Essay: The Young: Adult Penchants - and Problems

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Suddenly they were back in the news, if briefly: young people marching with placards and upraised fists to protest U.S. military intervention in El Salvador. Naturally the demonstrations stirred memories of the Viet Nam War. But they were also a striking reminder of something else: how little American youth has made its presence felt in recent years.

Compared with their predecessors, Americans in the pre-adult age brackets have, for the past ten years, been nearly invisible. Those predecessors, to be sure, were something special. They were the most active and activist generation of young people ever to come down the American pike. They were also, being baby-boom youngsters, the most numerous. In terms of both numbers and aggressive venturousness they all but dominated the stage of U.S. social change during the 1960s.

The young in those years did more than merely hold the attention of the nation; they became a national obsession. Adults sometimes imagined themselves lost on the wrong side of that much repeated cliche, the "generation gap." From hairstyles to civil rights, the young made their presence felt in almost every aspect of national life. And as the decade ended they provided the great body of the visible opposition to the Viet Nam War. Their activity peaked in the angry campus protests that followed the killing of four students during antiwar demonstrations at Kent State University in 1970. Soon after that, to the shock of many of their elders who expected them to persist and grow as a permanent political force, the young moved offstage.

Theirs would have been a hard act to follow, had anybody tried. As things turned out, nobody did. In the decade since, with the war ending and the draft no longer a threat, youngsters as a whole have not showed much inclination to give themselves to public causes even as voters, let alone as life crusaders. While they occasionally barge into the national consciousness during such rites as their pre-Easter pilgrimage to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., they seem to live mostly outside adult view. As a result, they have given the larger society no clear impression of what they are like.

What they are not like is certainly clear enough. They are not like their predecessors, those activists of the '60s. Professional youth watchers have described the young of the '80s as being more traditional, more religious, less rebellious than earlier youths. Also more pessimistic, more serious, more worldlywise. Says Psychology Professor Harry Schumer of the University of Massachusetts: "They are returning to private goals. What matters is the here and now." James Barry, director of admissions at St. Ambrose College in Davenport, Iowa, says: "The good old days [of mobilized youth] never happened to them. They hardly even talk about the '70s. It's just now. And now isn't so hot."