You can't define an entire generation

One rare exception is CYP Now's own Positive Images campaign. Another is the work of two individuals from the Netherlands, Jeroen Boschma and Inez Groen, who work for Keesie, a communications agency. They portray young people as "smart, social and super-fast" and have tagged them Generation Einstein.

Boschma opened a recent conference in the UK and explained the thinking behind Generation Einstein. It has been shaped by the 24/7 commercialised information society, rising levels of prosperity and relentless advertising - which has made young people extremely media-smart and very sceptical about messages from others. The authors' background analysis covers health, political participation and family life, though they arrive at very different conclusions from those that others typically reach. They give their most concentrated attention to education. They argue for something called "new learning", based on principles that learning is subjective, needs to be rooted within experience to be meaningful and it must be lateral, not linear: Generation Einstein has already learned to deal with multiple forms of discontinuous information at the same time.

Generation Einstein, it is suggested, values the ties of family and friendship and is concerned about the suffering in the world. It expects quality in products and will search for it. In a world of commercialism, it is loyal to the people and the products it can trust. Similarly, as the world gets bigger, it seeks intimacy - remaining both local and global simultaneously. Its core values are authenticity, respect, self-fulfilment and honour.

At the conference I was asked to respond to Boschma. I did not stoop to the observation that, as someone from a private consultancy firm, he would say these things. But, needless to say, I disagreed pretty strongly with him. I maintained that his position was fed by sweeping generalisations constructed from grains of truth. Some of his arguments were not particularly new, for there had always been a privileged elite of young people up to speed with new technology who might have been depicted in similar terms.

I noted that the analysis might have been peculiarly Dutch and it was misleading to project the argument beyond the borders of the Netherlands. In the UK, our latest evidence came from Unicef, the Good Childhood Inquiry, and the Cambridge primary education review, none of which followed Boschma's path, pointing instead to the corrosive impact of commercialism, family breakdown and contemporary schooling. But the Dutch thesis is an important corrective to all our doom and gloom about young people. Both groups are stereotypes and most young people in most European societies fall somewhere in between.

- Howard Williamson is professor of European youth policy at the University of Glamorgan.