By the middle of the 1960s it was the opinion of many that the younger generation “were students who would prefer to destroy our system rather than change it.” Why had such a gap developed between the generations at this point in history and to what

The 1960s, one of the most turbulent and active decades in the whole of American history had reached a peak by 1965 in terms of much of the reform that would take place across the nation. By 1968 America had reached a point that was being described as “The moment when all of a nation’s impulses toward violence, idealism, diversity and disorder peaked to produce the greatest possible hope – and the worst imaginable despair.” The nation had reached a point of which many had not foreseen and was very different from what had been hoped for at the beginning of the decade. The old argued the young were subverting many of the values they had fought for over the last fifty years while the young attacked the old institutions and established conventions that surrounded them.
Factors like the post-war prosperity that had dominated the earlier years and had at first seemed so liberating to the student majority that were set to inherit in had made it seem as though everything could b...