The episode marks a dramatic segment in the film, but it has an ironic import. The statement makes a claim to individuality, but in truth the young artist merely expresses a customary adolescent stance, and his disregard follows logically from his age and era. It is the nature of adolescents to believe that authentic reality begins with themselves, and that what long preceded them is irrelevant. For 15-year-olds in the United States in the twenty-first century, the yardstick of pertinence is personal contact, immediate effects. Space and time extend not much further than their circumstances, and what does Holbein’s portrait of Sir Thomas More have to say to a kid who works at Wendy’s, struggles with algebra, and can’t find a girl-friend? The attitude marks one of the signal changes of the twentieth century in the United States. It insists that a successful adolescence and rightful education entail growing comfortable with yourself, with who you are at age 17. Many generations ago, adolescent years meant preparation for something beyond adolescence, not authentic selfhood but serious work, civic duty, and family responsibility, with parents, teachers, ministers, and employers training teens in grown-up conduct. Adolescence formed a tenuous middle ground between the needs of childhood and the duties of adulthood, and the acquisition of the virtues of manhood and womanhood was an uncertain progress. It did not terminate with an acceptance and approval of the late-teen identity. The shrewdest approach was not to prize the interval but to escape it as efficiently as possible.
Not anymore. For a long time now, adolescence has claimed an independent value, an integrity all its own. The rise of adolescence is too long a story to tell, but the stance of teachers and researchers that fostered it may be indicated by a few highlights. In one of its first authoritative expressions, Professor G. Stanley Hall, president of Clark University and head of the American Psychological Association, composed a massive volume outlining the uniqueness of the stage. In
Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology
. . . (1904), he observed in glorious cadences, “Self-feeling and ambition are increased, and every trait and faculty is liable to exaggeration and excess. It is all a marvelous new birth, and those who believe that nothing is so worthy of love, reverence, and service as the body and soul of youth, and who hold that the best test of every human institution is how much it contributes to bring youth to the ever fullest possible development, may well review themselves and the civilization in which we live to see how far it satisfies this supreme test.”
Hall’s model shifted the burden of maturity entirely to adults, and it only takes a small step to pass from his effusions to one of the youth Bibles of the latter twentieth century, Charles Reich’s
The Greening of America
(1970), a long, animated discourse on the cataclysmic energies of young Americans. A leader of the Free Speech Movement, Jack Weinberg, famously advised, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” a slogan handily dismissed as sophomoric cheek. Reich, a 42-year-old Yale law professor, converted the defiant antics and rash flights of youth into a World Historical advent, and his publications in
The New Yorker
and the
New York Times
weren’t so easily ignored, especially when
The Greening of America
climbed the best-seller list. “There is a revolution coming,” Reich prophesied. “It will not be like revolutions of the past. . . . This is the revolution of the new generation. Their protest and rebellion, their culture, clothes, music, drugs, ways of thought, and liberated life-style are not a passing fad or a form of dissent and refusal, nor are they in any sense irrational. ” Reich interpreted youth lifestyle as a serious expression with deep political, social, and moral content, however flippant and anti-intellectual it appeared, and while his book comes off today like little more than a dated artifact in a time capsule, shorn of the radical, Bacchic 1960s rhetoric, the outlook he promoted carries on.
A cover story in
Time
magazine exemplifies it well (24 Jan 2005). The article profiles a new youth phenomenon, an unforeseen generational sub-cohort termed the “Twixters.” This curious social outcropping rests in a novel cluster of demographic traits. Twixters:
• are 22 to 30 years old;
• have a college degree, or substantial college coursework;
• come from middle-class families; and
• reside in cities and large suburban centers.
These features embody nothing unusual, certainly, but where they lead is surprising. What makes the Twixters different from other people with the same demographics from the past is the lifestyle they pursue after college. Consider the typical choices they have made:
• Instead of seeking out jobs or graduate studies that help them with long-term career plans—internships, for instance, or starting low in a company in which they plan to rise—they pass through a series of service jobs as waiters, clerks, nannies, and assistants.
• Instead of moving into a place of their own, they move back home with their parents or into a house or large apartment with several Twixter peers. In fact,
Time
reports, 20 percent of 26-year-olds live with their parents, nearly double the rate in 1970 (11 percent).
