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Downtown Toronto, May 22, 2008

Days to commencement: 145
In the span of a single smoke break, Julien Hernadez's 18-year-old life falls apart.

He has been cooped up inside West End Alternative School in Toronto all day, and the idea of sucking a butt has grown throughout the afternoon from a dull roar to a bomb detonating over and over in his brain. He can't think of anything else.

By 2:30, he caves and sneaks out into the warm spring day. At least it isn't pot. In Grades 9 and 10, he had nearly flunked out of school because of his lunchtime toking habit. He is over that now.

He barely puts lips to filter before he notices the guys in bandanas. They come up from behind him and now they have him circled. Six, he thinks, but he can't be sure. It is all a blur. There are knives and a gun that Julien thinks looks strikingly similar to a Desert Eagle, the .50-calibre hand cannon he's often used to blow away terrorists in Counterstrike, his favourite video game. He isn't about to mess with that.

He offers up his iPod and cellphone. The thieves bounce before Julien realizes the gun is actually an oversized air pistol. Otherwise, he would have put up a fight. The phone and MP3 player aren't just gadgets to him. How is he supposed to check Facebook updates or text his friends? And how is he supposed to finish year-end school projects if he can't rock out to Hedley, Coldplay or Michael Jackson?

"I'm so stuck right now," he tells me four days after the theft. "I can say, metaphorically, that music is my life. So not having an iPod is garbage. I feel like the day is 42 hours long."

THE 'DUMBEST' GENERATION?

In someone like Julien Hernandez, self-professed "generation" experts might think they had found a poster boy. According to these pundits, kids these days are narcissistic, lazy, arrogant slaves to technology. They are perhaps the most maligned crop of youth since the "slackers" of Gen X.

I'm a decade older, but I know how they feel. Even before I had learned to talk, I was considered selfish. Before I had learned the alphabet, I was called illiterate. Before I had learned where babies come from, I was supposedly self-obsessed. While my friends and I were sucking our toes and wetting our Pampers, scribes were despairing over our self-important ways.

I know it now because I have read in old issues of Time and Newsweek about our overprotective parents sticking "Baby on Board" stickers on their new minivans, hovering over our every move and buying us rooms full of Cabbage Patch Dolls and Care Bears.

The products of such coddling could only be the most spoiled, sheltered, entitled generation ever. The fate of the "echo boomers" - those of us born from 1976 to 1990 - was apparently sealed.

Now, 10 years after I graduated from high school, the labelling has begun anew. One needn't look beyond the title of one recent tome - The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future - to get the gist.

Certainly, Julien and his fellow "post-echo boomers," those born after 1989, are a new breed. Today's 18-year-old cannot remember a time before the Internet, making them "digital natives."

They were born after the Berlin Wall fell and were still in grade school the day two 767s smacked into the World Trade Center.

Rather than pigeonhole them, as earlier scribes did to my generation, I wanted to meet them, to investigate whether they truly are so shallow and unprepared to face the future. So for five months, since spring exam season, I have been visiting their classes, listening to their joys and woes and trying to grasp their view of the world. On Tuesday, the same day as the Canadian federal election, they have their commencement ceremony, when they come back to collect their diplomas.

In particular, I focused on four students enduring this anxious, transitional period of their lives - Vanessa Gold, a student-council president; Dale Wang, a numbers whiz and perpetual volunteer; Chantel Arce, a volleyball ace; and Julien, a kid struggling to get back on track.

All have attended Harbord Collegiate in downtown Toronto, a school that formed many prominent Canadian citizens across the arts, politics, science and business - politician and diplomat Stephen Lewis; Charles Best, co-discoverer of insulin; filmmaker David Cronenberg; and Loblaws founder and philanthropist Garfield Weston.

If any Canadian school could serve as a weather vane for a generation, I figured, it was this one.

Days to commencement: 141
Vanessa Gold bounds along the faded orange floors of Harbord Collegiate, her flowing summer dress barely keeping up. Green lockers line each wall, plastered with signs from students campaigning to replace her as Student Activity Council president: One says, "Vote Yasmin Parker 4 Prez"; one winks at the movie Borat, boasting the candidate will "make benefit glorious nation of SAC"; many give Web addresses.

