Advancing the Debate around ‘Millennials’

The singularity of the generation of students entering the education system today has excitedrecent attention of educators and animated debates among education analysts. Yet, theanalytical inquiry of the millennial literature discloses a clear mismatch between theconfidence with which assertions about the young generation are made and the evidence forsuch assertions. It seems that much of the debate about the special educational needs of thesepeople has been stimulated by Marc Prensky’s initial remarks on ‘digital natives’ and ‘digitalimmigrants’ since 2001. Termed ‘millennials’, ‘digital natives’ or the ‘Net generation’, theseyoung people are said to have been absorbed by technology, which imbued them with refinedtechnical skills, sophisticated needs and learning preferences for which traditional educationis unprepared. For Prensky (2001) today’s students are different in that they think and processinformation fundamentally differently from their predecessors. It is argued in this paper thatthese pretentious claims and ambitious generalizations made education commentators aboutthis generation need more empirical evidence before they could function as the starting pointfor any prospective reforms of the education system, in our country, at least