Age Discrimination

Starting in what I experienced as an example to make a point, I pluck from the past. When in my forties and in the teaching business, I felt age discrimination. In September, new teachers, in their first appointments, arrived on the scene and the school's teens on meeting them, anticipated that with their new "cool" teachers, they would become friends with benefits. The new young teachers were, indeed, cool. They were attractive, light-hearted and minglers with the kids who weren't that much younger than they were. They rewarded their students with such as class pizza dates and out-of-class events. I adored watching these new enthusiastic teachers but at the same time secretly felt dated and  envious of their freshness and popularity among the students. I wished I could be as "cool" as they, but I had my job to do just as they did, and my age was my age. As it turned out, when the teens got a little too friendly and the young teachers had to back off, reality naturally levelled the process and while it wasn't a them-and-us situation, classroom relationships developed into understanding it on a more professional footing. The age discrimination wasn't theirs; it belonged to me and I let it bother me. In hindsight, it was foolish but it was present, and I suspect, in some form, it always will be in schools and other work situations.  But age discrimination of elders over youth, goes the other way, too. This morning on a radio broadcast I listened to a young man who spoke of the world belonging to the young and that elders in his field didn't understand them. He felt that they failed younger folk. He said that he was developing a program for youth because older people were not doing a good enough job of relating to the young in his subject of interest. My first  reaction was did this young person know how he became knowledgeable in his field? Who exposed him to the facts? Did he not realize that experience provides the ground work for continuing research. It's how the human race progresses. There are mistakes and misconceptions but science goes from what is to what's next and more. Youth discriminates when it decries older experience as detrimental and outdated. Of course it is and it's the job of new information to become newer just as the elders learned by those who went before them. Youth, too, will become the elders eventually and what they do, will be improved upon.  It's the way the human race moves forward and onward. And it is natural and has nothing about it to criticise or be ungrateful for or to blame. Furthermore, why does age have anything to do with it when some of the oldest people in time, have been the most progressive artists, inventors and innovators? We all, young and old,  must work together to make our home, this precious world, a better place.