Special of the week; Issue 24-70 "The Teacher and Dissenters"

Why the. The British broke up in cooperation in collaboration with the national educational radio network for the transatlantic forum. In this edition the teacher and the dissent of the program introduced in London by Karen Kelly. Today we see a method from growing student involvement in political causes civil rights take the tough important issues indeed. But 10 or 20 years ago equally active in politics. Is there something about the way today's young people were brought up at home and the school that made them more politically rebellious and the Monday generations a few have indulgent home committed moral and free expression in education

sown the seeds of social turmoil. To this copied question we have in the studio involved them. MARTIN That that Professor of Government and sociology at Harvard University who made a special study of student and youth movement and in the London studio the aim of novelist and formally a University and Dr. Anthony saw a compelling and I cut it. Gentlemen how do today's young people differ generally from those of say 20 years ago. MARTIN that well there's no question that they've been reared in more permissive homes and that this probably plays some role in their being more rebellious more politically active students who are in the 40s and subsidies. However one should remember the students were quite active perhaps as or even more active during the 30s. And that in this country in the United States and in Great Britain as well there have been previous periods of unrest cirrhotic Ashby has just recently finished a book which I believe will appear in a few months. Describing the history of student activism in Britain which is

quite extensive and a look at the American activism shows period so around the turn of the 19th century for example in which there was a great deal of violence and student unrest as well as later periods like however there is no question that the current wave of unrest is at least in the United States the most extensive and powerful that we have ever had and one can point to the fact that the current generation of students of one goes back 20 years were reared in more open and permissive homes. I would argue however that what the main thing that distinguishes the students of today in terms of their upbringing from those of earlier generations that there are many other factors involved is the fact that the the students who have been most involved in politics come not only from permissive homes but from related factor that is from homes which have been politically on the liberal left chemist Ken Astin of Yale University used on a considerable amount of research on an American student activist describes them as the red diaper babies by which he

means of course that they are the children of the leftists of the previous generation. And in fact if one goes back and asked you know who their parents were. A lot of them were the activists of the 30s. Well now you've brought up a great many of us here that we can discuss in the discussion that's coming forward now but I think the aim is what you see as the changes in young people generally not just today. Well Ferguson happened rather nasty National Guard says they're probably just as intolerant and egotistical and terrible as their predecessors and their elders. So I may say that I think they're more sophisticated and also more ignorant. But I'd like to before I go on that take up a point made by Professor a little bit about the the red dot of a this is a cauldron is compelling phrase. I think this is true I think that young people are particularly quick to rock them to resent gaps between principals and

behavior and if your father or your parents or your general parental background professes progressive values socialism equality Brotherhood and so on and you find that what they're really doing is sitting down to $100 a plate dinners and embrace and generally reactionary values and find comfort and complacency and so on. Then you would expect your children to react against you very fond of him not only against you but against people occupy the same for the senior. Paternal position like professors you know the ministry saw and saw how far would you see the attitudes of young people today determined by the way they've been brought up changes in the way they've been brought up in fact I think that is a change in the sense that the so-called committee has made young people in the way that they talk to the elders and they behave in

general. So I thought one of the main changes was that they realized that they had when I was an undergrad you know that we thought about those as really having any power to alter the course with them. No you never do all of that with the world student who realize that if they do protested it they barely make it. And if they do it in the showdown then exit things happen and this is a totally new realize ish whether that's really a result of permissive upbringing I don't know that. But in the real change since my day the permissive upbringing come into all this. Well if you're encouraged from an early age not simply to acquiesce in what your elders tell you but to say what you think or to express different opinions. It does of course encourage you to stick your neck out there so it goes in a way which I think it will. You know I should float a little theory here perhaps a little early in the program but

we're talking about a gap of about 20 or 25 years and with a sort of comparison we're making right now you occurred to me that obvious enough that perhaps there's been time between say 1945 and 50 in 1970 for the collapse of religious belief. Would it take you say I speak as an agnostic obliques atheist brought up in a chapel Backus nonconformists so I have no religious stake in this but I do feel that the weakening of organized religion Christian Jewish and other means the weakening of family life and his right to be respectful Farsi and perseverance. Well you know I'm struck by the number I brought one can talk to statistically as well as impression that's likely but I'm struck by the number of people active in some of the current student movements in the United States who very closely express the opinions of their parents to take one extreme example and she's very

