The Class of 2014: What these kids don't know

Beloit College's Mindset List reminds us that today's college freshmen have never used wristwatches, dialed a phone, or written in cursive -- that's not all they've missed out

Beloit College has published its Mindset List for the Class of 2014, an annual tradition designed to capture the "cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall" and to make the rest of us all feel extremely old and out of touch.

As New York Times blogger Nick Bilton notes:

The list was first developed in 1998 by Tom McBride and Ron Nief, faculty members at Beloit, with the goal of helping the school’s professors avoid "dated references" and understand the perspective of the next generation.

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This particular mindset captures the generation of souls born in 1992, whose fingers never touched a rotary dial, who've never written a paper in cursive, who never had to choose from less than 100 channels of television, and who have never owned a watch because they get the time of day from their cell phones.

This got me thinking about my own mindset and those of my contemporaries -- at least, the ones who are still alive and not drooling into their pillows at the Bidawee Retirement Community and Knitting Sweatshop.

Life looks amazingly different now than it did just a decade or two ago. Remember when ...