The Traditional Barriers
But why aren't these youthful demonstrators quietly studying their assigned texts, instead of loudly disagreeing with their university officials?
Simply because all the traditional shapers of youthful opinion and action have themselves undergone a revolution.
The traditional opinion-formers of society — any society — have always been the home, school, and church.
But no longer do most homes succeed in producing children according to the standards of that home. No longer does the school seem to form, shape, or direct the thinking of its pupils. No longer does stentorian thunder quail the young from the pulpits of the land. In the midst of youthful turmoil, these three are strangely ineffective in curbing or halting teen rebellion.
Actually, these three are often as not the target of teen rebellion.
And the reason they are the target of teenage rebellion is because the teens feel most betrayed by each of these three.
Here are the shocking reasons, and more of the underlying CAUSES behind youthful revolt today.
The Home
The home, any home, or the lack of it, is the world's first authority, the world's first comfort, the world's first protection, provision, security, warmth, to every young child — regardless as to race, color or nationality. Yet in a worldwide sense, the home is fast disappearing as the traditional bulwark for standards of conduct.
Taking the United States as an outstanding example — almost every third home has already been ripped asunder by divorce.
Many a study is available which directly links juvenile delinquency and teenage crime with broken homes. But for each home directly involved in a divorce, there are others which are only hollow shells of their former selves — a couple barely clinging together because of socio-economic pressures, and not because of any desire of their own.
Remember, every home is a building block of society. As go our homes, so goes our nation. A house divided against itself cannot stand — just as nations filled with divided homes will not stand. In America, in the affluence following World War II, thousands of American families found themselves better able to afford more of this world's entertainment. Television was on the increase, and millions of Americans were now able to afford top Hollywood talent, nightly, in their own living rooms. Many social changes were occurring all at the same time — among them a relaxing of morals in the traditional areas of morals-watchers, including the Church, motion picture censorship, court control over indecency and pornography.
Labor-saving devices, new automobiles, new entertainments, new hobbies, and the growing affluence were all making it easier for Mom to escape the drudgery of the kitchen, to have additional social pursuits, or even hold down her own job.
The television set became an automatic baby sitter, many thousands of women got married, had babies, quickly put them in school, and then plunged into their own social lives which, often as not, ended up in a divorce and a "second time around" searching for a never-discovered happiness.
Far more than 6 million Americans are now divorced or separated, and while the United States contains only 6% of the earth's population, more than a third of the divorces in the world are granted in the United States.
Divorce has risen 7 times as fast as the population in the United States — and is on the increase. Obviously, to analyze the entire picture of the dissolution of the American home, and its complete ineffectiveness in accepting its responsibility as the traditional teacher of morals, the instiller of social values and spiritual precepts, would take at least one large book, if not several.
For a complete picture of what is happening in our homes and marriages, you need to write for our two free booklets on the subject of marriage entitled, Your Marriage Can Be Happy, and Why Marriage! Soon Obsolete?
But any way you want to slice it, the American home is fast disintegrating.
Few people seem to have paid much attention to what the destruction of home life has done to the nation's youth.
But a few statistical studies would very simply establish the facts that while fully more than 50% of all Americans are now under 21, and while almost every third American home has been broken by divorce, that a tremendous percentage of these youths have already lived through at least one parental failure, replete with all of the fights, squabbles, aberrant sexual behavior, courtroom scenes, economic chaos, and heartbreak that always accompany such domestic turmoil.
The revolutionary social changes which have directly affected the home are almost endless. Among them are the pill, the working mother, the alcoholic father, the "Jackass Formula" of entertainment (the attack upon fatherhood by many different media) and a host of other related causes.
Today's teenager lives increasingly in a home where communication has all but disappeared, where understanding of his own problems is rare, and where any real semblance of orderly family life has all but disappeared.
In a broad, general sense, American homes have betrayed America's most precious natural resource — America's children.
Self-seeking, pleasure-mad, lust-filled middle-aged Americans have heedlessly tossed aside the really important social values of the home, a sound marriage, LOVE, HONOR, AND OBEY, for the cheap, tinsel-wrapped glitter of entertainment, kisses under the mistletoe, casual affairs, and the excitement of a Hollywood-glamorized "life over forty."
You don't believe it?
Police agencies, divorce lawyers, disturbed child counselors, and sociologists do!
If you were the observer, listening to the stories of thousands of juvenile delinquents in the course of a year, hearing their woeful tales of hideous home life, of tenement-house horror and sex, of vermin, illegitimacy, dope, crime, and parental fights — you would be utterly soulfully convicted and convinced that America's homes are totally sick — totally corrupt!
Actually, a truly happy and stable home is becoming, whether we like to admit it or not, a rarity on the American scene today.
Consequently, the hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of children represented by these sick homes have come to feel betrayed.
How can they trust the teachings of a father who himself cannot be trusted? Why listen to preachments about morals from a mother who herself is a part-time pickup in the neighborhood piano bar? Why believe in virginity and chastity when their mother takes them to her own physician for the obtaining of a device to insure against premarital pregnancy over their own protests? Why believe in truth and honesty from a father who openly boasts of his illegitimate business dealings, the stories he told on his income tax form, or sneers about the "fuzz" when passing a policeman?
Why should the child grow up with a profound and far-reaching respect for members of another race while listening to his white father tell his "Nigger" jokes, or his black father talk of "Uncle Charley" or the white "Honky"?
Children are a product. The home is the factory.
Poor factories turn out poor products. You figure it out.