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The youth of Britain and France have the same blue-jeaned bottoms and fright-wig haircuts as their U.S. contemporaries, and they dig the same big beat and atonal balladry. Still, the Teen-Age International is largely confined to matters of style; underneath, European youth today seems less discontented and considerably more cowed by the adult world. In Germany and Italy, the young are just too busy cashing in on their new prosperity to protest against much of anything. In Soviet Russia, while society is changing and the young show signs of restlessness, youth by and large remains earnestly conformist. In Japan, despite occasional student riots organized by the left, the students' competitive drudgery makes even the American race for college seem relaxed by comparison; a Japanese youngster who fails to get into a university is called a ronin, the term for the pathetic samurai who wandered about without a master.
U.S. parents and teachers who may hanker for a bit more obedience and less obstreperousness from their own young should take comfort in the recollection that things have been worse. Riot and rebellion are a student tradition in the Western world; university records from the Middle Ages abound in accounts of pitched battles, rapes and homicides. A proclamation of 1269 denounced the scholars of Paris who "by day and night atrociously wound and slay many, carry off women, ravish virgins, and break into houses."
Britain's illustrious public schools suffered repeated student rebellions in the 18th and 19th centuries. At Winchester in 1793, after stoning the assistant headmaster with marbles, the boys locked him up overnight in the dining hall with the warden and a teacher. When the high sheriff was appealed to the next day, he refused help because the boys had firearms and were getting ready to defend the Outer Gate by flinging flagstones down on the police. Harvard and Princeton experienced numerous such episodes. In 1788 the situation at Harvard was so bad that Professor Eliphalet Pearson kept what he called a Journal of Disorders. "In the hall at breakfast this morning," he recorded on Dec. 9, "bisket, tea cups, saucers & a knife thrown at tutors. At evening prayers the lights were all extinguished by powder and lead." A partial list of college casualties during this period includes one undergraduate dead in a duel at South Carolina College and another at Dickinson, several students shot at Ohio's Miami University, a professor killed at the University of Virginia, and the president of Mississippi's Oakland College stabbed to death by a student.
All this past history suggests that Americans, in their tendency to idealize youth, often forget what it is really like.
The Invention of Youth
Society's important political, moral and intellectual changes, according to U.C.L.A. Historian Eugen Weber, have always been brought about by that section of the population that was "most available." Sometimes it was the nobility, as in the curbing of absolute monarchy, sometimes the rich, as in the rise of mercantilism, sometimes the bourgeois intellectuals, as in the French Revolution. In recent times, Weber holds, the most available group for rebellion has been the young, with more time—and certainly more energy—than anyone else.