untypical the teen app techer who is one of the leaders of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement is the daughter of herbut up taiko who's a leader theoretician of the Communist Party. And she had a discussion that she had once of the Communist Party convention some years later complained as a leader of the youth of the Communist Youth Movement. But I think her statistics where the two thirds of the Young Communists and they are a tiny group compared to the rest of the left of course. But the two thirds of the Young Communists were came from communist families who have not this continuity not break but continuity and in fact it's an interesting question to ask why some communists at least have been seemingly better able to bring up their children to follow the traditional beliefs of the family than other groups. Now of course the communists are a tiny insignificant group numerically in the U.S. But still the kind of thing chemist and talks about of this family continuity in values. Kingsley Amos mentioned the point quite correctly that students or young people reject hypocrisy and you know one of the chart one of the things about the charge of

hypocrisy if you if you call a person old or otherwise a hypocrite. What you mean is that his there's a gap between his values and his actions. Now if you're a left winger you don't call a conservative a hypocrite for acting as a conservative. He's he's perfectly consistent with his values. A young leftist would call an older person a hypocrite who claims to be a leftist but who actually doesn't seem to be conforming to the pattern of leftism so that when they students accuse their parents of being hypocrites of the older generation of being hypocrites or their teachers the professors are being hypocrites. What they were testing to is that they are choosing people who claimed who claimed to be leftists who taught them to be leftists as hypocrites for not carrying out their their their or their beliefs. And in the United States at least I don't know the equivalent data for Great Britain but the United States at least study after study and we have with our enormous establishment of researches large quantities of studies now on student attitudes behavior activism and so on they almost constantly come up with a similar

finding that the the the student activists on the left come from liberal left liberal only American sons left families and conversely those who belong for example a very conservative youth organization. Young Americans for Freedom come from conservative families either upwardly mobile workers or the children of conservative businessman. So there's really much more generational continuity in sheer political values. Then one would anticipate one also finds in these studies that there is a school bus a good car lation between permissive upbringing and liberal left political orientations on the part of students. But this is a large part explained by the fact that parents of liberal left persuasion tend to be the ones who are most premise of conservative parents politically tend to be more authoritarian patriarchal in their relations with children. And if you want to then go further as some studies have done to the friendship between those students who come from a permissive background who are politically leftist in an activist sense and those who are not.

The difference then turns out to be whether the parents have been active or not the activists children tend to come from activist parents and like the car away sions in many of these cases are quite high so that what we see is a kind of generational is is I suggest generational continuity with however the younger generation as is quite typical being much more idealistic much more moralistic much more absolute best in their values and this I should add is true for the young conservatives in the country as it is for the young leftists. Well I thought I don't think we've done it many on logical studies. But. How does that same thing I've come across to you as a psychiatrist. And I thought in general I'd go along with that and I'd really like to link it with what King was saying because when he raises the question of common years and how successful they are in being at their children becoming is this is

because they do in fact have a belief in just or with you don't. And one of the difficulties that well together internally and really is good because we're going through a transitional period because everybody in the nudity and the venues I think of the children of who is called New Group Limited turn and are very often thinking of who is said to be seeking for some sort of rule of law and also some new in fact through very human with the moment in which I think is one in the course of the student who I think that they're fed up with not having guidelines it can be difficult because if you have been a parent in a family where everything is aware of the myth there's nothing to rebel against. There's nothing to hurt yourself again and therefore you can't live in the sort of vacuum because you can't either. Your point of view because and I think many

people I'd like if I may interrupt at this point I'd like to add another dimension in this country which I think maybe different in Britain and that is the schools that as the high schools the secondary schools to which the American students coming from sort of the liberal left upper part of the upper middle class those families which tend to be employed and what a colleague of mine David Cohen is called the Welfare intellectual industries where their parents are largely clustered in the United States many of these parents either live in suburbs where they control the schools the public school the state school system which are which are generally very good in terms of the competence of the teachers but also extraordinarily progressive and permissive in terms of the internal operation of the school where they send their children to private schools which are also extraordinarily progressive both in a political sense often as well as in a permissive educational sense so that these students in the high in their high school education come to college or university. Out of an environment in which they've been running things

in which the whole high school environment is oriented towards making education play fact the same colleague of mine David Cone who I mention in what is really a little extremely illuminating as yet unpublished paper makes the suggestion that the parents in this educational in these welfare and academically inclined occupations tend to have an image of education that comes straight out of Marxist utopian image of socialist of the German ideology. Marx as you recall describes socialism as a situation in which one will hunt in the morning read poetry or fish in the afternoon and read poetry in the evening in which work in effect was lost. How to be motivated to play and the dominant educational idiology which has been advanced by a lot of progressive educational theorists in the United States is one where there is to be absolutely no coercion in the school system in the form of exams teachers pressure and the like and that educational utopian socialist conception actually permeates a large part of the

