!”
We all like to think that we know how to have a good time. But 18th century students take the cake. They fought. They drank. They danced with girls they were told not to dance with. They made offensive toasts. They wrecked homes, broke furniture, and skipped lessons. They insulted the university and the armed forces. They scared servants and beat innocent passers-by. While we can’t condone this sort of behavior, two things are crystal clear: people from the 18th century sure knew how to party; and very few millennials are as bad as these guys.
People really have whined about young generations for a long time. BBC Worklife reveals how this has been going for more than 2,000 years, since before Jesus Christ was born. Aristotle, who lived in the 4th century BC, lamented that the young people of his day thought they knew absolutely everything about life. While Horace, living in the 1st century BC, was angry that youngsters spend too much money on useless things.
Does all of this sound familiar? People were having these thoughts an incredibly long time ago, and it doesn’t seem like things are bound to change in the near future. Why do you think older generations have so much criticism for younger generations? Would you like to see a return of sword fighting? Let us know in the comments!
People thought Bann’s tweets were very much worth reading
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