The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [161]
At Sarah Lawrence College, where students had taken a large responsibility for their own education and for the organization of their own affairs, it was discovered that the new generation of students was helpless, apathetic, incapable of handling such freedom. If left to organize their own activities, no activities were organized; a curriculum geared to the students’ own interests no longer worked because the students did not have strong interests of their own. Harold Taylor, then president of Sarah Lawrence, described the change as follows:
Whereas in earlier years it had been possible to count on the strong motivation and initiative of students to conduct their own affairs, to form new organizations, to invent new projects either in social welfare, or in intellectual fields, it now became clear that for many students the responsibility for self-government was often a burden to bear rather than a right to be maintained.…Students who were given complete freedom to manage their own lives and to make their own decisions often did not wish to do so…. Students in college seem to find it increasingly difficult to entertain themselves, having become accustomed to depend upon arranged entertainment in which their role is simply to participate in the arrangements already made…. The students were unable to plan anything for themselves which they found interesting enough to engage in.4
The educators, at first, blamed this on the caution and conservatism of the McCarthy era, the helplessness engendered by the atom bomb; later, in the face of Soviet advances in the space race, the politicians and public opinion blamed the general “softness” of the educators. But, whatever their own weaknesses, the best of the educators knew only too well that they were dealing with a passivity which the children brought with them to school, a frightening “basic passivity which…makes heroic demands on those who must daily cope with them in or out of school.”5 The physical passivity of the younger generation showed itself in a muscular deterioration, finally alarming the White House. Their emotional passivity was visible in bearded, undisciplined beatnikery—a singularly passionless and purposeless form of adolescent rebellion. Juvenile delinquency ratios just as high as those in the city slums began to show up in the pleasant bedroom suburbs among the children of successful, educated, respected and self-respecting members of society, middle-class children who had all the “advantages,” all the “opportunities.” A movie called “I Was a Teenage Frankenstein” may not have seemed funny to parents in West-chester and Connecticut who were visited by the vice squad in 1960 because their kids were taking drugs at parties in each others’ pine-paneled playrooms. Or the Bergen County parents whose kids were arrested in 1962 for mass violation of the graves in a suburban cemetery; or the parents in a Long Island suburb whose daughters at thirteen were operating a virtual “call girl” service. Behind the senseless vandalism, the riots in Florida at spring vacation, the promiscuity, the rise in teenage venereal disease and illegitimate pregnancies, the alarming dropouts from high school and college, was this new passivity. For these bored, lazy, “gimme” kids, “kicks” was the only way to kill the monotony of vacant time.
That this passivity was more than a question of boredom—that it signaled a deterioration of the human character—was felt by those who studied the behavior of the American GI’s who were prisoners of war in Korea in the 1950’s.