ABSTRACT

In this chapter, the author explains his understanding of the basic forces which today are directing learning, development and culture in youth. In the social sciences, the fundamental concepts of culture, society and personality have a high value of structuring. The author presents a change to the underlying convictions on these three levels: culture, society and the self. Youth cultures are formed by changes in general underlying convictions which include a deeply based kind of 'knowledge' fostering our motives, expectations and actions in ways which we are not conscious of in everyday life. It is possible to maintain a desirable gain of liberation in comparison with the earlier authoritarian everyday culture. A phenomenon of the cultural modernisation is about the relation to the self, the personal internal world and its motives. It seems to involve a changed quality of self-observation.