97
be disappointed as the average salary for university graduates was, and continues to be,
insufficient for an independent life. As more and more graduates found themselves
unemployed and/or socially immobile", frustration and anger grew.
However, the political polarization of students and the ingrained disillusionment
with the state their experiences at university∕college promoted was not new; in fact, it can
be argued that students in Greece had been exposed to this reality and had been moving
toward the civic subjectivity described above since before the country’s 1974 return to
democracy100. Yet, there is no question that the civil action students undertake today
lacks the sense of political purpose that characterized the actions of the youth movements
of the past: older generations fought for concrete and identifiable political ends like
political reform and the termination of military rule, whereas the purposes of the current
youth generation are more difficult to discern beyond a general rejection of the state and
authority. This is becoming a defining characteristic of the youth population since 2000.
To understand this break from the older generation it is instructive to look at how today’s
youth population views themselves relative to their predecessors and to the past in
general. Due to a variety of reasons, including the social and curricular deficiencies of
the education system, temporal distance from the civil action of the past, and a growing
preoccupation with economic security, young people have lost a sense of historicity, or,
awareness of the historical dimension of the social reality they live in (Askouni 2000; see
also Voulgaris 2000). Evidence of this is provided by the dismissive attitudes parents are
met with when talking to their children about the youth struggles of their time, the broad
99 Unemployment numbers have steadily increased over the past ten years for the 25-and-under population
of Greece. Labor economists I interviewed and statistics provided by the Greek National Statistical Service
(2009b) suggest that a quarter of this population are out of work.
100 Incidentally, and as mentioned above, the country’s return to democracy was the result of a student
uprising at the Athens Polytechnic.