The student community today is in the throes of a revolution. The knocking about, the search, the unknown quest that we find in the student has also been the cause of revolt, of irritation against the existing state of affairs - political, social, economic. Those who condemn the revolt of the student are often old-timers who have lost touch with the changing nature of the world around them.
It is worthwhile repeating the truism that the human mind - both individual and collective - cannot rest without change, like the universe around us, which is itself in a constant state of flux. ‘The old order changeth, yielding place to the new’ is only a statement of facts. Whether change is desirable or not, whether it is progress or regress is beside the point.
A pragmatic approach to problems demands recognition of the inevitability of change. If change is resisted by the old order, the change will have to come the painful way; otherwise, it may come the smooth way. The student today represents this dissatisfaction with the existing order of things. He wants to break a new way out of it, to seek new horizons.
What is special about this quest for change in the newer generation is its universality. The student unrest is not an isolated phenomenon, pertaining to a particular country alone. It has taken various forms in different nations, unless suppressed with iron hands by a totalitarian regime. It cannot be said that it is a political reorientation. Politics concerns only a part of human life.
Another aspect of the student revolt is the increasing concern of the new generation to bring about equality. Man can be considered to have risen higher, in the course of his evolution, in this search for equality and universalism, which represents an urge for unity - not only a search. This urge is in direct contrast to that of the medieval feudal lord, whose supreme unconcern for others was considered quite natural.
We are in the age of collective thinking. We cannot be immune from the thought currents that are reshaping the world. In a narrowing world, this is inevitable. Man, though he is a thinking animal, rarely manifests this quality in a creative way, except through a few individuals. But when an individual sets the ball rolling, others take it up and add new dimensions to his thinking. This is what is happening in the modern world.
If you ask the agitating student, individually, what he is agitating for, ne may not be able to give a coherent answer.
He lends his voice to a joint demand. Notwithstanding this fact, this mass-thinking assumes such a force that it cannot be ignored. It makes the intellectual, the thinker, go deeper into these surface outbursts and analyze the causes that have contributed to these agitations.
The young man, who is on the threshold of life, needs answers to those problems which he has got as his legacy from his predecessors. He knows that the past generation cannot solve these problems, for these are the by-products of another revolution, which they staged when they were young. The solution to one problem is bound to give rise to another, though solving the one on hand.
This fact, again, need not be remembered by the student; he is not a philosopher; he wants results. Therefore, the younger generation has to seek a newer world - a world where the old values have to find new meanings, or die out giving place to new values. Now, in this search for new values, the adolescent does not always exhibit original thinking. He tries to imitate.
Of course, certain ideas attract him and certain others repulse him. He wants the freedom to practice what attracts him and avoid what repulses him. But as he grows up, he tries to rationalize his attractions. He does such and such a thing, because that contributes to such and such a common good. That is at least the way he thinks. It is no use challenging him. He will swear by it. He is not following it because so and so has said it. That is his own independent conclusion.
It is difficult to convince him that he may himself change his ideas as he comes to see a wider spectrum of life. This tendency to fondly stick to his conclusions, with a great amount of certainty, springs often from an unwillingness to part with his new-found freedom.