• Instead of forming a long-term relationship leading to marriage, they engage in serial dating. They spread their significant personal contact across many friends and roommates and sex partners, who remain deeply important to them well beyond college.
Despite their circumstances, Twixters aren’t marginal youngsters sinking into the underclass. They drift through their twenties, stalled at work and saving no money, but they like it that way. They congregate just as they did before college, hopping bar to bar on Friday night and watching movies on Saturday. They have achieved little, but they feel good about themselves. Indeed, precisely along the lines of Reich’s understanding, they justify their aimless lifestyle as a journey of self-discovery. Yes, they put off the ordinary decisions of adulthood (career, marriage), but with a tough job market and so many divorced parents, their delays mark a thoughtful desire to “search their souls and choose their life paths,” to find a livelihood right for their “identity.” So Lev Grossman, the author of the story, phrases it. Social scientists quoted in the article, too, ennoble the lifestyles, judging Twixter habits (in Grossman’s paraphrase) “important work to get themselves ready for adulthood.” These young people take adulthood “so seriously, they’re spending years carefully choosing the right path into it.” University of Maryland psychologist Jeffrey Arnett dislikes the “Twixter” label, preferring “emerging adulthood.” They assume no responsibilities for or to anyone else, he concedes, but that only permits them “this wonderful freedom to really focus on their own lives and work on becoming the kind of person they want to be.” Sociologist James Côté blames their delay on the economy: “What we’re looking at really began with the collapse of the youth labor market,” he says, which persists today and means that young people simply can’t afford to settle down until their late twenties. Marshall Heskovitz, creator of the television shows
thirtysomething
and
My So-Called Life,
gives the problem a social /emotional angle: “it’s a result of the world not being particularly welcoming when they come into it. Lots of people have a difficult time dealing with it, and they try to stay kids as long as they can because they don’t know how to make sense of all this. We’re interested in this process of finding courage and one’s self.” And a Dartmouth neuroscientist backs the economic and social resistances with brain chemistry: “We as a society deem an individual at the age of 18 ready for adult responsibility. Yet recent evidence suggests that our neuropsychological development is many years from being complete.”
Their comments apply a positive spin to what less sympathetic elders would call slacker ways. But even if we accept the characterizations—their brains aren’t ready, the cost of living is high, they take marriage too seriously to plunge into it—there is something missing from the expert observations in the article, an extraordinary absence in the diagnosis. In casting Twixter lifestyle as genuine exploration and struggle, neither the author nor the researchers nor the Twixters themselves whisper a single word about intellectual labor. Not one of the Twixters or youth observers mentions an idea that stirs them, a book that influenced them, a class that inspired them, or a mentor who guides them. Nobody ties maturity to formal or informal learning, reading or studying, novels or paintings or histories or syllogisms. For all the talk about life concerns and finding a calling, none of them regard history, literature, art, civics, philosophy, or politics a helpful undertaking. Grossman speaks of Twixter years as “a chance to build castles and knock them down,” but these castles haven’t a grain of intellectual sand in them. As these young people forge their personalities in an uncertain world, they skirt one of the customary means of doing so—that is, acquainting themselves with the words and images, the truths and beauties of the past—and nobody tells them they have overlooked anything. Social psychologists don’t tell them so, nor do youth experts and educators, but the anti-intellectual banality of their choices is stark. What is the role of books in the Twixter’s world? Negligible. How has their education shaped their lives? Not at all. This is what the Twixters themselves report. One of them remarks, “Kids used to go to college to get educated. That’s what I did, which I think now was a bit naïve. Being smart after college doesn’t really mean anything.”
In a word, the Twixter vision aligns perfectly with that of their wired younger brothers and sisters. It’s all social, all peer-oriented. Twixters don’t read, tour museums, travel, follow politics, or listen to any music but pop and rap, much less do something such as lay out a personal reading list or learn a foreign language. Rather, they do what we expect an average 19-year-old to do. They meet for poker, buy stuff at the mall, and jump from job to job and bed to bed. The maturity they envision has nothing to do with learning and wisdom, and the formative efforts that social scientists highlight don’t include books, artworks, ideologies, or Venn diagrams. For the Twixters, mature identity is entirely a social matter developed with and through their friends. The intellectual and artistic products of the past aren’t stepping-stones for growing up. They are the fading materials of meaningless schooling.
