Teaching the Art of History

The college generation is disgusted, out of patience, morally offended with us; they mistrust our handling of affairs; they don’t like the way things are going; they don’t want the same old crap. The Establishment, the war, the universities, music more than three years old, their parents, or anyway everyone else’s parents, middleclass morality, the myth that anybody over 35 except certain teachers knows anything about sex, history, morality, politics, government or the young themselves—they reject it all, not infrequently in non-university language. The only persons they accept are some of their own number and a certain set of youngish, or at least twinkling, instructors of history, anthropology, political science and other sensing disciplines who understand their desires and see the past with the same cynical eye, the future with the same bloodshot one, that they themselves do.

It’s all new to them. That is, the contumelious rejection of the old ways is all new to them, and they have had a certain amount of sympathy among their elders for their milling rebelliousness, even if the sympathy they get is itself somewhat confused. Many older people, at the very moment that they are vibrating harmoniously with the young people’s attitudes, are spending a good deal of time trying to formulate precisely what it is that the young people want in place of what they have. There is a certain amount of obscurity.

BL

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Bert Lippman

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The college generation is disgusted, out of patience, morally offended with us; they mistrust our handling of affairs; they don’t like the way things are going; they don’t want the same old crap. The Establishment, the war, the universities, music more than three years old, their parents, or anyway everyone else’s parents, middleclass morality, the myth that anybody over 35 except certain teachers knows anything about sex, history, morality, politics, government or the young themselves—they reject it all, not infrequently in non-university language. The only persons they accept are some of their own number and a certain set of youngish, or at least twinkling, instructors of history, anthropology, political science and other sensing disciplines who understand their desires and see the past with the same cynical eye, the future with the same bloodshot one, that they themselves do.

It’s all new to them. That is, the contumelious rejection of the old ways is all new to them, and they have had a certain amount of sympathy among their elders for their milling rebelliousness, even if the sympathy they get is itself somewhat confused. Many older people, at the very moment that they are vibrating harmoniously with the young people’s attitudes, are spending a good deal of time trying to formulate precisely what it is that the young people want in place of what they have. There is a certain amount of obscurity.