Travel through the world of English: Teens' revolution

Following the viewing of the 1955 film "Rebel Without a Cause," contextualized by the topic studied this week "The 50s", we chose, in this post, to focus on some ideas about the differences and similarities between the contemporary youth of this film and the youth of today.

As a starting point for this analysis we highlight the fact that in the 50s, the adolescence started relatively later and finish earlier than in these days. “Why does that happen?” that’s the question that rises.

In general, the demand level of children has been increasing significantly, thus visible a huge difference at this level, mainly in terms of the variety of activities connected to the education that the teens are subjected. In this context, today's children should be worried about their future a lot earlier than the children of the other decades (like the 50s). Alongside this, the room for “face-to-face” fun with street games and plays is decreasing while the electronic games and the television is gaining space in children’s life in a warning way, because they start to interact with virtual characters instead of real people and that disturbs the social growth of today's youth. The television puts, prematurely, kids in contact with “adult stuff” like sexuality, violence or even drugs, and with this fact we can easily see that one of the aspects that influenced the attitude change of the young people is the appearance of television that occurred in the 50s.

With the culmination of these various experiences, children are exposed in a radical way, to the almost absence of limits, such fact is accentuated by the lack of a proper education that parents can’t, or just don’t know, how to provide, making the assimilation of this symbolic message impossible, because kids won’t be able to distinguish what they see on TV and what happens in real life.

The youth of the 50s changed the way that adolescence was percepted, subverting the relations with the body and sexuality. So, it was the 50s children that announced loud and clear that it was “forbidden to forbid”. It was in this historic context that occurred the first teen revolution, that proclaimed their rights to political intervention and confronted the big amount of hypocrisy and conservatism that existed in the previous generations.

Teens imagined that another type of world would be possible and to this end they needed to take over absolute control, not just the political control but the moral, ethic and aesthetic control too. To reach that goal it was necessary to break the bound of dependence that they had with their parents, so they became adults a little earlier than expected, in a conflicting but joyful journey because the 50s teens were very optimistic. They started to leave their parents house earlier in the search of their own independence and values, with the adventure and the pursuit of the unknown as main objectives. They flooded the job market because they were too many looking for a job that would give them enough money to live with quality alone or sharing the apartment with friends.

All of these changes that occurred in teens' life and thoughts modified completely the concept of teenagehood and turned the process of adolescence a lot shorter.

Such fact influenced today’s youth in a different way because, though we start our adolescence very early, we finish it a lot later.

So, today we see a helpless generation because it still exists a big stack of information to filter due to the lack of parental support just like the 50s generation. But, if the 50s generation were fighting together for a better world, nowadays it’s not like that, because it’s everyone for oneself.