Youth--The Oppressed Majority

To most adults who read about it, the analogy must have seemed preposterous. Here was John Lindsay, the mayor of New York, actually telling a group of Princeton undergraduates last November that they were like black youngsters in a ghetto. "The distance between these groups--educationally, economically, socially--has certain psychological bridges," he said. "The frustration of the sophomore alienated from his university by its size and impersonality is not very much different from the resentment of the ghetto youth who is alienated from his city because its opportunities and rewards are foreclosed to him. Both suffer the malady of powerlessness--powerlessness in the face of huge, authoritarian institutions that routinely cause fundamental dislocations in the lives of the people they affect each day."

The young powerless? According to Al Capp, J. Edgar Hoover, editorial writers for The New York Times and practically any parent, the trouble with the young--the poor dutifully excepted--is that they have too much power. They are self-indulgent, willful and more disrespectful of their elders than any previous generation of adolescents. Accordingly, they must be curbed and prepared for "responsibility," for unfortunately, they will inherit the earth. The more the young rebel, the more firmly they must be suppressed; for is it not the obligation of their elders to make certain that the young grow up into replicas of themselves? If the young do not, what meaning has there been in the lives of their parents? "We must die," say the old, not really believing it, "but at least the values we lived by will remain."

And it is there that the dissident among the young make their attack: the values of those responsible for society as it is. In December 1966, Ray Mungo, then editor of the student-run Boston University News, wrote, under the head "Black Christmas": "We are nothing if not an educational institution, and yet our graduates tend to fall, unquestioningly, into the same narrow sphere of exclusive self-interest in which most men move. And even this self-interest does not pervade the self; we know ourselves as little as we know others.... So we do not examine our own sexuality, we won't study the history of China and we're unspeakably cold to murder by the thousands in Vietnam. We have ceased functioning as human beings capable of some sympathies beyond our own offices...our Beauty is an idealized Beauty rather than the one we'd joyously climb on and inseminate."

That's one skirmish in the generational war. Others of the young do not attack at all but try to remain private. "It goes beyond your class or the color of your skin," a wiry Indian girl from Maine declares. "It's the color of your mind they want to control. They want you preprocessed before you can have what they call autonomy. But they won't get me." Lines are continually being drawn by the young to preserve what they can of their youth--ways of dress, of wearing hair, of music, of speech. But most learn that in terms of making the most basic decisions about their lives, they are indeed without power. "Adolescents," writes sociologist EdgarZ. Friedenberg, "are among the last social groups in the world to be given the full 19th Century Colonial treatment."

One way to measure this society's attitude toward the young is their status in the courts. In many states, juveniles accused of breaking the law are deprived of such essential elements of due process as the right to appeal, access to records, the right to trial by jury and even the right to make bail. The rationale is that the proceedings are not "criminal" in nature, since they take place in a civil court and besides are intended to "protect" the young. However, juvenile courts do have the power to confine the adolescent or administer other punishment. And as many as one fourth of the young who are confined are placed in adult jails.

Some progress toward applying constitutional guarantees to juveniles was made last May in a landmark decision by the Supreme Court, which ruled that the young must at least be given notification of the right to counsel, who, if necessary, will be appointed by the court; the right to confront and cross-examine witnesses, including complainants; warning of the privilege against self-incrimination and the right to remain silent; and timely notice of the charges against them. The case before the Court involved a 15-year-old accused of making obscene phone calls. The juvenile-court judge, without informing the adolescent of his constitutional rights and without giving him a chance to confront his accuser, sent him away for six years to a state training school. The sentence was upheld by Arizona's highest court, then was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Although Justice Abe Fortas, speaking for the majority, noted that "it would, indeed, be surprising if the privilege against self-incrimination were available to hardened criminals but not to children," the courtroom reforms introduced by the Justice still omit a number of other basic constitutional guarantees--from the right to bail to the right of appeal. Furthermore, as Fred P. Graham noted in The New York Times, "Experience has demonstrated...that merely informing a child's parents that counsel will be provided upon request...will not bring many lawyers into juvenile courts. In the District of Columbia, where free counsel has been offered, between 85 and 90 percent of the parents have waived their children's rights to legal assistance. By comparison, when adults are defendants in felony cases, approximately the same percentage--85 to 90 percent--accept assigned counsel for themselves."

Nor does the new Supreme Court decision affect how adolescents are treated by police--before they come to court. Juveniles are still not protected, for example, from self-incrimination in police interrogation. And in other respects as well, their position as colonials in the way they are treated by the police in most communities will undoubtedly remain the same for the foreseeable future. Since police attitudes are consonant with how most adults feel about the young, cops regularly roust not only teenagers in black ghettos but also white middle-class youngsters who dress, talk and otherwise disport themselves in a manner considered "oddball," "rebellious" or "disrespectful."

For more than a year, Los Angeles police have not only established a ten-P.M. curfew for those under 18 on Hollywood's Sunset Strip but they frequently arrest any adolescent who "appears" rowdy or who "jaywalks." On November 28, 1966, The New York Times reported: "Baton-swinging armed officers marched shoulder to shoulder down Sunset Boulevard, the main artery, shoving the protesters into side streets or clubbing them to the pavement. Those arrested were often prodded with night sticks or repeatedly shoved to the ground before being loaded into police buses." Had this been instead a picket line of Negroes protesting job discrimination, these police abuses would have provoked lead editorials in the press and statements of concern by civic officials.

