Youth Movements in the United States

W HOEVER tries to compare different generations starts with the hopeless disadvantage that he belongs to one of them and cannot really know the other. Before parents can be parents they must have lived a good part of their lives. They remember their experience less as itself than as its consequences. But youth's experience is still itself, with its consequences to come. Days of youth, like days of childhood and of adult living, are ends in themselves, to be lived as fully as possible. But the differentiating factor for youth is that days are satisfying only if they mark progress from the activities and outlook of the child toward the function, responsibilities, and understanding of the successful adult. For a long time in America this adjustment from puberty to manhood was made in satisfactory fashion in what appeared to be an orderly process. There was little necessity for questioning the ideas or the manners of the elders. Youth accepted tradition, and in the traditional way married and moved away to build their own homes and raise their families. At the time the Constitution was drafted in Philadelphia, there was a vast and practically unexplored territory west of the Appalachians which not only presented opportunity, but held, as well, fascinating possibilities for the romantic and adventurous young. If there were no jobs in the home community, an abundance of rich land waited elsewhere to be claimed and homesteaded by the strong and energetic. Forty, fifty, seventy years later, conditions had not materially changed. Even in 1880 the census reported that there were almost as many people engaged in agriculture alone as in all other occupations together

Political science · Youth Development and Social Support · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics

• Undergraduate Society and the College Culture

  Edward Y Hartshorne•American Sociological Review•1943

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