Youth and Social Change
- ISBN-10
- 0814314503
- ISBN-13
- 9780814314500
- Pages
- 410
- Language
- English
- Published
- 1972
- Publisher
- American Orthopsychiatric Association
- Author
- Morton Levitt
Description
The essays in this volume examine youthful dissent since Berkeley in 1964 within a number of contexts -- the school and the university, opposition to the draft and the Vietnam war, the civil rights struggle, and the drug culture. The contributors are particularly concerned with the role of the mental health professional in relation to the dilemma of youth today and their culture -- a culture that is widely divergent from that best known by the professional.
"As old forms and tradition shave fallen away, the adults continue to move along familiar paths and often seem to refuse to look at the surrounding rubble. In an attempt to find individual definition and social purpose today's youth has become disaffected, uncommitted, hostile, angry, and apathetic. A relatively small number have dedicated themselves to total destruction of our society."
Their very nonconformity often brings "a vicious storm of hatred -- and sometimes bullets -- down upon their heads." Particularly affected, the authors believe, are young people of the working class, whose homes were the first to be disrupted by the technological change and whose elders are the least tolerant of the characteristics of today's youth culture.
Most of the papers in this volume were presented at the forty-seventh annual convention of the American Orthopsychiatry Association -- a convention noted for the continuous disruption of its presentations by young protesters. Drs. Levitt and Rubenstein have interspersed vignettes of the students participating in the dissent with the formal papers which include contributions by Edgar Z. Freidenberg, Daniel Offer, and Nathan Glazer among many others. The authors present varying viewpoints on the proper function of the professional as both teacher and therapist in dealing with dissent.