In Chicago, during the first six months of 1965, Peter Meyerson writes in The Young Americans, "a total of 10,660 teenagers were arrested for violations of a curfew that, one youth lamented, would be 'martial law' if applied to adults." In Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square, interracial groups of the young with long hair, sandals and occasional beards--though otherwise innocent of breaches of the peace--are not allowed to gather in groups of more than six, are told where they can and cannot sit and have been swept up indiscriminately in "narcotics" raids. And in Jackson Square, in New Orleans' French Quarter, a group of youngsters was sitting and singing on a Sunday last November. Suddenly, 17 of them were hustled into a police wagon. The charges: "littering and creating a scene."

A characteristic illustration of cavalier police action against the young was described in April 1966 by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Ralph Gleason. He had taken his children to hear the Paul Butterfield Blues Band at a dance on the University of California campus in Berkeley. Sometime after 11 P.M., Gleason discovered that two of his children and three teenage girls who were their guests had been confined to a first-floor office by campus police. The cops claimed that under the contract with the committee putting on the dance, everybody under 16 who was not "in the custody" of his parents had to be out of the building by 11.

Gleason angrily produced the dance's promoter and the contract, which had no such provision. At that point, Gleason recalls, "a policeman magnanimously said, 'You may go, enjoy yourself.' Then he added to me, 'Keep the children from running around the corridors. It's dangerous and they may be bumped into by an adult and hurt.' 'You are the only adult that endangers them,' I told him. 'You put them in a locked room.' " That same night, an 18-year-old, just as he was taking his jacket from the checkroom, had it snatched from him by a cop, who went through his pockets. "Just wanted to see," the representative of the law said, "if you had anything." "And we wonder," Gleason notes, "why youth is losing its respect for authority."

With minimal rights on the streets, the young have even fewer rights in the schools, where they spend most of their time. In fact, the length of confinement of the young in a classroom has been steadily increasing. Around 1900, only about six percent of American youth finished high school. Today, 70 percent of the nearly 18,000,000 between 13 and 17 are graduated. Until the Second World War, only a minority went on to college. Now, nearly half of each high school graduating class moves into a college population of 6,000,000.

It is in the schools that adult compression of the young is most insistent, most pervasive and--in terms of the final product--most terrifying. In his book How Children Fail, which is about upper-middle-class, not slum, schools, John Holt documents his contention that, except for a handful, almost all children who are processed through American schools "fail to develop more than a tiny part of the tremendous capacity for learning, understanding and creating with which they were born and of which they made full use during the first two or three years of their lives."

To begin with, they are often treated as if spontaneity were subversive to the processes of education. Too many classrooms and too many halls in the schools are deadly quiet. Trust, moreover, is not for the young. It is not uncommon for adult spies to be placed in the bathrooms of high schools. There are classrooms with two-way P.A. systems, so that functionaries can listen in to what's going on.

Principals, running their schools like authoritarian dukedoms, issue edicts of stunning and usually irreversible absurdity. The principal of University High School in Los Angeles, for instance, ordered an 18-year-old from Uruguay, who has always worn his hair long, to cut it forthwith. When he refused, the principal had him arrested. In jail, the irrepressible criminal began to sing. This failure to be penitent, this resiliency before adult power, compelled the police to choke him, punch him and handcuff him.

Other punitive measures are increasingly taken against those who choose to wear their hair long--a form of rejection of "proper" (that is, mass) behavior that particularly enrages adults. In Oyster Bay, Long Island, some months ago, five high school students were quarantined on a separate floor--called "the zoo" by their fellow inmates--and denied water as long as they refused haircuts.

In reaction to this and to similar stern pronunciamentos by principals who equate conformity with responsibility, Marya Mannes observed in The New York Times that so oversized an emotional reaction by adults "may be more a sign of our own rigidity than of [the students'] folly; one more example of a society grown set in its ways; resistant to change, hostile to difference." To which The New Yorker added: "It may be that smooth chins, cheeks and skulls represent to us something preciously modern--smoothness as an ideal, man as interchangeable, frictionless--and that all this bristling and flowing going on around us threatens to gum up the machine. Well, is the machine really that fragile? And was it designed to be eternal? We were furry primates before we were robots."

There is pathos as well as obtuseness in the nearly hysterical antipathy of many adults, in and out of schools, to long hair on young men. They are disturbed by the nerve, the sheer nerve, of those who defy smoothness as an ideal. Their own smoothness of morals, of sexual response, of attenuated life goals are also called into question by this luxuriance of hair and the other sensual "excesses" it connotes. One such longhaired, bearded youngster, drummer Bobby Moses of the Free Spirits, a rock group, was ambling along a street on New York's Lower East Side when a middle-aged stranger, in a suit and tie, stopped, stared and, his face contorted, rasped: "In two months you're going to be in Vietnam and you're going to be killed." Moses looked at him coolly and said, "Listen, mister, the only reason you're complaining is because you're old and you're going to die before I do."

