By the early 1960s, the children of the Greatest Generation were coming of age. They had grown up in tidy suburbs, in houses their parents had built out of grit and sacrifice. They had televisions in their living rooms, cars in the driveway, and food on the table every night. Their lives looked nothing like the hardship their parents had endured.
And because they had been spared struggle, they began to question everything.
College campuses became the stage. For the first time in history, millions of young Americans were in higher education, funded by government programs and their parents’ prosperity. They gathered in lecture halls, read the works of radical thinkers, and listened to professors who had lived through the same wars but drawn very different lessons. To the parents who had bled on foreign soil, America was worth defending. To many of their children, America was the problem.
The war in Vietnam became the flashpoint. Draft cards were burned in the streets. Young men who had never known hunger chanted against soldiers who had grown up with nothing. Demonstrations grew, first on campuses and then in city squares. Protest songs filled the air. The same nation that had united against Hitler and Hirohito just twenty years before now looked fractured, angry, and unrecognizable.
But Vietnam was only the surface. The protests gave way to a deeper rejection of authority. Faith, once the anchor of American life, was mocked as outdated. Patriotism was dismissed as propaganda. The family itself — father, mother, children — was branded a tool of oppression. Young people weren’t just rejecting a war. They were rejecting the entire framework of values their parents had built.
It’s worth pausing here to understand the irony. The counterculture could not have existed without the prosperity their parents had created. Only in a society where food, shelter, and opportunity were abundant could a movement survive that spent its energy tearing down the very system that provided those things. Comfort gave birth to rebellion.
And when the marches lost their momentum, the activists didn’t disappear. They realized the street could only change so much. To truly alter the fabric of America, they would need something more permanent than protest. They turned to the classroom. They became teachers, professors, and administrators. Slowly, patiently, they began reshaping the culture not with megaphones and placards, but with textbooks and lesson plans.
The battle for America’s future would no longer be fought in the streets. It would be fought in the schools.