Vanessa smiles and nods to half the students she passes. A weekend in the sun has highlighted the freckles on her nose. She rounds a corner and beams at the sight of a brown-haired girl seated against the wall.

"Vanessa!" shrieks the girl, Martha Nelson. "You're still alive."

"Yeah, I'm still alive. Sorry about this morning."

"That's okay, we'll go tomorrow."

The girls hug. They hit the gym together most mornings to keep fit, with prom a month away. It's their thing. But Vanessa was awake much of the night fretting over year-end projects, impending exams, her long-distance relationship, her conditional acceptance to McGill University, prom-dress shopping, summer jobs, the council, all that. When her purple Sanyo cellphone started blaring at 6 a.m., she wasn't able to raise her golden curls off the pillow.

"How was your weekend?" Martha asks.

"Soooo weird," Vanessa says, explaining that she bumped into someone she knew from Grade 8. "We were best friends. And then he totally wanted it to become romantic. It was awkward. So we stopped hanging out. Seeing him this weekend, I don't know, it was sooo weird."

Weird, not amorous. But it did dredge up thoughts of her boyfriend, who is stuck in Northern Ontario all summer, tree planting. They aren't sure what they will do come September when he goes to Dalhousie in Halifax and she to McGill. "I have to see him before I go to Montreal," she says. "One more thing to the list. I'm so crazy busy now."

Days to commencement: 140
Later that week, one of Vanessa's old classmates is lumbering out the front door of Toronto police's 14 Division, a black kid wearing a flat-brimmed Detroit Tigers cap, a grey skull-and-crossbones bandana, braided hair and thunderbolt earrings. Julien has come to 14 Division to identify his robbers.

Losing his cell turned out to be a nightmare. His whole life was on there, including snapshots and video clips that shouldn't have ended up in the wrong hands. "There was, like, videos on that phone that they're not supposed to see - you know, with my girlfriend and me, um, doing stuff," he says.

"Okay, it was a bit stupid to do, putting things like that on my phone," he admits. "But now these guys who stole it, they've been calling my girlfriend, saying, 'You're sexy, we should really go out to a movie or something.' Which really pissed me right off. If it involves me, that's cool, but my girlfriend had nothing to do with it."

He can feel his focus on school slipping. Because of his grades, Julien was recently booted out of Harbord Collegiate, just down the street from West End Alternative. But he has designs on being readmitted. His master plan: Graduate from Harbord; attend chefs school at George Brown College; work a few years in the trade and then venture to one of the famous culinary schools of France. Meanwhile, prom is looming and he wants to be there. It isn't looking good.

"I really want to go to college, but, you know, I smoked weed all through Grade 9. I fucked around. People always told me, 'You fuck around, you'll be sorry.' And I am. But now I don't smoke or drink and, you know, I'm serious about my education."

His new outlook on life has cost him some friends. "My black friends, they call me 'whitewashed,' " Julien says. "Just because I like rock and every second word out of my mouth isn't 'nigger' or 'bitch.' Why should I have to live up to some black standard that is the epitome of ignorance? Why can't I just be my own person?"

Thanks to the Internet, he feels he can. His all-time favourite teacher is the one he calls Mr. Google. He doesn't need lectures or classrooms, he says, because he can ask Mr. Google and learn everything he wants to know. "I mean, I can learn to speak languages off of YouTube. I'm learning to play the guitar right now off of YouTube. I can look up anything and in a few minutes know more about any subject than my teacher does. Why should I listen to them?"

STAYING CONNECTED

Vanessa Gold and Julien Hernandez should be a study in contrasts. She is student-council president, a brain and an ebullient leader who can't walk a stretch of hallway without hugging half a dozen people. He is flirting with dropout status. Yet they both come across as smart, polite and brimming with optimism.

Classmates of mine who were in Julien's situation became bitter dropouts and have since done time in prison or rehab. Society cut them off, so they cut themselves off from the world, ignoring current affairs, eschewing books, halting all curiosity, arresting all development. But the numbers of such untethered youths are shrinking, according to Statistics Canada. In 1991, nearly one in five people 20 to 24 had no high-school diploma. By 2005, it had fallen to one in 10.