In other ways besides preordained hair styles, the young in school are prepared for "responsibility" by being allowed hardly any. High school and many college newspapers are rigorously--often bizarrely--censored. Controversial speakers are not invited. Student protests are squashed. At Cass Technical High School in Detroit, a 17-year-old semifinalist in the National Merit Scholarship competition had been forced to cut his hair on pain of permanent suspension from school. Later, when he and three other students wore black arm bands to protest the school's observance (continued on page 188)Youth--the oppressed majority(continued from page 138) of "Military Day," all four were "temporarily excluded." Said the young man: "I got my hair cut, but now they're regulating ideas and I can't get my ideas cut. I'm keeping them."

In many other schools, antiwar demonstrators have been stripped of their arm bands; and at a high school in Great Neck, New York, when the student government voted to forgo one lunch in sympathy with the famine-threatened people of India, its plan was vetoed by the administration.

In classes throughout the country, teachers ritualistically underline the importance of political commitment for citizens in a democracy. But the young are trained for this role in situations devoid of political activity. When a senior in a large suburban high school in New Jersey asked that the school's World Affairs Club be permitted to cosponsor a lecture with an outside political organization, the director of student activities peremptorily informed him that no student political advocacy of any kind was permitted in the school.

The same student, Daniel Gladstone, wrote a review of a history textbook for the school newspaper. In it, Gladstone reported in a Saturday Review article, "High School Students Have No Voice," "I established criteria for textbooks and showed how the book failed to meet them. Because the sponsor of the newspaper was not in school the day the articles were sent to the printer, he did not see the review until it was published. Then he, the vice-principal and the chairman of the history department all told me that I had acted 'out of line' in writing the review and that I had no right to criticize an action of a faculty member or group."

No high school is more respected for the academic achievements of its student body than is the Bronx High School of Science. Yet a few years ago, its students were instructed that during a civil-defense drill simulating an atomic attack, they must kneel and hold a book over their heads. "An interesting medievalism for a school of science," commented social critic Paul Goodman, father of one of several young empiricists who disobeyed the command. They were suspended, of course, and the parents of the disobedient youngsters were informed that "behavior of this type can do immeasurable harm to [the students'] future possibilities for recommendations and college entrance." Paul Goodman pointed out to the New York City Board of Education with as much self-control as he could muster that "this attitude of the organized system is not calculated to make creative scientists." But it can help produce scientists trained to function in teams and easily able to involve themselves in all manner of assignments--biological warfare, for instance--on orders from the organized system.

If the young are prohibited from learning how to govern themselves and from following their best instincts, including common sense, in high school, they do not receive appreciably more growing room in most colleges. There they continue to be prepared for the basic feeling of powerlessness of American life--the powerlessness of the individual, young or adult, to affect what Mayor Lindsay terms the "huge, authoritarian institutions that routinely cause fundamental dislocations in the lives of the people they affect each day." S. E. Luria, professor of biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, points out that "a most distressing aspect of university life is the mock parliamentarianism of formal campus democracy. Students engage in meaningless campaigns and elections for student governments that are concerned mainly with trivia such as curfew hours.... The empty, formal democracy of the campus is not only a frustrating experience; it becomes also a training ground for the acceptance of patterns of pseudodemocratic government, in which political machines determine the choices presented to the voters, and a willful executive can frustrate the spirit of the Constitution by turning a legislative assembly into a rubber-stamp body."

Here, again, there is pathos in the repression of the young by adults. Those who are without power in the "real world"--without power in relation to the corporations that employ them, to the governments that make war and raise taxes in their name, to the social forces that make their cities unsafe and their air polluted--resent assumptions by the young that they can run their lives, that they can somehow avoid fundamental impotence. Father knows best, damn it. There is no hope. Settle down and hold onto a comfortable niche in the system. The son who defies authority shows up the weakness of his father and must be taught a lesson, the lesson being that passivity is wisdom, that survival is all.

The young, meanwhile, are prepared for "real life" not only by their subject status and by the meaningless regulations keeping them in place in the educational zoo. Also, what they are taught, as well as how they are taught, prepares them to fit smoothly into the system. One of the most basic of all needs--especially during adolescence--is to shape an identity, to find out what in the world is most relevant to you. But the American educational system operates all too often directly counter to that goal. The schools consider their function to be the adaptation of their pupils to the requirements of society as it is now and as they think it must develop. And increasingly, this is a society of specialization. Certain basic skills must be instilled to lay a foundation for the specialized skills to come. Recently, during the course of a series of lectures he delivered on the BBC, John Kenneth Galbraith asked: "Can we be altogether happy about education that is so motivated? There is the danger that it will be excessively vocational. We shall have a race of men who are strong on telemetry and space communications but who cannot read anything but a blueprint or write anything but a computer program."

But the schools, with few exceptions, have no time to worry about that question. Nor do they allow their pupils time to worry about who they are. Too much information has to be funneled into them so that they can go on to the "better" colleges and then to the "better" specialized jobs. The independent youngster with strong interests in particular areas that are not currently regarded as having a high degree of social usefulness gets in the way--particularly if he has questions for which answers are not to be found in the textbooks or the teachers at hand. He takes too much time and must either be cut to fit or leave school. He also gets in the way if his learning style is not geared to speedy achievement on predetermined tracks. One very bright 14-year-old in New York scored miserably on a reading achievement test. Astonished, his mother asked him what had happened. "Well," he said, "the idea was to read and comprehend as fast as you could. I didn't feel like reading fast. I got interested in some of the paragraphs and wanted to think about their implications." Later, the mother was told by the boy's teacher, "He certainly has capacity, but he is not a group person. You must help us make him into a group person."

