Talking about the future of youth seems paradoxical.

Because, according to ingrained idioms, the youth themselves are the future.

If that were the case, the future society would already be visible in the features that characterize its present youth.

Such characteristics - for example political skepticism or activism, career orientation or hedonism - would only have to be extended to get a picture of the near future.

The future of the youth would then be little more than their unfolded present.

Accordingly, the famous “youth studies”, that is, surveys among schoolchildren and students, are often read with worried looks to see whether the future distilled out of the present youth can also appear desirable to adults.

Jürgen Kaube

Editor.

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    The attempt to characterize the youth and then to declare the result to have a promising future, however, encounters a fundamental difficulty.

    Youth has only been a prominent transition in the life course of individuals for two hundred and fifty years.

    Before that, in a nutshell, there was childhood and adulthood, but no separate period in between.

    The transition to adult roles occurred early for younger members of the estates, and the pace of socialization was fast.

    In the novel “La Princesse de Clèves” by Madame de La Fayette in 1678, astonishment is noted that a woman in her twenties was even able to find a man's attention.

    Separation of family, school and work

    That changes when there is youth. Or better: where there are young people, because there are still parts of the world where marriage is very early, the educational phases are short and there is little romance about the status of young people. In the west and in the urban centers, however, entry into adulthood has long ceased to take place over a threshold, but through a wide space and in a whole series of stations. The main reasons for this are the separation of family, school and work. The need for education in modern societies is high, the offspring are not simply socialized in the vicinity of their origins, but are trained for tasks that remain undetermined for a long time.

    To be young therefore means, despite the jostling of education politicians: having to wait and being allowed to wait. Between having to, i.e. the gradual acquisition of certificates, and being allowed to, the use of free space at reduced normative tariffs, every youth therefore sees themselves in an ambivalent intermediate position. Historically, it has become longer and longer. “Modern man spends a considerable part of his life as a teenager,” said the sociologist Friedrich Tenbruck a good half a century ago. The current definitions of this age phase range from twelve to twenty-fifth years of age and beyond.