Al Gore goes there — turning kids against their parents
I’m thinking back now a long way to when I was your age and the civil rights movement was unfolding. And we kids asked our parents and their generation, “Explain to me again why it’s okay for the law to officially discriminate against people because of their skin color.” And parents try to tell their kids the right thing, you know, usually. I do. And when our parents’ generation couldn’t answer that question, that’s when the law started to change.
There are some things about our world that you know that older people don’t know. Why would that be? Well, in a period of rapid change, the old assumptions sometimes just don’t work anymore because they’re out of date. New knowledge, new understandings, are much more widely available sometimes to young people who are at school, who aren’t weighed down with the old flawed assumptions of the past. Now, don’t get me wrong, your parents and your elders, as you’ve already figured out, know a lot that you can gain from, but in a period of rapid change, there are times when new understandings are more apparent to young people.