Days to commencement: 138
"Guys, guys! Calm down, please!"

Dale Wang stands at the front of Harbord's geography room, trying to interest a bunch of students in their Key Club activities. Through the windows, they can see sun glaring off cars parked along Euclid Avenue. Girls decked out in bug-eye sunglasses and guys in muscle shirts bask on the school's front lawn. It's the first summery day of the year. In here, there is the chalkboard, shelves of dusty National Geographics and a heavy smell of peanut butter. It's a tough crowd.

"This is our last meeting of the year," Dale yells, "so we have a few events to talk about before the summer." Two girls start singing.

Over six feet tall, Dale has a tendency to look unsure of himself, often adjusting his glasses, smiling nervously and then adjusting his glasses some more. But eventually the club begins to pay attention, raising their hands when Dale asks for volunteers for a Heart and Stroke Foundation marathon, an urban tree-planting program and a fundraiser for spinal-cord research.

By every measure but age, Dale is an adult. He lives alone in the upstairs apartment of a house he co-owns with his father, a Montreal businessman who comes to visit his son every month or two. His mother died of a heart condition when Dale was just 2, shortly before he and his father emigrated to Toronto from Beijing. Five tenants live in the house. Dale is their landlord.

But right now, schoolwork dominates his thoughts. He plans to attend the University of Western Ontario and then the Richard Ivey School of Business. "Ivey is looking for above 80 in English and above 90 in math," he says. "They might accept an 86 overall average. Might."

Life is full of tests these days - the upcoming vote for valedictorian, job interviews at The Gap and Banana Republic, the last dragon-boat race of the season. And then there's the wild card, his dad, who often phones needing urgent computer help: "My dad says that if I don't type things out for him, we'll go broke."

Dale has been thinking of selling the house to help finance university. "We'll have to get all the tenants out of there," he says, laughing somewhat anxiously. "I'm not looking forward to that."

DISAPPEARING CHILDHOOD?

In university, I despised Neil Postman. I had to read several of the American media critic's books, including The Disappearance of Childhood, for first-year communications classes. All he seemed to write about was how two of my favourite things in life - TV and video games - were causing social decay. I switched majors.

But meeting Dale Wang, and walking the halls of Harbord, I couldn't help but see signs of the world Mr. Postman foresaw in 1982, where kids exposed to television and other electronic media would mature before their time. The students were holding fundraisers for victims of the Sichuan earthquake. They were putting up posters demanding an end to Guantanamo Bay. There was talk of United Nations millennium-development goals, the environment, the genocide in Darfur and a city decision to close some public pools.

Fifty-five per cent of Canadians aged 15 to 24 volunteer an average of 139 hours each a year, according to Statistics Canada, higher than any other age group. Four out of every five in that age bracket follow the news on a daily basis.

Many demographic experts have contradicted Mr. Postman's work, arguing that this generation is doomed to bumble through life, dependent on their domineering, "helicopter" parents. But what he realized, even before e-mail, Facebook or instant messaging, was that electronic media might come to nurture us just as much as Ma and Pa.

Still, he saw this dwindling of childhood as inherently negative. Tuned in and turned on, the Harbordites don't make it look so bad.

Days to commencement: 133
In one corner of the Student Activity Council room, a chintzy boom box is blaring tinny beats: That girl is so dangerous/ That girl is a bad girl/ I've seen her type before ... Twenty or so students are scattered around, nodding their heads to the music. Vanessa is goofing around on a couch with friends Marshall Zuehrn and Marsha Nelson. You wouldn't know that final exams start in mere days.

At the other end of the room, I've buttonholed Chantel Arce. It has been hard to arrange meetings with her. Maybe she is busy, or doesn't really want to talk about herself to a newspaper. Or maybe she's worried that I have been talking to Vanessa, who says they used to be friends, until Vanessa "drank a few times and [Chantel] didn't like it."

