Conditioning forces facing our youth

Many people have different attitudes towards the young today. Usually, one is either too optimistic or too pessimistic.

For the pessimists, I quote a paradoxical extract I deem very consoling: “We live in an age of decadence. The young are good-for-nothing, do not respect their elders, are impatient and rebellious. The wisdom of the old is ridiculed by them and their parents are treated without regard. These symptoms of our age are an indication that we are near to the end of the world.”

What is consoling in these gloomy phrases, many will ask. The signatory and the date: Atamou, scribe of Thebes, in Egypt, 2,500BC, more than 4,500 years ago.

Pope John Paul II spoke in a more hopeful way in late 1979. “Young people, in their various phases from adolescence to the doorstep of marriage,” he told cardinals, “are righteous, generous, thirsty for the truth, for justice; they turn to the Church with renewed interest and with a profound desire for a clear reply to the fundamental questions of life… But I think also of the obscure realities which menace this potential richness of life.”

Young people realise, more or less consciously, that they are subject to strong conditioning forces and complain they are either unable to express their creativity or they have already lost it.

The originality of youngsters is not protected and is continuously menaced. This is done by the stereotyped culture fed to them by the press and TV. The creativity of the very young is not valued as a precious treasure. So, “the individual is born original and dies as a copy”.

The conditioning comes from the family, which imposes “fixed roles” and standard behaviour according to sex or social status. The family uses the TV like a babysitter, abandoning the children to its spell instead of living together with them. It uses trivialities and games imposed by publicity, instead of helping them express themselves and stimulate creativity.

Young people live in a society that does not give space for children to play and grow, builds houses insufficient for adults and unsuitable for children, does not offer young people the opportunity to get together and be active, except in dance halls. Blessed, therefore, are the youth associations that do provide space for the experience of life, of liberty, of personal choice, the most important group relations and encounters with others and with God.

The school becomes conditioning if the teacher does not teach what he should or teaches what he should not; if he teaches without intent.

There is certainly a substantial scarcity of real values

The strongest conditioning comes from publicity and from all the myths diffused through social media; the false values of money, of success, of sex, of violence, of the car, of high-society life, of supermen and other things, spread in a big way by TV, cinema, cartoon strips, photo-romances, illustrated magazines and records.

The way these conditioning forces are used and the influence they have depend greatly on the age of the young people concerned.

The most evident phenomena are: the excessive time children of pre-scholastic and scholastic age are exposed to television (in many cases, even five hours a day) and social media; the great influence of modern songs and music on the young; the emotional involvement of both the TV and the mobile phone when compared to the passive state to which the spectator is reduced; the fact that the models of behaviour demonstrated are, for the most part, inferior but still indicated as quite normal and taken for granted (diffusion of the mass-medium mentality, which takes for granted what should be verified); the scarcity of education in the critical sense.

The end result is ‘massification’.

In terms of education, the real problem is to take note of this existentialist condition and to lay stress on personal liberty, within the ‘mass’ context prevailing within society.

When an education community puts among its primary tasks the formation of the critical sense and, in play, sport and social life, offers young people valid alternatives to the excessive use of the social communication media or when it enters into the mass-media proposing alternative products, it carries out a valuable service for the liberation of mankind.

In their free time, in particular, young people are subject to a precise consumeristic exploitation. Other strong conditioning influences come from the political parties, which have been transformed into rigid ideological schemes.

The late rector major of the Salesians, Don Viganò, synthesised several of these problems in an interview to L’Avvenire: “The youth of the so-called consumer society, particularly in Europe, is striving to find the entire sense of life which has been adulterated by an affluent society… However, I am preoccupied by a certain superficiality in these young persons. This needs to be seen urgently so as to be able to confront the challenges of a cultural pluralism…”

Many of our youngsters do not have any traditional values and, overcome by the exigencies of the present times, tend to be autonomous in relation to the world of their elders, which, to them, seems to be unjust and foreign.

Their lost values are replaced by others that creep into their lives.

No matter from what angle you look at the problem, there is certainly a substantial scarcity of real values; a void is, thus, created, which, unfortunately, can be easily filled by other means.

Fr Charles Cini is a member of the Salesians of Don Bosco.