The Movement for
Youth Rights: 1945-2000

[This article originally appeared in the Spring, 1998 issue of
Social Policy magazine.]

By Keith Hefner

The most durable achievement of the youth movement of the sixties was the recognition that young people deserved to be taken seriously, as students, citizens, criminal defendants—as people—and that adults in authority could be held accountable if they failed to recognize youth rights.

The sixties youth movement had two intertwined strands: one was youth participation in the broader social movements of the decade. The other was youth activism on behalf of specifically youth-related causes.

Youth were key participants in the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the emerging feminist and gay movements, the underground press, and the various new left groups where they fought for social change alongside adults.

Youth, and especially teenagers, were also involved in struggles more closely connected to their own issues as young people, such as those for school change and student rights, the creation of alternative youth programs, the right to vote, access to birth control, expanded legal rights for minors, and draft resistance.

The connections among broader social issues and "youth-for-youth" causes were complex and inseparable. Students who wanted to protest the war found themselves in conflict with school policies which limited free speech. Students active in civil rights issues quickly saw that the racial composition of school faculties was an important battleground. When young people took to the streets to protest they became painfully aware of their lack of legal rights and protection. It's not surprising that an overarching term—The Movement—was needed to encompass the wide range of personal and social protests of the time.

It is well-known that the protest movements of the sixties profoundly altered laws and attitudes. Less well-known is how those movements changed youth services. Prior to the sixties, traditional youth services like Scouts offered a "one size fits all" approach. Kids were told, "Here's what you're going to do." And, by and large, they did it. The sixties changed all that. All over the country, activists trained in the anti-war and civil rights movements began to set up programs that catered to youth needs as youth defined them. Alternative youth services included runaway centers, freedom schools, and sex and birth control counseling and programming. In a few cities, huge multi-service centers sprang up where teens could get a health check-up, attend a peer counseling group, and practice karate. Bob Moses, a leader of Freedom Summer in 1964 who now runs the Algebra Project, and Bill Ayers of the Weather Underground who now teaches and writes about youth, are only two of the thousands of 1960s activists who turned their idealism and passion to youth service. Today, alternative youth services are widespread and traditional youth serving organizations have been revamped to be much more youth-centered.

Schools and colleges underwent similar transformations. To make schools more responsive to student needs school districts set up alternative schools, gave students more choice of courses, and incorporated social services such as peer counseling into the regular school. Colleges dropped requirements, expanded the curriculum to include previously marginalized groups, and strove to provide amenities that entitlement-minded students demanded.

The new view of youth as people and citizens in their own right (not merely adults-in-training), percolated up to the Supreme Court in two landmark 1960s rulings, in re Gault, and Tinker v. Des Moines. In Gault (1967) the court ruled that the informal, paternalistic nature of juvenile court proceedings denied youth due process of law. Two years later, in Tinker, the Court ruled that students could not be prohibited from wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam war. In strikingly strong pro-youth language, the court wrote, "It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech at the schoolhouse door."

What has changed since then?

The greatest (and self-evident) difference between the 1960s and today is that there are no comparable mass-based movements of young people struggling for social change.

There is little organized political work among youth from the left or the right, either youth-run or adult-initiated. And what there is typically focuses on narrow issues like sex education or conflict resolution. For example, the teen-written newsletter Sex, etc. circulates more than 300,000 copies nationwide. Conflict resolution programs run by Educators for Social Responsibility and other groups are popular in many school districts. The anti-sweatshop campaign, like the South Africa boycott before it, has captured the imagination of young people from elementary school through college and even spurred some young people to boycott companies charged with exploiting their workers overseas. On the right, Dr. James Dobson's Love Can Wait program recently inspired tens of thousands of teens to demonstrate in Washington for abstinence until marriage.

A less obvious difference between now and then is that today's youth have taken to heart the notion that they are people deserving of rights and respect. Youth participation in the broader social movements of the 1960s imbued in them the notion of the inherent worth and dignity of marginalized groups (women, blacks, gays, etc.). It opened up a political space to critique the idea of the straight, white, adult, male as normative. Young people began to sense that they too had inherent worth—that they should be seen and valued for who they are, not for who they might become. Today, those people are parents, teachers, and youth program directors, and the lessons they learned have become part of the culture—though not always in the ways that we expected.

As a result, youth voices are heard and heeded in ways they never were in the past. While youth have not seized political power (they have little or no formal governance role, even in youth-serving institutions) they exercise power as consumers and through peer networks. As consumers they are selective in their participation and crafty in their forms of resistance to institutions like schools and youth programs, when they fail to meet their perceived needs. The declining importance of activities like high school student councils reflects teen unwillingness to play-act powerless adult roles. And the much lamented decline in teen "respect" for adults is, in part, a refusal by teens to play the role of "adult in training" and instead to demand respect for themselves as teens.

The growth of peer counseling and community service projects is another significant byproduct of the sixties. Arising from the free clinics of the 1960s, those projects give young people opportunities to contribute that, while not part of a social justice movement, they do promote citizenship development and expose young people to social issues.

At the institutional level, one of the biggest changes in the past 30 years is the growth of the pro-youth lobby. In 1970, all the youth advocates in Washington could meet around one table. Today, hundreds of groups work on child poverty, youth violence, teen pregnancy, youth employment, and other youth-related issues.

And, at a deeply personal level, teens have rejected the sixties catch phrase, "Don't trust anyone over 30." Adolescents, abandoned to VCRs, video games, and latch-key afternoons, crave relationships with adults. The powerful teen desire to find an adult who they can trust and talk to is one of the greatest unnoticed changes in the past 30 years.

For the future, poverty looms as the most daunting issue facing young people. Since the 1960s children have replaced the elderly as the poorest age cohort in the nation. The most serious youth problems—bad schools, poor health, violence, early pregnancy, disenfranchisement-are byproducts of poverty. Unfortunately, there is no powerful movement to provide the European-style social safety net that seems to be the only way to protect youth from the brutalities of poverty that are endemic to democratic capitalism. And youths' own consumerist mentality (in which the main question often is "How does it meet my immediate needs?") makes it difficult to mobilize a sustained struggle in support of broader social change.

What might upset the dominant complacency and consumerism? Perhaps the sweatshop movement resonates not just because the good guys and bad guys are easy to identify, but also because young people feel a sense of unease about their own prospects in the workforce. Perhaps the right-wing attacks on affirmative action and immigrant rights will awaken the a latent social conscience and sense of fair play. Or perhaps the recent efforts to require school uniforms and crackdowns on student expression (most recently around the Internet), will make young people realize that the civic stature they gained in the sixties is not an entitlement. Rather, like democracy itself, it will can be snatched away by the powerful unless the people of every generation fight to preserve it.

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Since 1980, Keith Hefner has been the executive director of Youth Communication, which publishes New Youth Connections and Foster Care Youth United, magazines written by and for teens.

From 1971-1979 Hefner ran Youth Liberation Press, which published How to Start a High School Underground Newspaper, Students and Youth Organizing, and other books about youth rights.