ONE great educator became so infuriated with what he called the licentious, outrageous and disgraceful behavior of students at his college that he quit in disgust. The college was at Carthage, the year was A.D. 383, and the dismayed teacher, as he relates in Confessions, was St. Augustine. Sometimes students can try the patience of a saint.
One of those times is now. Seldom before have so many groups of students organized so militantly or seemed to try so hard to reorder their colleges, their countries or the world at large. It is the biggest year for students since 1848—a year of student-led revolution in Europe.
The rise of this obstreperous generation is a genuine phenomenon. It was unforeseen by educators, who scarcely a decade ago were overstating the case in criticizing what came to be called "the silent generation." Now the cry for student power is worldwide. It keeps growing and getting a lot of attention and quite a few results. For the first time in many years, students are marching and fighting and sitting-in not only in developing or unstable countries but also in the rich industrial democracies. In the U.S., the movement has spread from the traditionally active, alert and demonstrative student bodies of the elite schools to many usually quiescent campuses.
The protesting activists, still a very small minority, overlook the accomplishments of society but criticize its shortcomings. Possibly idealistic but skeptical of ideologies, they contend that governments have not performed up to their original promises. The student leftists disdain Soviet-style Communism as spiritually corrupt. The democrats fault the West's inequalities of wealth and race.
The activists demand change and want to determine its course. The university should not be the conserver of society, they argue, but the fountain of reform. They believe that students should be not merely preparing to enter the active world but a force within it. Many of them have a fashionable disaffection for organized religion, but they express the Judaeo-Christian belief that one man should act where he is, and that if he does so, he can help to change the world.
| Demonstrations & Issues
During the past three months, students have demonstrated for change in 20 countries. They have taken to the streets in such usual centers of student unrest as Brazil, Japan and The Netherlands and in such normally placid places as Denmark, Switzerland and West Germany. Student protests have led to the temporary closing of at least three dozen universities in the U.S., Italy, Spain, Tunisia, Mexico, Ethiopia and other countries. Belgian student demonstrations, fanning the old Flemish-v.-Walloon controversy, brought the government down. Egyptian students, marching in spontaneous protest against government inefficiency, obliged Gamal Abdel Nasser to rearrange his Cabinet. Communist Poland put down street demonstrations, but only after suspending more than 1,000 rebellious students. More successful were Czechoslovakia's students: their protests were a significant factor in pushing out the old Stalinists and shifting the direction of government toward greater liberty.