Tom McBride - The Mindset Lists of American History: From Typewriters to Text Messages, What Ten Generations of Americans Think Is Normal

Copyright 2011 by Tom McBride and Ron Nief. All rights reserved

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada

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To Alex and Emma and Alex and Abigail
and to our students and colleagues at Beloit College,
all of whom inspired us with their Mindset Moments

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

L. P. Hartley

The past is never dead. Its not even past.

William Faulkner

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Mindset List project extends back to an experimental list created at Beloit College in 1997. A group of colleagues, including Beloits Institutional Research director Richard Miller, contributed to that list, which launched the phenomenon that has now become the much anticipated annual assessment of the event horizons of eighteen-year-olds. Family, friends, and colleagues have contributed to this process, and we would like to thank Sarah McBride and Joanna Kutter for patience and understanding and no small number of suggestions in the course of assembling the manuscript. Our children, Abigail Van Hoewyk and Alex Nief and Emma and Alex McBride, to whom this book is dedicated, have contributed in innumerable ways.

We extend a special thanks to Beloit College president Scott Bierman and our colleagues at Beloit who have offered encouragement and support. In particular, we wish to thank the following people: David Heesen and Jenny Tschudy for their assistance in the preparation of the manuscript, and Andrew Alt (Beloit 86), Kyle Dallman (Beloit 13), and Beloit Professor Emeritus Art Robson for reading portions of the manuscript. Special thanks to Gayle Keefer and the late William Keefer for their support of the Keefer Chair in the Humanities.

And we have been extremely fortunate to work with literary agent Steven Harris of CSG Literary Partners and with one of publishings best editors, Stephen S. Power at Wiley, who together made a challenging process enjoyable.

INTRODUCTION

Generations Have Always Had Mindsets

In 1998 we launched the first Mindset List from Beloit College as a way to give our faculty and staff some insight into the worldview of the incoming class of students, the men and women who would graduate in 2002. With our list of what has always or never been true for that class, we detailed the events and new technologies that marked the formative years of these incoming students. We offered a sense of what it was like for them to grow up: the trends and values that to them had always seemed normal. Just one year later, we were amazed at how we seemed to have struck a nerve: the website on which the list was located had become one of the most frequently visited at the college. Now the list, on its own dedicated website, gets more than a million hits each year. Since that first list, we have talked with hundreds of peoplejournalists and non-journalists, educators and non-educators, parents and studentsabout the lists and their responses to them. There are lots of reasons why people love the list and look forward to it every year. Among the more important is that older readers perceive an ongoing drama in which they have played a role. The members of each generation are inevitably influenced by what they have seen and heard during their earlier years. Just as high school graduates in 1898 could not imagine a southern president in the White House ever again, and just as high school graduates in 1957 could not imagine life without zippers or the possibility that a mouse would ever be anything other than a rodent or a cartoon character, so those in 2009 cannot imagine having to enter phone booths and deposit coins in order to call someone from a street corner. And if the grandchildren of those born today accuse their grandparents of not having done enough to protect the rights of animals, Grandpa and Grandma may be astounded in 2065 at how weird their grandkids and other young people have become.

The Mindset List came into being in response to dispiriting lists circulating on the nascent Internet that indicated how little high school graduates were aware of. Perhaps these glum lists represented a Baby Boomer defense against the encroaching digital generation. In contrast, the Mindset List took the approach that these students were new to serious learning and had to be recognized by their life experiencesthose things that had always or had never been part of their lives. It became a topic of conversation, particularly among colleagues responsible for our first year programs, which then slowly spread into available cyberspace. Soon we were surprised to hear from other colleges and then from the media... and the rest is history. Based on research through which we immerse ourselves in American culture, especially relating to the early years of class members lives, and supplemented by suggestions from students and grown-ups from all over the world, the annual List has become known as a go-to source for the attitudes and expectations of and a prompt for stories regarding American college students. In this book we have used these methods to illuminate not only generations going back to the late nineteenth century but also future ones of the twenty-first. Each generation has its particular set of expectations, and every generation seems, if not disappointed, at least perplexed when things dont turn out the way they thought they would.