A few weeks ago, I overheard a teacher friend complaining to his colleagues: "I don't know how to deal with these students, they pretend to engage in discussion without respecting my status as a teacher: they would like to be able to discuss things with me on an almost equal footing, it's unacceptable".
Unacceptable ... but unavoidable!
This is now the rule with these students, caught between a Generation Y - both ready to question the authority of their teachers and employers, but just as ready to accept existing models when they can turn them to their advantage, in a very opportunistic way - and a rising Generation Z, which we still find hard to envisage what it will be or can be, but which is no longer rebellious, but simply 'outside the box'.
As a result, our teacher navigates between students who are subject to a hierarchy whose forms they still respect, the better to circumvent it, and others who deny any form of hierarchy because the very notion escapes their understanding. And they cling to obsolete signs (= some still accept their superiority without fundamentally respecting it) for the sake of convenience rather than trying to discern the weak signals (= their power is becoming more fragile every day, the harbinger of a new society).
And therein lies the dilemma for teachers, but also for today's managers, faced with societal upheavals that are as rapid as they are violent: every day they try to convince themselves that the system (not to say the mould) within which they were trained and subsequently flourished; that this hierarchical system still works ... and that the rebellion of some is merely the exception that proves the rule.
But this exception, rather than being an isolated case, foreshadows what tomorrow will bring: not an egalitarian society (which would mean that the idea of any superiority or authority of some over others could still have meaning, and that it could be fought) but a totally flat society (because such notions of superiority or authority can have no meaning for individuals born with the social Web).
Everything becomes relative, all certainty disappears: there's no point complaining, it's "just the way it is"; it's better to adapt to it in order to face the challenges ahead.