A Quaker girl in New York who has shuttled between private and public schools to find a place for herself exclaims in exasperation: "They're all geared to examination statistics. Like, they have set curriculums. The records at each stage of your 'advancement' through school must show that you have taken so many units in math, in science, in languages. Without the right assortment of credits, you're going to have trouble getting into college. And so we're not allowed to learn what we want to learn. What I want, for example, is just a basic background in science and a great deal more time to write and to study how different writers have handled all sorts of problems. I can't do it. There's no room in the schools for individual needs. And they give you so much work to do at home, you have no time to explore what interests you outside of school. We're all locked in, locked into the same set of building blocks from elementary school on."

The concept of education as a way to individual growth, as a way to retain and build on the spontaneity of real interests and organic motivations, is alien to the schools. The "achievers" learn that success in school means playing back to the teachers what the teachers want to hear. In this circular game of manipulation, the free play of intelligence and individual initiative becomes dangerous, for it can lead to bad grades. A youngster who continually questions the worth of what he is being taught and the values of the society for which he is being shaped becomes a "problem." As John Holt says, "Teachers and schools tend to mistake good behavior for good character."

Recently, through the International Teacher Development Program, over 600 teachers from a number of countries visited classrooms throughout the United States. Most were saddened by what they saw. "You will find," observed a teacher from Chile, "that the examination questions that determine success or failure in American schools are chiefly those for which answers can be memorized. Hence, they test training, not thinking. The trained person depends upon others for his instruction. The great goal of the school should be to produce the independent learner." And an appalled teacher from Japan observed: "Students raised their hands and asked questions industriously. But somehow they seemed to be driven from lesson to lesson, having only minutes between periods. Why this hurriedness?"

A 17-year-old girl in Boston echoes the question: "Just why is everything being made to go faster and faster? You have to have the new math bit by the time you're five. That's funny. And this great shift to stuffing people with education early, so that by the time you get to college you see this world as a big, vast textbook!"

The pressures begin in grade school. A teacher in the Abington Township School in Pennsylvania, where the parent body consists mainly of the striving upper middle class, tells of an eight-year-old who received an M (for medium) on an assignment. The boy came to her, held out his paper, his hands trembling, and asked, "Does this mean I won't get into medical school?"

The teacher spoke to the boy's parents. "You have a charming, bright child. Don't push him." The parents, however, are convinced that education is nothing if it does not push. "Our two older children," the mother said, "are high achievers, and we're moving into a better neighborhood with a better school. Therefore, he must be prepared. Besides, we do have to think about college."

An extreme example? Perhaps. But there is no denying the intensity of the pressures that have been spiraling in the country's classrooms. Get with it or you'll be sidetracked. And so the young are continually tested, grouped, evaluated--not according to their individual bents and strengths but through standardized measurements. Look, say the parents and guidance counselors: In 1965 alone, more than 100,000 qualified students couldn't find any openings in any but the most arcane colleges. You have to be better and better and better! Remember, say the parents and guidance counselors, the difference between being 18th or 88th in your class can affect your whole life!

But what if you have different criteria for a successful life from the kind to which all that accumulation of credits will lead? An American mother writes to A. S. Neill, headmaster of the Summerhill School in England, that her 11-year-old daughter won't do her homework and is failing in school. "Shall I push her to study," the woman asks, "or shall I let her fail?" "Woman, you cannot push her," Neill begins in his new book, Freedom--Not License! "She already knows the consequences and has made her choice. Your child is alive and shows a healthy criticism of the system by refusing to take part in it. How can you as an individual remedy a situation in which your daughter is the victim of a barbarous system? What good did homework ever do anyone? Home study--forced on a child--is dead study. Such forced study wrenches the child away from her play hours. Homework is resented because it has no true place in your daughter's sense of living. It occurs to me: Maybe your daughter is not much of a scholar. Maybe her natural interests do not gravitate toward study. Must you force your values and ambitions on her? Far better for her to be a happy human being without a college degree than an unhappy, neurotic girl fighting her inner drives and armed with a college diploma."

The advice is far too subversive of prevalent values for all but a few parents to accept. And, more tragically, most of the young have already been so deadened by the educational system that they see failure as the only alternative to "making it" in the established middle-class way. A high school senior in Lexington, Massachusetts, is stiff with fear the night before she is to take the crucial college boards: "Everything is on the line tomorrow. You determine your next four years. And perhaps your whole future. And all this is determined in a lot of impersonal questions. This supposedly is the sum total of 12 years of being a person, of being involved in activities with teachers and with other people. You're judged by one test." In Texas, a 17-year-old tells a reporter surveying the young for Newsweek: "I flunked the college-entrance exams and I don't have any money, so I've had it."

