Boy Scouts Still Prepared
As we mark the 214th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press has issued a report saying that today's 18- to- 30-year-olds know less, care less and vote less than any previous generation. The authors term this "the age of indifference," adding that "The ultimate irony is that the Information Age has spawned such an uninformed and uninvolved population."</br></br>This is not the first time we have been given this message. Last November, People for the American Way released a study by pollster Peter D. Hart, focusing on 15- to-24-year-olds, which found they were "turned off by politics and tuning out on citizen participation." Asked to describe a good citizen, few of those Hart interviewed suggested any civic involvement; only 12 percent even mentioned voting as part of the definition. Their teachers, in a parallel poll, agreed by a 2 to 1 margin that today's high school students have less interest in public affairs than their counterparts from the previous decade.</br></br>The consistency of these studies' findings clearly sends a warning signal about the failure of us older-generation Americans to impart to our children the importance many of us feel about the obligations and rewards of involvement in the community and nation.</br></br>But these studies don't capture all of the American reality either, as I was reminded this spring when I listened to the leaders of some of the major youth organizations, meeting under the auspices of the Council for the Advancement of Citizenship. Julian Dyke of the Boy Scouts of America, for example, said that membership in the Scouts has grown every year for the past 10 years, reaching 4.3 million-one-third higher than it was in 1980.</br></br>So has emphasis on community service. Last year, he said, a "Scouting for Food" program, in which Scouts went door-to-door in their own communities, saw four million Scouts collect 72 million food items for distribution locally to homeless and needy people.