Hymowitz is a Brooklyn-based writer and cultural critic: one of the generation who dropped out with the peace and love crowd but who now bemoans the legacy of that time as a focus on individual fulfilment and a moral and spiritual void. Her thesis is a challenging one for youth workers: that treating children and young people as adults, through "empowerment", is a betrayal of young people and an abdication of the real role of parents and educators, which is to pass on values. There is an "adult silence" on the question of how we should live that results in Columbine massacres, syphilis epidemics among 14-year-olds and a crudely vocational, value-lite education system. "Children hear endless moralising about the virtues of tolerance and open-mindedness," she writes. "These virtues cannot help the young person build a self. They tell kids not to judge, but not what to believe... liberation's children live in a culture that frees the mind and soul by emptying them."
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