But right now Chantel is the picture of calm and kindness. She's looking forward to attending McMaster University for life sciences. "Right now," she says, "my average is in the mid-90s. Yeah, so I really don't have to worry too much."

I'm surprised: When I ask other students about her, they mention her volleyball prowess or her looks, never her smarts. Julien told me he used to sit behind her in class and call her "gorgeous" until she would swivel in her seat and tell him to screw off. On her Facebook profile page, in the space to identify "Religious Views," Chantel has written: "Roman Catholic ... but when needed the volleyball gods help out."

In fact, her Facebook page was so stereotypically teeny-bopper that I started imagining her as the catty Rachel McAdams character in the film Mean Girls - manipulative, conniving, self-centred.

Here's how she listed her interests: "Volleyball, soccer, basketball, field hockey, BOYS, tv, movies, BOYS, telling Gui (my bitch) what to do, watching 300 hot men run around, baseball (managing the team and the game itself isn't that bad) ... did i mention boys?"

But Facebook pages can be deceiving.

"I know this is going to sound really weird," she says. "But, like, anything below a 70 is a 'fail' to me. I've always been pushed really hard. If I get 99 per cent on something, my mom will ask what happened to the other 1 per cent, just as a joke kind of thing."

Her fellow students call that the "Asian fail," referring (tactlessly) to the frequent high academic drive of Asian students. Chantel isn't Asian - the Arces are Ecuadoreans who arrived here about 20 years ago and now run an imported-goods shop. But it's the same idea. I've had her all wrong.

UNCIVIL LIBERTIES

Some parents and educators get over-exercised by Facebook profiles such as Chantel's. Among all the bad grammar, obscenities and shameless networking, they see the downfall of Western society.

In The Dumbest Generation, published in May, Emory University English professor Mark Bauerlein paints a depressing picture of the results. "I've seen a great decay among students over the last eight years or so," he tells me in an interview. "I do see a decay in verbal skills. Their vocabulary is less descriptive and stylized. There is great amount of homogeneity in writing."

What follows, he argues, will be a culturally illiterate population and a weakened democracy. It's Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, with information and communication overload in the place of narcotics.

Such suspicion toward Facebook nearly got me kicked out of Harbord. One day I sent a message to more than a dozen students asking for input on this story. Two of them reported to their principal, Rod Fuentes, that some guy claiming to be a reporter for The Globe and Mail was contacting them. Apparently, I had become an online predator.

Mr. Fuentes, who had granted me access up to that point, barred me from school grounds until we could discuss it. I was being called to the principal's office for the first time since making faces at a teacher in Grade 4. He invited two vice-principals in, closed his door and unleashed the principal-speak: "Frankly, Patrick, I'm a little concerned..." He said I had scared students by trying to contact them through "their technology."

"Wait a minute," I said. "Their technology?"

Facebook was invented almost five years ago by an American much closer to my own age, as a way for university students to network. The whole high-school phenomenon came later. I was about to dismiss Mr. Fuentes's concerns as those of an older person demonizing technology because he can't keep up with it. But then he explained.

In recent months, he had discovered that several subscribers to the "Harbord Network" on Facebook didn't attend the school. "We don't know who they are," he said. As well, several students, including Chantel, had been devastated by online-identity theft. And online bullying is always an issue. (What would happen if Julien's attackers put those pictures of his girlfriend on the Internet?)

We talked it through, and Mr. Fuentes lifted my suspension. I think my brush with authority spooked Chantel, however. She stopped returning my e-mails.

Days to commencement: 116
The Hummer limos are parked three deep. Guys step out and adjust their tuxes. Girls wear chiffon, silk and sequins. They're all self-conscious, rubbing their forearms, darting their eyes from side to side. Some things don't change.

Exams are over, but kids are still waiting for final marks. Chantel looks nervous in her little black dress, even though she probably aced her courses. Later tonight, she will be crowned prom queen.

Dale fidgets, adjusts his glasses and makes James Bond poses in his tux. His plans to stay out late at karaoke don't jibe well with the dragon-boat regatta scheduled tomorrow.

