Future of youth

							                                      World Futures Studies Federation
                                      19th World Conference
                                      “Futures Generation for Future Generations”
                                      21-24 August 2005
                                      Futures Studies Department
                                      Corvinus University of Budapest




     Pessimistic futures generation for pessimistic future
 generations or? The younger generation has the future but the
          older generation has the power (authority)

                           Péter Molnár – Zoltán Vass

    In this lecture the topic of youth’s future orientation and so-called gap of
generations are the references German-Hungarian international representative
comparative youth surveys 1984-85, and representative data at the years 1996,
2004. The starting point 15-24 years old youth as status passage was published in
Germany and Hungary. The social changes in the last decade have had a dramatic
effect on both Hungarian and German society, which is most really represented by
university student opinion as well. The latest representative data in print by
International Journal of Behavioral Development: Political system change and future-
orientation as psychological developmental process.
    Methodologically we have some common direct attitude scale to measure the
future pessimism-optimism and generations’ conflict and we have a common
intercultural typology of social status. The university students are showed by
intercultural analyses as a most important sub-sample.
    By the evidence of the article, the civilization theory of Margaret Mead and the
future orientation of youth have proved to be a useful principle in interpretation for
the common European youth cultural style. Common characteristics can be found in
the social development of German and Hungarian youth culture and in the relation of
the future-orientation and life feeling of youth about generations conflict.
    Though, 15-20 years’ retardation can be pointed to in the opinion of youth, which
had temporarily disappeared in the time of the political system change. In the 10
year period following the political system change can be observed significant
difference in the future-orientation of youth.
    For the interpretation of Hungarian students data is important to know the
following: The modern youth life style and the increase in the number of university
students are advantageous for our economic level, which is a result of last decade.
10 percent of cohorts were students in the 80’s and nowadays more than 30 percent.
However we want to summarize that, Hungarian youth they think about this process
as peripheral participants opposed to Western European’s civilization processes. This
comparison can be observed more directly in “Alte-Bundesländer” than in Hungary.