ABSTRACT
To enter history, each generation of youth must find an identity consonant with its own childhood and consonant with an ideological promise in the per ceptible historical process. But in youth the tables of childhood dependence begin slowly to turn: no longer is it merely for the old to teach the young the meaning of life, whether individual or collective. It is the young who, by their responses and actions, tell the old whether life as represented by the old and as presented to the young has meaning; and it is the young who carry in them the power to confirm those who confirm them and, joining the issues, to renew and regenerate, or to reform and to rebel.