Wearing a white dress and a masquerade mask, Vanessa says exams were a breeze. And she has learned that she'll be presented the school's Optima award - for "leadership, moral influence and scholarship" - at October's commencement ceremony. But she takes more pride in the grad prank she and Marshall cooked up.

On the last day of school, they planted dozens of cheap alarm clocks all over the school. When they all went off simultaneously, "a few teachers went flip-shit," Vanessa says. "They were running around with these armloads of alarm clocks. They wanted to call the SWAT team. They thought it was a bomb. It was the best grad prank ever."

Twenty minutes away, Julien is at work, making egg rolls. The catch-up classes didn't work. He won't be donning a tux this year.

Days to commencement: 52
The blue Ford is no looker. In fact, Vanessa says, it's "a piece of crap." But it's big. Somehow Vanessa has jammed virtually everything she owns into the car for the five-hour trip to McGill.

She can't wait. All summer, she has been working two jobs, as a cashier and a server. She started every day at 10:45 in the morning and didn't climb into bed until 2 a.m. She had little choice. The average Canadian student forks over about $5,500 a year in tuition these days, and even though Vanessa's parents, a freelance editor and a holistic medicine practitioner, will be helping out, a first-year student's lifestyle doesn't come cheap.

"As you know," she says coyly, "the drinking age in Quebec is 18."

Days to commencement: 14
Julien Hernandez has a new cellphone. A BlackBerry, to be exact. And no, he says, there's nothing X-rated on it. "I learned my lesson," he says.

We're hanging out at a Second Cup near his house along the St. Clair streetcar line. He strode in immaculately dressed as usual, matching white shoes with a white hoodie and a white Tigers hat.

He has been busting his ass as a prep cook all summer for $8.75 an hour, and he has had enough. "They think they can get away with paying me that just because I'm 18," he says. At one point, he considered joining the army reserves - he still remembers 9/11 and how freaked out his elementary-school teacher looked that morning when she turned on the classroom radio. But the idea didn't go over well with his family. "My dad said he'd kill me if I did."

So he has kept cooking while watching friends skip town for jobs or college. "It's hard, you know. All I'm thinking about now is what's the fastest way out of high school."

Julien knows he's too smart to be lurking around his old neighbourhood as a high-school dropout. He talks enthusiastically about Barack Obama, the listeriosis outbreak, classic rock and the evils of Black Entertainment Television. Not Canadian politics, though: He can't name any candidates, although he recognizes the faces.

No matter. "I'm thinking of writing a book. It'll be about my life as a black teenager - only I'll tell them I'm not black, that we're living in a new generation, a post-racial generation where I can listen to AC/DC and white kids can listen to Lil' Wayne."

I laugh. "Don't you need a little more experience before you write an autobiography?"

"No. See, our generation grows up so much faster. We're exposed to everything online or on TV: bad language, beheadings, porn, people getting shot, whatever. We grew up with this stuff. You can't shelter us. I don't want to say older people are stupid or anything, but I've been exposed to a lot more than a lot of them."

Neil Postman could not have said it better.

Days to commencement: 15
"I was barfing all over last night," brags the kid leaning over Dale Wang's study table.

"Really?" Dale says.

"Oh yeah. I'm having such a bad hangover right now. I got up at like 5:30 in the morning and I was like, eghhhhh, all over the place. Everywhere. Swear to god. Worst experience of my life."

Dale and I are sitting amid a cacophony of students clicking laptops, sipping Tim Hortons and shouting "Ohmigod!" and "I don't get this question at all. At all!" Autumn is stalking the University of Western Ontario campus in London, Ont., though you wouldn't know it by all the Lululemon shorts and halter tops strutting across the leaf-scattered lawns.

At first, I couldn't find Dale. Walking past dozens of tables, I couldn't spot his bespectacled face or gangly gestures anywhere. Then a long arm shot out of the crowd, waving.

"Dale?" I said.

"Hello."

"I barely recognize you."

"Yes. No glasses any more."

But it's not just the glasses. There's a new confidence in his face. In fact, he doesn't have much time for me, with his friends gathered all around him asking for his help with economics homework.

