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about paying attention to carefully collected data, is meant to achieve,
and confessedly so, a very large social transformation.
This transformation, simply put, is the return to a once-again vital
and powerful American family, where mothers may be distinguished
from fathers and where children may fully be the wards of both. And
Kay Hymowitz's particular contribution to this general project is an
attempt to answer the question with which I began, namely, what in
God's name is going on with a cohort of children who by some reckon–
ing may be thought the luckiest since the world began and who yet seem
to be caught up in some kind of frenzy of self-hatred.
Her answer is that they are, against both their wishes and capacities,
being required to bring themselves up. The term she uses to character–
ize the dispensation under which they are being both reared and edu–
cated is "anticultural." What she means by this is that both at home and
at school they are being instructed about life and about the world by the
adults who mean to impress upon them that little or nothing of the past
has any value to them.
It
goes without saying that the children of whom she speaks are the
offspring of the baby boomers, who appear to imagine that they did
indeed make a revolution in the sixties and seventies, and that in their
footsteps all has been made new. Thus by implication their children are
happily and creatively on their own in a brand new world (an idea made
all the more plausible by the sight of all of them, from toddlers on up,
totally at home and at peace, fingers flying, in that place of a limitless
future known as the cyberworld).
There is no question that in the two decades of the 1960s and 1970s,
collectively known as the Sixties, much of the old ethos had collapsed
and much had been made "new." Women, for instance, were figura–
tively and often literally storming the streets; marriage and childbearing
were beginning to be put off until some mythic "later," while sex
seemed to be ever freer (if in truth no easier); and among other signs of
liberation there were people, among them judges and lawyers, who were
ever more successfully invoking something called children's "rights,"
both legal and moral.
Such "rights," however, could soon be seen-by anyone, that is, with
eyes to see-to have far more to do with the abdication of responsibil–
ity, at least on the part of parents and teachers, than with any new–
found sense of justice. Kay Hymowitz quotes, for instance, from an
article by one Hillary Rodham, published in 1978 in the
Harvard Edu–
cation Review,
in which she said, "when it comes to decisions about
motherhood and abortion, schooling, cosmetic surgery, treatment of