As if one can learn only in school. As if there are no meaningful experiences for the young except in school. As if all vocations but those requiring academic training have by fiat been made of lesser value. As if one could not go back to a school when one wanted to. Having been trained not to think but to respond in predetermined ways, too many of the young are unable to recognize alternatives to breaking out of the lock step that is American education. And so, youth, which should be a time of wide-ranging curiosity, joy in discovery and a reaching out to experience, becomes a time of fear. "Even in the kindest and gentlest of schools," John Holt writes, "children are afraid, many of them a great deal of the time, some of them almost all the time...afraid of failing, afraid of being kept back, afraid of being called stupid, afraid of feeling themselves stupid." If you think Holt exaggerates, consider how many adults return in their nightmares to fantasies of failure in school.

And with fear comes cheating as an additional preparation for the "real world." A Columbia University study of 99 colleges found that half the students in the sample had cheated. Estimates of high school cheating run considerably higher. Why? "Cheating increases," notes Gladys Gardner Jenkins of the University of Iowa, "in proportion to the emphasis put upon a goal beyond the reach of many children who compete not because of a personal desire and motivation but because of a situation from which there is no escape."

That feeling of there being no escape, the height of the walls around the ghetto of American youth, was made painfully vivid in a letter in November 1964 to The New York Times Magazine by a bright student in a New York high school with an extraordinary record of "success" in placing high percentages of its graduates in prestigious colleges. A cry of despair, it reveals how mercilessly--though impersonally--youth can be crushed. With classes from 8:15 to 3 and study hall or activities until 5:30, this girl worked on homework after dinner every night until midnight or 12:30. She had, of course, been told that the purpose of this regimen is "preparation." And she mourns:

I'm wasting these years of preparation. I'm not learning what I want to learn.... I don't care about the feudal system. I want to know about life. I want to think and read. When?...

My life is a whirlpool. I'm caught up in it, but I'm not conscious of it. I'm what you call living, but somehow I can't find life. Days go by in an instant. I feel nothing accomplished in that instant. So maybe I got an A on that composition I worked on for three hours, but when I get it back I find it means nothing. It's a letter you use to keep me going.

Every day I come in well prepared. Yet I dread every class; my stomach tightens and I sit tense. I drink coffee morning, noon and night. At night, after my homework, I lie in bed and wonder if I've really done it all. Is there something I've forgotten?

...I wonder what I'm doing here. I feel phony.... You wonder about juvenile delinquents. If I ever become one, I'll tell you why it will be. I feel cramped. I feel like I'm locked in a coffin and can't move or breathe. There's no air or light. All I see is blackness and I've got to burst. Sometimes I feel maybe something will come along. Something has to or I'm not worth anything. My life is worth nothing. It's enclosed in a few buildings.... It goes no further. I've got to bust.

And in their coffins, they are transported to college. There the testing and the evaluating is even more onerous and incessant, for there aren't enough places in the "better" graduate schools and everyone now knows that a mere B.A. or B.S. is not enough for the "best" careers. Last year, the Yale graduate department of English had 529 applications but places for only 45 students. In economics, there were more than ten applicants for every opening. In the course of a year, as many as 30 people with Woodrow Wilson fellowships are turned down. The same compression exists in practically all of the more renowned graduate schools.

The undergraduate, therefore, pressing to be as close as he can to the top of his class, still has no time for what interests him. As Nevitt Sanford and Dr. Joseph Katz of Stanford's Institute for the Study of Human Problems point out: "The indications are that increased work demands, competitiveness and a resultant pervasive guilt when one is not occupied with studying have also considerably diminished the opportunities for forming friendships with other students, at least the kind of deep and meaningful friendships that require time and freedom from psychological encumbrance in order to grow."

Later, in the graduate schools, says John Perry Miller, dean of Yale University's graduate school, "the pressure is already worse than in the undergraduate colleges."

Accordingly, some college students do, indeed, burst. Wrote a coed in the Wisconsin Daily Cardinal: "My parents hounded me about grades to the point where I spent more time worrying than studying. The idea of failure was the worst thing in the world that could happen. There was no chance to begin over; if you failed the first time, that was it. By the time exams came, I was a nervous wreck. I went home before exams for the weekend. Then it happened, the worst it had ever been. Then came 75 sleeping pills, 125 aspirins and a razor blade."

And for some the burst is final. In an exhaustive study, Moderator, a magazine aimed at leading college students, disclosed in October 1966 that the national suicide rate among students is 50 percent higher than for Americans in general. It estimated that during the year, 90,000 students would threaten suicide, 9000 would make an attempt and 1000 would succeed. That last figure was called conservative by Dr. Edward Schneidman, codirector of the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center.

But the vast majority of students do move on--and out into the adult world. The majority, having wasted their chance to find out who they are in adolescence, are now sufficiently numbed to function as docile members of the society. Paul Goodman has described this educational "treatment" succinctly: "The scholastically bright are not following their aspirations but are being pressured and bribed; the majority--those who are not especially bright but have other kinds of vitality--are being subdued.... Few look toward vocations that will peculiarly fulfill them. Few really believe that they will have a say in their jobs or in how their city is run, any more than they have had in how they grow up."

