When I was a kid, I, like many other kids, watched Mr. Rogers. Well now Fox News is telling everyone about a a professor from Louisiana State University is claiming that Mr. Rogers ruined an entire generation. What's that? Let me make some quotes here:
The semester was ending, and as usual, students were making a pilgrimage to his office, asking for the extra points needed to lift their grades to A's.
"They felt so entitled," he recalls, "and it just hit me. We can blame Mr. Rogers."
He is saying that today's college students have been told my Mr. Rogers that they are special and therefore entitled to whatever they want. Let's think this through a bit:
Mr. Rogers was broadcast nationally from 1968 - 2001. His peak was from 1985 - 1986. If we assume that a freshman college student is 17 years old, that means that they were born in 1990. He could very well be talking about senior students though. Those students were born around 1986, just as Mr. Rogers' popularity was starting to wane.
I watched Mr. Rogers and I don't think I'm any sort of entitlement queen. My sister watched Mr. Rogers (and actually she was more of a fan than I was) and she doesn't think she's entitled to anything. A lot of people in my generation watched the show. It's not fair to us or to the memory of Mr. Rogers to say that he ruined an entire generation. If that was true, not only would my generation be messed up but so would the generation before us.
It's really sad when people, including Fox News, feel the need to attack a kind man who spent his days caring about kids and trying to teach them how to do the right things in life. Shame on you, Fox News, for spreading this viciously mean story from a professor who is obviously tired of his students. No one wants a bad grade. That doesn't mean they feel they are entitled to it. It means they want to pass the class and, of course, they are going to do whatever they can to get the better grade, the better GPA because it looks better to people in the "real world." Don't blame Mr. Rogers for something that every kid has been doing since they started handing out letter grades in school.