Analysis Of David Brooks The Next Ruling Class: Meet The Organization Kid

The article “The Next Ruling Class: Meet the Organization Kid” by David Brooks, published by the Atlantic in 2001, presents a glistening, positive view of the merits of a select sample of young people in our society: highly privileged “millennials”. According to Brooks, these “future leaders” have lives which are highly organized, with time carefully choreographed to ensure future success in life. For example, today’s elite kids “are likely to spend their afternoons and weekends shuttling from one skill-enhancing activity to the next.” Millennials don’t hang out in neighborhood parks with buddies. Instead, they “lead lives that are structured, supervised, and stuffed with enrichment.”
Brooks presents an overview of the frantic fast paced lifestyle of America’s future elite, (those who will end up at prestigious schools like Princeton). A typical youth wakes up at dawn and then cycles through a mind-boggling succession of activities such as classes, study groups, volunteer work, prayer session, and exercise. These kids are so highly booked they go so far as to make appointments to socialize with one another. Millennials don’t read newspapers or follow national politics. Even romance, takes a back seat to achievement oriented activities. One student is quoted as saying “It’s a basic question of hours in the

He quotes William Strauss, the author of Millennials Rising as saying America’s young are “generally a hardworking, cheerful, earnest, and deferential group”. Brooks maintains that today’s elite college students are rule followers who “don’t live in that age of rebellion or alienation”. He says that these students now live in an age when the battles of militant feminists, theological conflicts, and the Reagan years are over. Millennials, according to Brooks, live in a “just world which rewards high achievers who ‘play by its rules” and respect the “fundamental order of the