There are those who resist the treatment. Not all high school dropouts, for example, have necessarily made the wrong choice--for themselves. Dr. Joseph L. French of Pennsylvania State University has studied a sample of the 7.8 percent of all school dropouts in Pennsylvania with I. Q.s of 110 or better. The results, as reported in the Roosevelt Torch of Roosevelt University in Chicago, indicated that "compared with those who remain in school, the intellectual dropouts were by nature less inhibited and more happy-go-lucky. They were also more independent, unconventional and rebellious. Their homes had been more permissive and less protected." The vocational interests of the dropouts, French found, tended toward "mechanical activities--machine operation and design, or home repair of machinery and electronic gadgets." In view of those interests, only 22 percent of the male dropouts "anticipated a professional career as opposed to a trade, while the figure for [those who stayed in school] stood at 60 percent." Interestingly, however, 90 percent of the dropouts said they were interested in eventually furthering their education. They had refused to be conned into believing that moving out of the lock step meant that education had to be at an end for them. Therefore, those who do return to school are likely to go back when they want to and to study what really interests them.

And the number of college dropouts is increasing. The consensus of many of the contributors to the new book The College Dropout and the Utilization of Talent is that it is not at all essential and often not advisable that a student spend four consecutive years in college. Today's student life, the book points out, is characterized by "increased unrest and subsequent mobility among academically sound undergraduate students. Some go to Europe for a year of study and/or travel, others into the Peace Corps and still others to an entirely different type of college to gain varied experience." And more and more of these college dropouts report that this break in the pattern has been of great value in allowing them to discover themselves. Some also discover that there is no personal need for them to return to college. But to drop out positively, not in self-judgment as a failure, requires students who have not been entirely subdued by the system, and they are not by any means in the majority.

New recruits to the intensely private life are coming from those of the young who were once involved in civil rights activity and in other hopes for changing society. The rise of the Black Power ethos in groups such as SNCC and CORE makes a growing number of white former activists feel there is no longer any place for them in the front lines of the Movement. Others are convinced that, in any case, nothing can really be changed. An 18-year-old from New York says: "If I'm sitting here and know that what my Government is doing may bring the bombs down on me, what can I do except get high or get in bed with somebody? When the British were coming, I could have gotten out my gun and helped fight. The UN? It's obsolete. It can't enforce anything. Some of my friends say, 'Protest!' Hell, those same guys have marched on Washington for peace two or three times. They were with thousands of people. What did they accomplish? Johnson just kept on escalating. So my friends say I'm afraid to protest, that I'm playing it safe. That's not it at all. I don't do anything because anything I'd do would be futile."

And so the increase in the use of consciousness-expanding drugs among the young continues. Dr. James Fox of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Bureau of Drug Abuse Control estimates that by now about one in every hundred college students has used LSD at one time or another. Marijuana is easily obtained at most major universities. At the University of California at Berkeley, more than half the student body has tried marijuana at least once, and perhaps a third has gone back for more. Nor are high school and junior high school students unfamiliar with hallucinogens. The incidence of their use among those that young is growing.

Parents and other adults are disturbed, appalled and grimly censorious of the young who have gotten off the world. They agitate and vote for restrictive laws and demand investigations of the schools, ignoring their own role in convincing these young to "turn on, tune in and drop out." Harvard psychiatrist Norman Zinberg says of the young drugtakers: "They don't trust life as it is. They look for something more beautiful, more real." More beautiful and real than the lives of the adults they know. Than the lives of those in their 40s, let's say, whom New York reporter Jimmy Breslin has called "the young old men.... Every day, they are losing the world of the young girls and they try to hold onto it with their eyes and their one-line jokes and every day they are losing. Every day that they go home and eat and fall asleep in front of the television and then get up in the morning and go to work on jobs they don't like. Every day that they spend going to a golf course as if it were a church, and polishing a car, and then going to a house party and talking about the same things that they talked of last week.... And the women, their bodies coming apart from having too many children, talking with the first old-lady stories of operations coming into the conversation."

These are the fading adults who illustrate Eric Hoffer's threnody: "In this country we are warned not to waste our time, but we are brought up to waste our lives." And these are the adults who look at the young with envy and barely suppressed sighs of self-pity at the waste of their own years. But they cannot fundamentally concede that waste and therefore must condemn "deviant" behavior and try to "straighten out" those of their children who won't take the prescribed routes to death on the installment plan. They send them to psychiatrists, they cut off their allowances, but they cannot talk to them--for what have they to say?

It is the increasingly free-and-easy sexuality among some of the young that especially torments adults. For American adults have been brought up on the Puritan ethic. Pleasure is suspect. Pleasure has to be earned. Pleasure has to be postponed. And so pleasure--in its most intense, releasing forms--is often postponed until death. Imagine the stab of loss at breakfast tables and on commuter trains the morning last December on which the wire services carried--and newspapers prominently displayed--the view of a 19-year-old University of Minnesota coed that "Sexual intercourse is a form of communication between two people, which, because of available contraceptive pills, should be no more regulated than any other form of communication, such as conversing, dancing and holding hands." What is the world coming to? But they'll learn, they'll learn. They'll get married and they'll learn. And probably many of the now sexually liberated young will slide into habit in sex as in all else. But it may be that today's adolescents' one permanent legacy to their own young is the shattering of unnatural and anachronistic barriers to sex, at least before marriage. For the premium on virginity is becoming obsolete; and on many campuses, living together is simply part of the scene.

