"Woman plus..."Young Generation Today: Strategies for Living

Young Generation Today: Strategies for Living

Olga Zdravomyslova, Marina Arutyunyan,

Irina Shurugina

The past decade has produced tremendous impact upon the entire process of bring-ing Russian young generation into social context of the nation. The society abruptly turned from being entirely ruled by unitary and rigid administration into something utterly different and amply described by the two terms: variation and fluidity. At the same time, the emerging new Russian culture — conceivably associated with power and democracy merged in one — has to fight its way through extremely hostile social, economic and political environments making the process of young people integration into society highly problematic.

Socialization process is further complicated by absolutely different rules of the game if compared to what teenagers’ parents faced. Fathers’ and mothers’ experience is often useless from their sons’ and daughters’ standpoint, as many parents do not have a slightest idea of what tasks life is going to pose before their offsprings and what personal qualities and skills need be developed to meet social challenges of tomorrow. Those parents who were brought up in soviet-time context cannot serve adequate models of social behavior to their children for the simple reason that while youngsters are in bad need of advice, elders struggle to survive their own crisis of social values standards changed. Recent surveys revealed prevalent parents’ orientation towards social conformity values (adequate conduct in public, integrity, accuracy, obedience to parents, good marks at school, etc.), while values describing internal behavioral gadgets (responsibility, compassion, concentration, curiosity, self-control, etc.) are largely neglected.

Since parents focus exclusively on external aspects of family upbringing, their children grow up with no inbred behavioral regulations and are easily influenced by whatever company they may happen to become members of. Given obvious overabundance of bad companies at the current stage of Russia’s national evolution, probability of deviant behavior of teens is particularly high.

The major national-scale problem in Russia is progressive social stratification: rich ones grow richer; poor ones degrade; with practically no middle-class in-between. The process is deep and serious — the entire society is being remolded. One feature specific to Russian way of social stratification is that among those who have recently found themselves deep down the poverty level are mostly people used to high standards of living, including scores of trained specialists with higher education. In other words, life strategies that previously were deemed as straight way to success turned out to be leading to poverty and social nothingness, while new strategies have not been formulated yet.

While overall living standards deteriorated, public cognizance of "how it should be" grew resulting in west-oriented request for consumption rooted in mass conscious-ness (with immature being most unsheltered against it). Meanwhile, only chosen few had means enough to actually afford high "Western" standards of living. All this has resulted in what sociologists call "claims revolution" in youngsters’ minds. Symptoms include lack of motivation to suffer or sacrifice anything for higher goals (including those associated with attainment of desired prosperity). In combination with absolute lack of legal opportunities to earn money that could satisfy newly acquired request for consumption, "claims revolution" results in disappointing failures in life and, finally, to social deviations of all sorts.

Along with aggressive advertising of unattainable living standards, another misconception is being propagated: that poverty is the result of human weaknesses: laziness, non-professionalism, lack of flexibility and initiative... Poverty is a shameful state! Finally, public opinion came to common perception of human society being divided in two clear-cut categories: successful individuals (i. e. those who have much money, including primarily businessmen and criminals); and others (i. e., deprived failures). Judgement by criteria of morality (good vs. evil) eventually gave way to evaluating people in terms of success: rich, successful, immoral, useful to society, highly respected and causing envy beautiful people on one hand, and destitute, un-successful, socially useless, contemptible masses.

In socialist period education was synonymous to social success. Today success is associated with money and freedom from any obligations before others. Currently, the prevailing model of success is oriented towards complete independence from society as the ultimate personal goal which advocates and encourages deviant behavior. In this sense, wealth as criteria of success produce opposite effect in comparison with education, since the latter encourages young people’s integration into society. Changed criteria of social success inevitably caused changed young people’s attitude towards education.

Sociological surveys of 70’s and 80’s revealed invariably high standing of education and knowledge-requiring professions on young people’s scale of values. Whilst ‘preferred’ specialties varied with time, level of competition for becoming students of higher education institutions was invariably high. In early 90’s the picture changed radically. Transition to market economy caused immediate social response bringing prestige of education deep down pre-reform level. Many teenagers left schools and went out in the street to sell their unqualified labor and inapt services. Since it did not take much brain to sell something from a street stand and have good and stable in-come, education soon became outmoded.

