The New York Times, one understands, seeks to reach its audience, and those who casually turn the pages of Thursday Styles are of a sort that enjoys and relates to articles such as this.
How to prepare teens for the world of work? the piece asks. Should parents encourage children to do what they love, or should they push diligence and sacrifice as the road that leads to a successful and rewarding career? Probably more the latter; the author herself writes that her son is "part of a generation whose members are so convinced that work should be personally fulfilling that they see photocopying as beneath them."
This is a well-documented "millennial" attitude. (Sometimes, though, it's well-founded. Some of the most talented recent college graduates make loads of money because that's what they're worth to the companies that employ them. Why on earth would they deign to make photocopies when they could trot across town and get another job at which they don't make photocopies?)
Conspicuously absent from the Times piece is the role colleges play in youngsters' work preparedness. I'm still amazed at how??ill-equipped for office life I felt after receiving my undergrad degree, and I imagine the adjustment is even more difficult for some grads, especially those who go in for stuff like this. (A particularly noxious "art" project by a Yale student.)
It's easy to dismiss it as culture war fodder. But it makes a point--this selfish, relativistic stuff is eschewed in the real world, and yet it happens all the time (albeit not to such a repulsive degree), and is often applauded,??on college campuses.??K-12 schools have their problems--lots of them--but at least they enshrine certain codes of conduct into the school day. In this way, when it comes to preparing students for the work world, college can actually be a regression from high school. No matter how much self-esteem parents spoon-feed their kids, it's nothing compared to the??all-about-me culture that's the norm at many universities.
Update: Turns out the Yale art project was a hoax.??As Yuval Levin wrote, it's an "abhorrent and disgusting one."