education of a high school educational system in which the liberal part of the upper middle class and their children so that these children come to university not only from permissive homes but from high schools where they've been running things both educationally and India largely. Think if you want to comment. Well I only say that there are now that that is so it has so often I think the United States ahead of us. I don't mean intellectually but they've come up with what I'm what I consider for a moment of I'm as I go back to a point that this bill is making about children since they were that sort of age looking for guidance of some sort of direction I think is that the True I found to take a quite a different sort of approach the same point that the feelings that I had in South Wales and Cambridge in the past so they were all very different political complexion from very different upbringing and class origins and so on. We united on one point but they weren't paid enough attention by the members of the faculty.

You know our kids up just as I did my visit to everybody conservative socialist rich for example what is wrong with Cambridge at that particular they all fit without any excess of coal we don't get enough contact with Siemens university and I think this is we should be very much feared as not exactly a friend of ours. In fact there's a much more of that. But but as an explanation I think that whatever they may say to each other I want to make beds and fill these young people very much are looking for. And their parents don't seem to be playing the role of father or son and somebody in some sort of relationship they would like their teacher their gone their lecture the professor to be doing this and I think it's true to from what I've read that the kind of faculty members of the militant scenes are most angry about are not the people who are different from the politically but the people who will say in effect you're doing that means

your view or your role is minute to come between me and my research me in my book me on my television program and I feel that this is true of both our countries both sides of them and thought well I was fried by a brother who if it was a man American students because I was teaching in the summer. And my impression of American undergraduate was that they were extraordinarily compound and a billion two of you and I had a cause about 80 who just sat and read down everything I said and I did my best to get them to the end of the 10 minute free and so on to question and it was with the greatest difficulty that you got anybody to rebel who asked questions do you see any person who didn't was one student who was already a graduate at the undergrad who thinks that wouldn't play and I got the impression that American education from this very limited experience was at the height of moral authority. And I'm there.

Well I I think I think the facts are the statements I made those which you make are not incompatible strictly given you know are the fact we now have something close to eight million students in institutions of higher education. Yeah. And it is quite true. I was talking about a tiny minority of them. Basically those who come from these liberal politically permissive welfare you know college graduate parents sort of the liberal part of the upper middle class which itself is a minority of that class of that class but whose children are the ones who are most most activist. And I think I should mention also that the summer session would be a bad sample in that it is the students who went to summer would be those who were most vocationally oriented. Most oriented to sort of get ahead academically within the system take advantage of the opportunities it offers to them from an educational vocational point of view and that you find relatively few of the kinds of students that I was talking about in summer session. In this research in this regard it's

interesting to note also that the first generation university students in America. Particularly the children of manual workers of whom we have quite a number 10 on the whole to be either a political. Or that has their vocationally educationally oriented or to be relatively conservative in fact comparative studies which were made couple of years ago of the delegates to the Young Americans for Freedom convention and to the students for a democratic society yes the s convention produced the finding that about a third of the delegates to the Wyeth the conservative Young Americans for Freedom. Well the children are manual workers and 0 percent of the STF delegates came from manual worker backgrounds. Now the manual worker children on the whole will tend to be hard working. Well see University as a way of getting ahead will be concerned with the grades they get in school and will be relatively indifferent if they're not outraged by the efforts of the other students to to. To press them to become

political and to waste their time in college. What about for work and not just the young people to come. But they are young work out their rebellion against the Second World War and that's what the young and the boys getting the New York gang. I thought well you gotta remember the generation which is that the Fed has more or less has more money and has very little provided them. At an age when masculine rebellion and men can insult the surgeon this time what are they to do with themselves. Well young men who are boiling as it were for a fight or at least for some sort of aggressive manifestation of self-assertion in male and the less I think we forget that for many years we've tolerated a good deal of bad behavior among

the upper classes that are living in Cambridge tearing people to pieces on South America all this stuff. And we do this in a different turn and we make much more fuss about it but of course the charges were controlled in a kind of way where they haven't been funded as a lurker. Geographically there's nowhere for them to go and the problem is really to provide some sort of fit for this at this particular age attorney say from 15 to 21 and if you've got kids and some goes on even have sympathy with the people who say they will be drafted into the 40s to spell something or revise we haven't begun to tackle it but I haven't put that rebellion into politics. Whereas the young in the last few years have been there in goes in education what we're talking about NA is a group which isn't particularly intelligent or educated but you know when the when the young have cracked are some of the assets of Iraq to mention wreck each other's room.