• • •

There is persistent ferment among a minority of the young to change the ways in which they are being educated--from within the system and by setting up parallel institutions out of the system's control. With regard to the latter, students, sometimes with faculty help, have set up their own "free universities" and "experimental colleges" on at least a dozen campuses from Cornell to San Francisco State College. There the students themselves decide the courses to be given, which are then taught by student specialists or by professors drawn to the heady prospect of a totally voluntary learning situation. A year ago, the Student Congress of Boston University inaugurated a series of nongraded courses--the Experimental Seminar Program--"to counter the impersonal atmosphere of the larger lecture classes at Boston University." There are seminars in "Eros and Civilization," "Jazz," "War on Poverty: War or Sellout," "The New Morality: Sexual Freedom" and "Black Power."

The faculty members who participate in these parallel schools are those rare adults who understand that education should not be a passive process, that people should not be educated but ought to educate themselves, with the teacher as a catalyst. John Clayton, for example, an assistant professor of humanities at Boston University, who delivered lectures on Saul Bellow in the Experimental Seminar Program, writes in the Boston University News: "Ideas are not abstractions but experiences; they must be carried alive into the heart; they should be richly loaded with values; they should lead to action--either social or personal. I remember a couple of years ago teaching Thoreau's Walden. I quoted the passage criticizing university education, laughing at the irony that even this idea students had to write in their notebooks. I said, if you believe what Thoreau says, what are you doing here? So one student--John Kaplan--got up and walked out! Joy! Like the Baal-Shem-Tov, he was in the truth, not just in possession of the truth.

"The teacher's main job," Clayton continues, "is to draw the student into living communication and thought. The job is to shatter the existing knowledge structures in the student so he can form new structures that will let new data in. The job is to open him up. It's to let him relate new ideas to his old values. The job is to blow his mind. Freshmen need to study alienation in America or to study problems of identity in Boston. If sociological tools are needed, if economic concepts are needed, introduce them. But don't make a student go through years of digested, analytical, disciplinary structure before he finds out why. We need courses that involve the student's life at home, in the dormitory, at work. We live in Boston."

It may be that the existence of such experiments as Boston University's experimental courses may draw more such men as Clayton into teaching. And some of the professors of the future may come from the young in this academic underground. Already, pressures from the young have begun to elasticize, to a small extent, the courses and the way they're conducted in some schools. Moderator reports as illustrations: "A psychology course at the University of Michigan gives course credit for one third of the time students spend working in a community tutorial program, mental hospital or social-service project.... Next year at Western Michigan University, students will be able to receive academic credit for work overseas in the Peace Corps."

And while there are still only a very few colleges--Sarah Lawrence, Goddard, Bennington--that have liberated their students and teachers from grades, a growing number of colleges and universities are permitting students to take courses in which the only grade they will be given is "pass" or "fail." Thereby, time and spirit will not be wasted on regurgitation under the name of examinations and on worry as to whether taking a course outside your field may lower your averages. Deep down in the system, at the beginning of the compression process--the elementary school--there are beginnings of nongraded classes and of discovering what the child wants to know. But from elementary school to college, these are only beginnings. The system is too deeply rooted in its rigidity and in the undeviating length of its tracks to be radically changed soon.

But at the colleges and universities, some of the young still try to have a voice in how they are educated. Student pressure at Stanford caused the resignation of an unpopular dean of women and the inclusion of students on faculty committees concerned with curriculum and admissions. At City College in New York, sit-ins and other tactics are being used to force the administration to give students a share in policy making. At the University of Michigan, students have won national support, including that of the American Civil Liberties Union, in their persistent campaign to get the university to stop cooperating with state and Congressional investigations of allegedly "subversive" organizations. In the process, the students--as had happened at the University of California during the height of the Free Speech Movement--awakened some of the faculty. They were soon joined in their protest by 700 faculty members. Also at that university, a student referendum last November disclosed overwhelming opposition to the administration's compiling of class standards to be used by the Selective Service System in deciding draft deferments. The National Student Association has called for similar referendums at its 331 member schools; and at its annual meeting last August, the NSA also proposed abolishing the peacetime draft. Asserting that "no government should be allowed the power to compel its citizens to kill," the delegates asked that even in wartime, those drafted should be given choices of alternative service in hospitals, conservation or other nonviolent activities. That same meeting called for the repeal of laws banning the sale of marijuana.

A remarkable example of the questioning of "official" adult values that can be set in turbulent motion by a candid, committed and unafraid group of students is the rebellion at Boston University led by Ray Mungo, his staff and such colleagues as Julian Houston, president of the Student Congress. A relentless campaign by the Boston University News to abolish the R.O.T.C. on campus, for instance, has helped spur similar movements at Ohio Wesleyan, Cornell, Duke, Harvard and other schools. Its raising of the issue also provoked a controversy as to whether the R.O.T.C. has the right to continue to receive academic standing and official curricular recognition. The News has also called for noncooperation with the draft, for the end of grades and for sexual freedom. ("Because the matter is entirely personal, we believe the student should be free to practice his own approach to sexual discovery and wonder without the prurient shadow that the administration throws over him, in the form of unyielding parietal rules. But, far more important, we believe the university has rejected its responsibility to provide information and advice regarding birth control to students who often do themselves tragic harm for lack of sound, available consultation.")

