U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government, Department of Justice.

NCJRS Virtual Library

The Virtual Library houses over 235,000 criminal justice resources, including all known OJP works.
Click here to search the NCJRS Virtual Library

Philosophy of Youth (From Perspectives on Contemporary Youth, P 62-88, 1988, Janusz Kuczynski, S N Eisenstadt, et al, eds. -- See NCJ-124226)

NCJ Number
124229
Author(s)
J Kuczynski
Date Published
1988
Length
27 pages
Annotation
In establishing philosophical hypotheses of youth, this essay develops five laws pertinent to youth development.
Abstract
The author proposes a historical hypothesis and a historiosophical hypothesis. The historical hypothesis is that "the dynamics and the universality of Western civilization are brought about by a considerably more intensive dialectics of generational change and a considerably greater role for youth than in other civilizations." The historiosophical hypothesis is that youth "will become -- side by side with adults -- one of the two main 'demographic' subjects of unifying humanity. And by this very fact, it will become a subject of universalism, the philosophy which is to prepare such unification and which is correlated with this process." From these hypotheses, five laws and imperatives of youth development are derived. The laws discussed are the regularity of general universal growth (physical, sexual, psychic, and social), the regularity of the stepwise enlargement of fields of socialization, the law of the intensification of development, the law of transition from self-objectivity to subjectivity, and the law concerned with overcoming the contradiction between dependence and emancipation by creating community. 34 notes.