Neil Howe - Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation

Neil Howe and William Strauss, the authors of Generations, 13th Gen, and The Fourth Turning, write and lecture frequently on generational issues. They host active discussions with readers (at www.millennialsris-ing.com and www.fourthturning.com) and run a strategic planning consulting firm (LifeCourse Associates).

Strauss is the cofounder and director of the Capitol Steps, a political cabaret. An alumnus of Harvard Law and Kennedy Schools, he was a policy director for the U.S. Congress and coauthored two books on the Vietnam draft (including Chance and Circumstance) before shifting his focus to the performing arts. He has recently written two musicals on teen themes (MaKiddo and StopScandal.Com) and has founded the Cappies, Americas largest theater awards program for high school students.

Howe is a senior advisor to the Concord Coalition and senior policy advisor to the Blackstone Group. With graduate degrees from Yale in history and economics, he was a journalist, magazine editor, and foundation policy executive while playing a growing role in the national debate over entitlement reform. He coauthored On Borrowing Time, about the impact of aging on fiscal policy, and coedits the Concord Coalitions Facing Facts newsletter.

Both Howe and Strauss live with their families in Fairfax County, Virginia.

Also by Neil Home and William strauss

Generations

13th Gen

The Fourth Turning

Also by Neil Home

On Borrowed Time (with Peter Peterson)

Also by William strauss

Chance and Circumstance (with Lawrence Baskir)

Reconciliation After Vietnam (with Lawrence Baskir)

Fools on the Hill (with Elaina Newport)

to our parents and our children

Hold your head high and reach the top
Let the world see what you have got!

S CLUB 7, Bring It All Back

ere the Millennial Generation, asserts 15-year-old Tyler Hud-gens of McLean, Virginia. Were special, one of a kind. Its our turn, our time to shine.

Kids Today, answers the buzz page in Newsweek. Theyre just no good. No hardships + no cause = boredom, anger, and idiocy.

Whos rightTyler Hudgens, or Newsweek?

Until very recently, the public has been accustomed to nonstop media chatter about bad kidsfrom mass murderers, hate criminals, and binge drinkers to test failers, test cheaters, drug users, and just all-around spoiled brats. To believe the news, youd suppose our schools are full of kids who cant read in the classroom, shoot one another in the hallways, spend their loose change on tongue rings, and couldnt care less who runs the country. According to a national survey, barely one adult in three thinks that todays kids, once grown, will make the world a better place.

As for Miss Hudgens, where could she look to find allies? She wont findthem among hard-line culture warriors, whose agenda for moral renewal feeds on the supposed depravities of youth, nor among those on the other side, whose plans for expansive government depend upon youths supposed pathologies. She wont find them in business, which has learned how to target the hard youth edge so well that it would rather avoid the risk of trying anything new. Only among Tylers teenage peers will she find an unwavering optimism to match her own. Even there, one can imagine a well-trained note of irony: Were speciali Oh. And on whose pianeti

Yet the central message of this book is that Newsweek is wrong, and Hudgens is right.

A new generation is rising.

Meet the Millennials, born in or after 1982the Babies on Board of the early Reagan years, the Have You Hugged Your Child Today? sixth graders of the early Clinton years, the teens of Columbine, and, this year, the much-touted high school Class of 2000, now invading the nations campuses.

As a group, Millennials are unlike any other youth generation in living memory. They are more numerous, more affluent, better educated, and more ethnically diverse. More important, they are beginning to manifest a wide array of positive social habits that older Americans no longer associate with youth, including a new focus on teamwork, achievement, modesty, and good conduct. Only a few years from now, this can-do youth revolution will overwhelm the cynics and pessimists. Over the next decade, the Millennial Generation will entirely recast the image of youth from downbeat and alienated to upbeat and engagedwith potentially seismic consequences for America.

Look closely at the dramatic changes now unfolding in the attitudes and behaviors of todays youth, the 18-and-unders of the year 2000. The evidence is overwhelmingand just starting to attract notice. In the spring of 2000, newsweekly magazines with good news youth stories marked a possible turning of the media tide.

Thats not all. When you fit these changes into the broader rhythms of American history, you can get a good idea of what kind of adult generation the Millennials are likely to become. You can foresee their future hopes and fears, strengths and weaknesses, as they rise to adulthood and, in time, to power. You can understand how todays kids are on track to become a powerhouse generation, full of technology planners, community shapers, institution builders, and world leaders, perhaps destined to dominate the twenty-first century like todays fading and ennobled G.I. Generation dominated the twentieth. Indeed, Millennials have a solid chance to become Americas next great generation, as celebrated for their collective deeds a hundred years from now as the generation of John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Joe DiMaggio, and Jimmy Stewart is celebrated today.

By that time, no one will recall the Newsweek-style cynical barbs that greeted Tyler Hudgens as she, along with millions of other young people, began setting a new tone for America. And by that time, perhaps Miss Hudgenss sunny opinion of her generation will be widely shared, reinforced by the enduring memories of heroic achievements.