Entitlement and selfishness

Much of the general angst directed at the student movement includes rants about how ''kids these days are so selfish. They feel so entitled...''

Don't I know it. I'm a teacher by trade. High school students today actually believe that they have the right to text in class. They get all kinds of upset when you ask them to put their iPhone4 away or you'll have to send them to the office where it will be confiscated for 24 hours. Imagine, 24 hours without a spontaneous Facebook photo update? 24 hours without texting? Dear Lord...

I am with the general public on that one. Kids have been brought up to believe not only that they can get what they want whenever they want, but also that it already belongs to them. Parents, schools, and society-at-large are all at a loss as to what to do with the youth.

I'll admit that this may play a part in why the student movement has not folded up like a cheap tent under public and police pressure. The students do feel entitled to an affordable education. It's not their fault. Our society has been drilling that into their heads for many decades.

Their actions, however, are not selfish. The students currently in Quebec's universities will not bear the brunt of the tuition hikes. However, if they do somehow manage to come out of this with a tuition freeze, they will be the ones who will pay taxes to pay for tomorrow's students. How is this selfish?

The students in the streets are promising to continue the social contract that has existed in Quebec for decades. You pay cheap tuition and high taxes. Unfortunately, it is the boomers and Gen Xers (like me) who profited from cheap university to get all of the good jobs who now do not want to pay the piper. It is hypocritical and shameful. Anyone who attended a Quebec university and paid thousands less than everyone else in the country and who now supports the tuition hike needs to take a long look in the mirror and decide whether they want to fork over $10000 more ($4000 for the first year, when Quebec students are at CEGEP, and $2000 for each subsequent year) in student loans plus interest (a low-ball estimate on the difference between the cost of a Bachelor's degree in Alberta and Quebec in the 1990s), or continue to subsidize higher education to the same degree in Quebec.

Who is selfish here? Middle-class boomers who feel entitled to a good retirement but continue to flood the market because they can't yet afford to pay off the cottage? Gen Xers who profited from low tuition and now don't want to pay back their social debt? The students who just want to go to school and finish up before tuition rates go up? Or those students who go out in the streets every night and risk their own safety because they know that one of their brethren will act like an idiot and break a window thereby giving the police the justification they seek to unleash the hounds?

Sure these students feel entitled to a cheap education. However, they also feel that their own kids are entitled to one too. They are even willing to pay for it. Their actions and stubbornness are born out of entitlement, but they are not selfish. I invite anyone to explain to me logically how these actions are selfish. Of course, such a debate would take a readership... but that's sort of beside the point.