Beleaguered millennials have been blamed for the demise of everything from napkins to marriage, but one scholar says youth-bashing has been an older generation pastime for hundreds of years.
"The idea that young people are ruining society is nothing new," Boston College professor Eric Weiskott, an assistant professor of English who focuses on Medieval literature, writes for the website The Conversation. "I teach medieval English literature, which gives ample opportunity to observe how far back the urge to blame younger generations goes."
Weiskott writes that Thomas Malory groused in the 15th century that kids were ruining sex by being too eager to have it.
And “Millennials might be bankrupting the napkin industry," he writes, "but Chaucer was concerned that younger readers would ruin language itself."
“There’s [always been] rampant worry that society, as we knew it, was crumbling," Weiskott told the The Boston Globe.
"And that the people to blame for that were the youngest generation."
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