Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Friedenberg, Edgar Z.

Titel

The Generation Gap

Ist Teil von

• The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1969-03, Vol.382 (1), p.32-42

Ort / Verlag

Thousand Oaks, CA: American Academy of Political and Social Science

Erscheinungsjahr

1969

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The "generation gap" between youth and adults in contemporary American society reflects a real and serious conflict of interest rather than mutual misunderstanding. In an open, bureaucratic society, sanctions against nepotism and the attrition of property through inheritance taxes lessen the utility of each generation to the other: the young cannot succeed. Youth, moreover, is a discriminated-against minority in America-more seriously so than any ethnic minority. It is excluded from economic opportunity, and is seriously exploited by being forced to supply, as members of the Armed Forces, its services at a fraction of their market value. School attendance is less obviously exploitive, but is as much a forced subsidy of the social and economic system by the young as "an opportunity to invest in the future." Compulsory school attendance, the juvenile court system, and the Selective Service System all operate as serious, age-graded constraints from which adults are exempt-these constraints, indeed, define youth as a social role. Informal and often abusive constraint by schools and law-enforcement officials exacerbate the conflict. The humiliation of, particularly, youth from the upper-middle and upper classes, especially those prone to dissent, is functional in preventing the disruption of a democratic society by the hostilities of the "lumpenbourgeoisie."