Mungo and his associates have created a ferment of ideas and self-questioning in what used to be a placid, conformist school with a largely moribund faculty. Mungo has, of course, been attacked by the adult community--in Boston's newspapers, from pulpits in the city's largest churches, by former United States Senator Leverett Saltonstall and by the university's Board of Trustees. But he thrives on his attempt to make BU a place where "real persons" can learn and teach, because he is experiencing that rare joy of, as the Quakers say, speaking truth to power. And he is trying to spread that joy by advocating a national union for students--"a union providing an autonomous power group on and off campus, capable of collective power and, ideally, force." The concept of a union, he continues, "is particularly applicable because students are at last demanding their rights here and elsewhere; because they have learned that Federal aid to education is meager compared with war budgets; because they pay immense sums for their education, and thus they remain physically tied to parents (when they deserve, as most European nations have long ago recognized, to be educated at national expense); and because their training in submission to university authorities is specifically intended to prepare them for lives of submission--to employers, to governments, to fear."

There are other signs, it is claimed, that the values of the young may be changing. Michael Harrington writes: "In 1964, The Wall Street Journal reported that 14 percent of Harvard's senior class entered business, as contrasted with 39 percent in 1960. In 1966, the Harris Poll surveyed college seniors for Newsweek and found that this trend was deepening. Only 12 percent of the sample were looking forward to business careers." Where do they go? Into research, the professions, academic life. Education, for instance, is now a 60-billion-dollar business in the United States. Is there sufficient reason, however, to believe that a rejection of business as a vocation also involves a rejection of present societal values? Will those in research refuse to work on projects of destruction? Will those in the professions be any less addicted to self-interest, any more critical of political and economic power blocs, than their elders are?

And will those who go into education be significantly different from the present educational establishment? Will their effect on the young to come be significantly different from that described by Carl Davidson, vice-president of Students for a Democratic Society? "We have named the system in this country," he wrote in SDS' New Left Notes, "corporate liberalism, and if we bother to look, its penetration into the campus community is awesome. Its elite is trained in our colleges of business administration. Its defenders are trained in our law schools. Its apologists can be found in the political-science departments. The colleges of social sciences produce its manipulators. For propagandists, it relies on the schools of journalism. It insures its own future growth in the colleges of education. If some of us don't quite fit in, we are brainwashed in the divisions of counseling."

There are as yet insufficient grounds for optimism in the fact that more and more graduates are turning away from business as a career. The system, as Davidson points out, is extremely efficient in manufacturing its defenders in other vocations as well. Similarly, the optimism of some interpreters of demographic charts is questionable. They note that currently half the population of the United States is under 25, and the proportion below 25 is steadily rising. By 1968, the average age of the American voter will be 27. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., predicts that by the end of the Sixties, alongside the fact that those in their 20s will constitute the biggest voting bloc in America, there will be 7,000,000 students in college. We will be a country of the young; and within that young, there will be a special-interest group, says Schlesinger, which "will formulate its demands and fight for them." But if most of those young, in and out of college, are already young-old men, how far-reaching will their demands be? Placing American youth in a ghetto has, in the majority of cases, worked as intended. When they are ready to be released into the world, the values of the majority of them will be of the world as it is now.

And yet the dissenters persist. Some, such as Ray Mungo, persist in working and organizing for change. Others travel into their own minds. Both the outer-directed and the inner-directed dissenters believe they can hold out. Such as a 17-year-old girl from Boston who insists: "I could never join the mainstream of society now. If you've been made aware, then you can't suddenly bury yourself. So society is just going to have to accept us. Either that or this darned society is just going to collapse. You can't have a society full of unaware people."

She ignores the much more likely third choice--that society will neither collapse nor become en masse that much more "aware." However, even as efficiently dehumanizing a society as ours will be unable to force all in the vivid minority of today's young to adjust to what most adults call reality. If the best of the young do not prevail--and the odds are heavily against them--many will remain a conspicuous community of refusal to accept shallow or counterfeit lives. What will society do with them? It will try to ignore them while they, in turn, keep trying to discover and fulfill their potentiality in enclaves in the larger cities and in university towns.

A New Yorker in his early 20s who dropped out of college to work with CORE and then to engage in community organizing in Syracuse is now at the London School of Economics. On his Christmas card last year, he wrote a line from Henry Miller: "I believe because not to believe is to become as lead, to be prone and rigid, forever inert, and to waste away." He intends to come back to engage in further action for social change. He will probably be able to save himself from becoming as lead, as will Ray Mungo. They have avoided being pressed flat in the ghetto of American youth. But not many do. Not yet enough, anyway, to do much more than keep themselves alive and growing. This is a country of waste--from natural resources to armaments. But especially it is a country that wastes its young.

If that wastage is to be significantly reduced, it can be done only by the young themselves. Accordingly, today's young are sharply divided, as never before, between those who have already been processed and those who are resisting their ghetto status and corollary powerlessness. The latter recognize that they are in a fight for their lives--figuratively and, in view of the lessons of Vietnam, quite often literally.