My wife and I are the dorm parents for 35 girls attending the summer session. We have a good seat, then, for the pageant and kitsch that makes up the life of the usual well-to-do middle class female adolescent in America. It is not a very exciting or inspiring picture.
Of course some of them are fine. Some show a useful sense of proportion and humor, speak at a human decibel level, dress without anxiety, and seem to have accepted themselves without too much trauma. As such, they are pleasant people to know, to trust.
And then there are the others. The most striking characteristic of the "others" is their essential uselessness. I use both the adjective and noun knowingly. "Essence" in the sense of my sense of there being nothing there underneath the smooth skin, tonsorial off-handedness, expensive clothes, and frenetic animation of their personalities. What I try to find in them is some ballast, some of what was once called "character." I don't mean some sort of ruthless entrepreneurial spirit, but more of a solidity that announces to me that the person has some grounded sense of herself and her possible purpose in the world. The British historian Macaulay once said that "the measure of a man's character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out." In this sense I would neither trust my life nor possessions nor anything like responsibility to these people, since the only thing that keeps them close to a line of acceptable behavior is their knowledge that they might indeed be found out. It is a petty goodness that requires a continuous master.
They are not juvenile delinquents. Most of them would simply be good out of habit, partly because they've never really known enough passion in their lives to be truly tempted, and so don't have the habit of rebellion down. This brings me to my second point, "uselessness." It is a point larger than the girls, but I'll come to that in a moment. Females by and large throughout history have been considered superfluous in any number of ways. Only recently have people seen how dangerous and untruthful such an assertion is. Yet, most of these girls are being raised (the passive construction is deliberate) as if they were indeed superfluous to the work of the world, as if the last decade had not happened. For one thing, their manners show it. Most play the helpless female in the face of adversity. One girl, who had a blown lightbulb in her lamp, told me on opening day that the lamp was broken. I checked the bulb and we found out the hypothesis was wrong. But it never occurred to her to check the apparatus herself. She automatically assumed it was broken because it didn't work to her specifications, and then, instead of perhaps fussing with it to see if it could be fixed, checking out her hypothesis, automatically ran to me, the male (not my wife, who was the dorm head), and voice her plea. Variations on this helplessness happen daily.
Also, they act as if their uselessness were a social plus. They speak in loud voices that are continually squealing out "Oh my God!" like raucous ravens. They dress in unbecoming clothes which are partly unbecoming because they are not serviceable for real life, but are frippery, indications of the fact that they don't have to engage the world. And even though they are shelling out a lot of money to learn, they act as if such a thing as an idea has never passed the portals of their lips. They are loud, squealish, affected, and most oblivious to the troubles and delights of the world around them.
The boys are no different, though they have other deficiencies and express them differently: they are victims of other myths. I sometimes think that this essential uselessness is the virus of adolescence, not because adolescents are congenitally lazy or incapable of taking charge of their lives, but because we, the adults, have gone about raising a leisure class who believe that schooling is a right, even if they don't have to take advantage of it, a good job is theirs by droit de seigneur, and that the rest of the world, even that world within the confines of their hometown or city, is not legitimate until they decide to recognize it.
Such inbred solipsism is dangerous because it destroys virtues the world needs to extricate itself from its problems: a sense of self-government, a purposeful engagement with the world of work and politics, a sense that oneself is not the center of the universe. But these adolescents don't have those virtues because, in the name of love, they have been protected from having to exercise them. This is a love that kills.