The Passion of Youth Activism?

Feb 19, 2008 - 11:30 AM PST

Recently I was speaking with a high school principal in the Midwest who has been at his job for over 30 years. I asked him about the biggest changes he has seen in young people. He replied quickly that young people today are a lot easier to control. I asked him to clarify and he said that in the 70’s the majority of the students disliked authority and did whatever they could to not comply, but these days he only faces one or two students like that a year. He said back then they constantly had to deal with protests, walk outs and other anti-authority issues, but today kids seem to be more concerned with the Internet and not so much coming together in person to fight for a cause.

The conversation really got me thinking. Could it be that the Internet is taking away from protests and rallies for different causes? It is somewhat true that if you go to most anti-war protests these days the crowd is definitely from the 60’s and 70’s generation. I have talked to a lot of people from that generation and they seem to agree with the principal. However, when I ask them how effective their protests were in stopping wars and promoting other social causes they don’t have many answers. So it’s possible that young people today don’t see that as an effective way to change policies. It’s also entirely possible that students labeled as trouble makers and defying authority today are also placed on watch lists for risk of blowing up the school or carrying out Columbine and Virginia Tech style attacks, rather than having valid complaints with the way things are run. Also, don’t forget that the high schools that walked out for immigration in Los Angeles organized their walkouts over MySpace and Facebook.

I am not sure where I stand on this issue, but I do think it brings about some interesting concerns. I do feel the Internet and joining your favorite Facebook action group can limit us in some ways from showing a forceful human presence that fights for what we believe in. But it also allows us to connect with people from all over the world much quicker than we ever could to communicate and coordinate how we feel on a larger scale. I do think young people today are not nearly as defiant for the issues they feel passionate about as they were in the past, but I feel that is a direct result of how schools learned to crack down and discourage that behavior rather than people not caring. I go to high schools all of the time and there are more rules than ever before. More evacuation codes, more absurd state and national tests, more codes of conduct than were ever present in the generations of our parents.

After a lot of thought on this issue I think it’s important to keep in mind that whenever we see changes in any generation we have to understand the actions from the generations that came before them. Harry Truman said the only future we don’t know is the past we haven’t learned. I guarantee you the principal I was talking to wasn’t marching for much in his younger days, and was one of his generation that enacted the codes that made it harder for anyone to do that in the future.


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