Abstract
The 1950s saw a wave of depictions of threatening male working-class adolescents in English novels, films and cartoons. However, these texts must be contextualised not only as part of the well-documented 1950s moral panic about youth but in relation to the popularized psychological concepts of the ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’ child and the increasing implementation of progressive educational ideas that artificially limited working-class pupils’ horizons. This makes this period not only another reiteration of the perennial moral panics about the rising generation that Geoffrey Pearson has documented, but an emergence of a new way of conceptualizing youth.
Highlights
In October 1949, a correspondent wrote to the Daily Mail to complain about youth
These fears do seem heightened compared to previous eras, the association of youth with modernity could be used to explain their intensity; if youth represent the future, concerns about Britain’s relative economic performance, the growing affluence of the working class, and the political and cultural dominance of America could be projected onto this social group
While I concur that the ‘generation gap’ has been exaggerated, I would like to argue in this article that teachers’ attitudes towards youth were more complex than this model suggests, and cannot be fully accounted for either by Pearson’s model of recurring generational conflict or the more recent suggestion of a media-created generation gap that masked a harmonious reality
Summary
In October 1949, a correspondent wrote to the Daily Mail to complain about youth. ‘Teenagers are pampered’, the writer declared.
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