Brilliant Transcendentalist or Feedback-Resistant Intern?

I was talking with a colleague recently about an interesting dynamic with the summer interns in her organization. She described many of them as entitled, feedback-resistant, and perhaps even a little arrogant. Knowing the quality of the intern experience she creates in her company, I couldn't imagine how an aspiring professional could reject help and development so rudely. I jogged down the path of judgment...and then hit a turn in the road. Thoreau.

I had been sixty years on the planet without reading Walden before I decided to address that gap. Not only do I live less than an hour’s drive from the site of his social experiment; Thoreau ignorance is a definite handicap to my Jeopardy! game. Walden was slow going. The turn on my road of judgment came from an insight about old people (for these interns that would be anyone over 30. Puts me in the dead and buried category). Henry David wrote "age is no better qualified as an instructor as youth for it has not profited so much as it has lost. ...I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even ernest advice from my seniors. ...Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it." Well then.

Thoreau was feedback-resistant, embodying a truth that still holds. Each generation is genetically encoded to learn for themselves. There is probably some Darwinian logic to this. I remember the days of trying to help my sons, then teenagers, to learn from my experience and mistakes so they would not have to repeat them. I have come to understand that they do not wish to learn from my mistakes. They wish to make their own. They do not wish to benefit from my experience. They wish to have their own experience. While I may have grasped this intellectually, I have not embraced it emotionally. I expect I can be forgiven; they are my sons, after all, and the drive to meddle in their lives is an occupational hazard of being a mother.

But what of the interns? My annoyed colleague is not their mother; she is a capable and imaginative professional simultaneously working to help her company find and land great talent, while creating a powerful learning experience for young adults in the early stages of career exploration. She only wants to help. How to do this well, understanding that here is career development, an experiment to a great extent untried by them; but it does not avail them that she has tried it?

I don’t have a punchy solution. I'm not clear about this one. Maybe it’s time to go back and reread the work of one of great original teachers: Socrates, whose wisdom was passed along through his greatest student and disciple: Plato. Hmmm. I wonder why Plato wasn't feedback resistant.