However, the situation began to show some signs of improvement by mid 90’s, as a result of growing demand for qualified professionals, especially in finance and com-merce. From 1994 on, level of competition for admission to higher education programs has been steadily growing. At the same time, serious negative changes oc-curred that made access to higher education problematic for young people of lower social classes. In former Soviet Union, beginning from early 60’s, national policies were enforced to secure equal opportunities to receive higher education for repre-sentatives of all social groups. Recent studies has shown dramatic drop of work-class offsprings share among university and higher school students (from 32% in 1990 to 15% in 1994), while rapidly forming business class has largely increased its presence (from 4% in 1990 to 9% in 1994). Non-government higher education programs require out-of-pocket payment which makes private education an exclusive privilege of children of businessmen and elite, since education loans and grants are practically unavailable. Therefore, workers’ and farmers’ children are effectively "filtered off" students’ inflow to educational institutions supposed to produce future Russian elite.

1993 study of 21 communities in all parts of Russia revealed strong variation in high-school education quality and students’ plans for future by type of school. Private schools and colleges, along with elite "specialized" public schools, provide thorough knowledge and orient their graduates towards higher education. Private schools’ role increases every year, and they may already be categorized as suppliers of future Russian upper class (which, again, makes family income predominant selection crite-ria). Meanwhile, non-privileged public school are dramatically under-funded, quality of public education degrades, and most public high-school graduates lack motivation and knowledge to continue education. Motives for acquiring higher education have also changed. Approach to choice of future profession becomes more and more pragmatic: aspirations are to acquire "cash-gainful" and "marketable" professions. Students look for "first-rate lawyer’s office", "fine education, fair capital outlay and corporate executive’s position", "some specialty opening many opportunities to find well-paid job", etc. So, education is looked upon as a component of overall well-being. Moreover, it has regained its position among youth’s social values as derivative of and inferior to "money" value.

In general, transition market has produced transition society, and youngsters’ first experience of adult life is through perception of all peculiarities of the transition: radi-cal change of values; unclear future; widespread catastrophic vision of the world; discontinuity of generations; unclear "rules of the game" and publicly disapproved but commonly accepted corrupt strategies for one’s life and practices of their implemen-tation. Now, average high-school graduate strategy for his life is: to acquire education/pro-fession — to have well-paid job/position — to attain high living standards — and all that serves the ultimate goal of maximal independence and freedom, as opposed to any social and personal limitations and "dependencies". Their life credo is excellently articulated by one respondent, "I want good education and well-paid job, for I want be completely independent of anything and anyone!" In other words, young people enter social relations (study, work, business), because they want to become free of any responsibilities before society and even family ("...and anyone!") and do whatever they might want to do.

What practical approaches are useful in pursuing this goal? Surveys of higher-school students have shown that absolute majority would prefer to open "their own busi-ness", rather than to become "a corporate employee" (i. e., the idea of working for someone else is not attractive), while the prospect of becoming "a state employee" has been rejected completely (for employment in public sector today is synonymous to beggar’s life). At the same time, to own a business is not associated (in their minds) with either "personal responsibility" or "professional self-realization", but again with the same old "maximum personal freedom". No wonder that Russian business circles bear more semblance to the ill-famed runaway communities of Muscovy times than to rational western-type businesses. To prove this point, a recent Russian sur-vey of relatively young businessmen resulted in 91% (!) of them naming "independence" as the chief incentive motivating them to do what they do.

Whereas five years ago students tended to "retain" their specialty and seeked op-portunities to make professional career in whatever they were trained for (i. e. prac-ticed traditional pathways to gain social standing), by 1996 social success in their minds was irreversibly and exclusively represented by two concepts: "profitable busi-ness" and "doing whatever I want". Public and political activities were placed the last on the list of values, and in interviews students demonstrated hearty desire to "hedge" against any influence produced by Russian society, which they deemed un-predictable and hindering their personal plans. At the same time, young respondents were completely unaware that their position contains intrinsic contradiction. They want to be successful in the society while rejecting the same society and ignoring its "rules of the game".

In fact, this contradiction make their chances for success almost intangible. Prevalent concept of success as unlimited freedom bought with one’s money is sim-ply another utopia. On the other hand, this concept has evolved in response to soci-ety-placed hazards resulting from nationwide spread of organized crime and ever-widening gap between rich "businessmen" and poor "others". Since the society is polarized to the extreme, so the two "mainstream" options exist for young men to enter it. An ambitious youth either aims at social heights (usually, with parents’ sup-port) or goes down slippery roads of criminal business. This country has always been best suited for extremities and surprisingly hostile to people honestly inclined to live regular life.