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Sociologist David Riesman agrees; he finds that service careers—schoolteaching, social work, government—are increasingly popular with undergraduates, and many of them are working at them part time while still in college, "trying to show that they are capable of human concern," says Riesman, "even while they are competing for grades." And Harvard Professor Erik H. Erikson believes that youth's main virtue and need is "fidelity"—to a worthwhile cause. Until that object of fidelity is found and tested, rebelliousness may simply be "a period of delay, a moratorium."
It is difficult to do justice to the young without being alarmist about their failings, or sentimental about their charms, or condescending about their rawness. The dialogue between experience and naiveté, between "we-know-better" and "we-don't-care," is in a sense impossible, because it is eternally carried on in two different languages. In this dialogue, youth is bound to have the last word—but only by the time youth itself is no longer young. In the face of this ultimately common destiny, Robert Louis Stevenson struck perhaps the best note of loving humor when he said: "Prudence is not a deity to cultivate in youth. Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other both in mind and body; to try the manners of different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight; to see sunrise in town and country; to be converted at a revival; to circumnavigate the metaphysics, write halting verse, run a mile to see a fire."
But it still matters where the fire is, and who set it.