The Twixter piece illustrates a softer version of the outlook we witnessed above, the Arts for Humanity mentor-artist who doesn’t give a darn about Rembrandt and Picasso. He merely supplies a clear and distinct expression of the self-oriented, present-oriented, anti-tradition, knowledge-indifferent posture of his contemporaries. And the authors of the
ArtShow
study likewise reflect the judgment of Grossman’s social scientists and youth experts. Keep in mind that the filmmakers chose to insert the “I’m just trying to be Carlo Lewis, you know” avowal into the video, that among the many testimonials they filmed, this one survived the final cut. They must have liked it, and his disposal of artistic masters served their pedagogical point. In fact, if you read through the 95 pages of the resource guide, you can’t find a single assertion of the value of precursors, canonical models, aesthetic concepts, and artistic traditions. The list of 10 “Youth-Based Organizational Goals” includes “Working with every young person’s sense of self,” “Promoting dynamism and creativity to model on-going habits of learning, self-assessing, and project critiquing, ” and “Helping young people engage realistically with prejudicial behaviors that target youth.” It has nothing like “Introduce students to important artistic styles and movements” or “Have students visit local museums and select works to copy,” and it never recognizes that “project critiquing” of an intelligent kind requires artistic standards and knowledge. Moreover, it won’t acknowledge that the best way to combat stereotypes of youth as ignorant and irresponsible is for youths to demonstrate the opposite. The truth is that nothing endorses arts education better than educated student-artists, and in neglecting tradition
ArtShow
overlooks one of art’s strongest claims, the cultural authority of artistic heritage. An earnest student who speaks engagingly about Impressionism exhibits the value of after-school arts programs a lot more effectively than a research report filled with grandiloquent abstractions about learning and selfhood. But
ArtShow
cares more about the feelings of youths than the judgments of adults.
I watched the
ArtShow
video for the first time in the company of four arts educator/researchers, and when it ended one of them smiled and exclaimed how much he enjoyed precisely the complaint about kids in art class all having to copy the same Rembrandt painting. He concurred with the oppressiveness of it. I asked him whether he really thought that this was a good educational outcome. He blinked in reply, not sure what I meant. I said that such a disrespectful attitude toward artistic tradition was bound to limit the young man in his career. Not at all, the others disputed, and look at how far he’s already come. “Okay, then,” I relented. “Still, does the young man’s growth have to assume such an adversarial pitch?” Does tradition have to retire so conspicuously in order for the adolescent self to come into its own?
Nobody else worried about the polarity, though, and my question seemed to arrive from out of the blue. It’s not an atypical response. Spend some hours in school zones and you see that the indulgent attitude toward youth, along with the downplaying of tradition, has reached the point of dogma among teachers, reporters, researchers, and creators in arts and humanities fields, and pro-knowledge, pro-tradition conceptions strike them as bluntly unpleasant, if not reactionary and out of touch. Indeed, the particular mode of sympathy for the kids has taken such a firm hold that offering education as a fruitful dialectic of tradition and individuality looks downright smothering. Uttered so rarely in education circles, a modest opinion in favor of tradition comes across to experts and mentors as an aggression against the students, a curmudgeon’s grievance. For many of them, the power of cultural tradition sounds authoritarian and retrograde, or aligned with a Eurocentric, white male lineage, their view recalling the Culture Wars of the 1980s when conservative activists battled liberal professors over the content of the curriculum in English classes. In truth, however, the indulgence crosses ideological boundaries, touching generational feelings that mix widely among liberals and conservatives alike. It’s not a political conflict. It’s a cultural condition, a normative sentiment positioning young people in relation to a past and a future, the cultural inheritance and their prospective adulthood. Instead of charting as Left or Right, it charts as traditionalist or self-centered (or youth-centered, present-fixated, individualist). And while traditionalists lean toward conservative opinion, many liberals feel a similar respect for the past and impatience with youth self-absorption, and many conservatives no longer set their moral values, religious faith, and civic pride under the long shadow of great books and thoughts and artworks.