They didn't go very far they didn't go in for a physical fight and also bubble they didn't get on television. You know we have people that write articles about them. We have to start. As I say we have two groups of young workers in the United States both of whom have begun to go into politics in a certain way the left early redistributive sidedly political axis you have of course a lot of the young blacks and young negroes. And while the young black students are the most activist they do increasingly get a great deal of support from from working class youth an organization like the Black Panthers those small gets much of its membership and support for front from young black workers. But on the other side and I think less noticeable by many people particularly abroad is the extent to which a movement like a right wing movement like the lalas movement which was racist American Wallace American Independent Party was both young and working class.

That is Wallace drew his support in 1968 disproportionately from the young and from the workers which meant that among young workers His support was at its height young white workers and in fact in the trade unions which had a great deal of difficulty with lost support among their members. That difficulty was again it at its height among its very young members the older trade unionists were were having allegiance to the party of the New Deal of the Welfare State of the trade unions and of pro Humphrey. The younger workers were reacting much more to insecurities about the war about crime on the street and about changes in race relations and they and they moved over towards towards right wing activists so that in a real sense in the 968 election we had two youth revolts. One in the PL in the election one which took the form of a peace revolt which was largely middle class and college students around the candidacy first of Senator McCarthy and also Senator Robert Kennedy. But the other which took the form of strong support for George Wallace but these are not children they were not young people who as children had been reared in the idea of Dr. Park.

Oh no no it's not fun for the young workers I would guess sort of very much were reared in very different kinds of homes. But you sound surprised. It doesn't surprise me in the least the young workers of this country right wing intolerance is what I would expect. I don't I really thought that the the attempt if it had been very much of a hint of the truth. In the USA and here too when people get from it directly from the workers there's been a miserable failure only here I mean I thought chalked up on a bridge recently when workers unite. We want a pipe dream that is even from this didn't really come off and you know we seen workers certainly not in the right taking up the prophetic view to be militant. Quite the reverse. Well I don't know how much publicity this demonstrate the recent demonstration of the construction workers and others received in Britain. But as you may have read we had a parade of

some estimated somewhere between one hundred one hundred fifty thousand workers in New York which was a pro-war parade which was a reaction to student demonstrations on Wall Street there's a large amount of skyscraper building going on in New York something like 22 in Manhattan at the moment. So there are many construction workers and when student groups invaded the Wall Street's cries scraper area to protest against the war. These construction workers reacted first by beating up some of them and then in the unions their trade unions in an effort to Tamil you're right the reaction proposed a demonstration on the Stemmons tracing was by far the biggest demonstration held in New York probably since World War Two it was a working class directory. I'm sorry I'm still working the same thing would happen if the students here went down to the docks where a not good for to get beat not exactly the same with protesting about color prejudice because you get this very month in the right wing working from the same the same dichotomy at 10 I think it all looks rather parochial I mean in a sense they were

dealing with millions of people of course but if you compare the lot happening outside it is aware that Czech team remark recent visitor when he looks as American student rebels he might well have found in British ones as well. He thought he was confronted by the spoiled children because there really isn't an adult means something because of the gun at the end of it. Looking to the future to come up do we think that young people are going to get more about the arts and how can provide what we can do or let me and I have in the states the immediate future I think is very much linked to the war. Just this past month in May and I'm sure it'll continue into June the extension of the Vietnam war into Cambodia had refurbished recreated student protest movement on a scale that we really haven't seen since since the whole thing began and include and involved in the protest movement many students say them although one majority of those who are involved who had never been involved before because of their shock and the nation about the extension of the war after it seemed like the war was coming to an end and I would

say the immediate future at any rate of American student protest is very much linked to the future of the war in Vietnam at that are you opening up. I think we're going to bring the right to learn who is even more structured. I don't know what the believe who will be but I'm going to have you know the big three hundred years. How can they cope. I don't know that I agree about that as it was I'm going there will be a swing away from this but I think if this is desirable in that we're not going to get very much by being too serious about the stink and shock and indignation about Cambodia. I think it's student hysteria follow my leader very much. Kingsley Amis contaminates on in London might admit that about them. Thank you all very much. Transatlantic forum was produced in London by the British Broadcasting Corporation in collaboration with the national educational radio network taking part in the programme with Seymour Martin lips set in Boston and Antony store in Kingsley Amos in London.

Your chairman in London with Terrence Kelly this is the national educational radio network.