The fingernails of his left hand are painted black and white, the work of a group of girls who pounced one night when he was asleep. He has a brand-new white laptop. During club week, he volunteered for six groups. We were talking about his new life when the barfer stopped by to share his condition. Several more friends stopped to chat too.

Quite obviously, Dale is in heaven.

A HERO GENERATION?

And that's the thing about these generational diagnoses: People change. The boomers evolved beyond the image of tripped-out hippies dancing nude and promoting free love. The Gen Xers were considered low-ambition layabouts until they delivered us the Internet. And Generation FaceTube undoubtedly will grow beyond the narcissism and arrogance ascribed to them and surprise an older generation of grumps.

William Strauss and Neil Howe, writers who are party responsible for the modern obsession with generation speculation, think so. Their 1991 book, Generations, outlined a narrative that starts in 1584 and winds through the G.I. Generation, the Silent Generation, the boomers and Gen X.

Early this decade, they predicted the coming of a new "hero generation," similar to the one that built dams during the Great Depression and went on to win the Second World War. Such a generation, they say in Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, arrives cyclically following an "upheaval in values and culture," and "passes through childhood during a time of decaying civil habits, ebbing institutional trust and resurgent individualism."

Less-optimistic demographers and historians scoff: "I see no evidence that today's young people feel much attachment to duty or group cohesion," writes San Diego State University psychologist Jean M. Twenge, the author of the scornful 2006 tome Generation Me. They "have been consistently taught to put their own needs first and to focus on feeling good about themselves," she adds.

Before I left Dale, he began explaining to me the minutiae of the recent credit crisis. It occurred to me that an "upheaval of values and culture" may well be upon us. If so, Dale Wang is on top of it.

Days to commencement: 12
Once outside the Harbord bubble, Chantel Arce is tough to track down. We agree to meet at her new school, McMaster, but when I show up she's nowhere to be seen on the rainy campus. Maybe this generation is too damn self-important, after all.

Irritated and wet, I wander into the library. There, sitting at a study table, is Chantel. Her books are open. Her brow is furrowed. She appears to be tutoring a friend.

Of all the dubious labels her generation has garnered, "narcissistic" is the stickiest. Not for Chantel. The girl whose Facebook page is all about boys and volleyball would much rather help a friend than spout off to the newspaper. I leave before she sees me, all my annoyance replaced with a strange sort of pride.

Days to commencement: 11
The McGill football team is stinking up the field. Down by three touchdowns to Laval, the players have given up. High in the bleachers, Vanessa Gold has not. She's yelling, screaming, jumping up and down and pounding a red, plastic bucket as part of the ragtag McGill fight band.

The transition here has not been easy. For one thing, she and her boyfriend have broken up. "We had been dating for over a year and a half," she wrote to me, "and anyone who knows us can tell you how ridiculously perfect our relationship was. ... I'm telling you it was unreal. We decided to end it because we both believe that ending on a happy note is more likely to allow for a possible future relationship. Neither of us wanted to be 'tied down' in university, especially in first year. ... He is still my best friend."

As the game wears on, the band starts to seem more interested in beer than cheer. It's Friday night, after all. By the time the teams come back after halftime, Vanessa and the rest of them have vamoosed to parties all over town.

LIFTOFF

This Tuesday, as the rest of Canada goes to the voting booths, the Harbord graduating class of 2008 will gather, adorned in caps and gowns. Awards will be presented, speeches delivered, tears shed.

Afterward, Dale will head back to London, destined for a career in business. Chantel will rush to Hamilton to study for midterms. Vanessa will amble back to Montreal, entirely unsure of where she wants to be by the time her next graduation rolls around.

Of the four, Chantel is the only one with firm plans to vote. "The Conservatives have pretty much screwed up the country," she says, and lists off all the policies she objects to, including tax cuts and the erosion of public health care.

By contrast, Vanessa tells me: "I really haven't been paying too much attention" to the election. "I really don't see how it affects me."

As for Julien, he will just aim for the next commencement ceremony. He's not bitter - as one quotation posted on his Facebook page says, "Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die."

For him, the clock resets: Days to commencement: 365.

Patrick White is a reporter in Globe Life.