Value Orientations of Young People

In a polycultural and heterogeneous society in contrast to a monocultural and homogeneous society (Z. Bauman), there are intergenerational differences, the necessity of choice and various choices in the same situation. That is, the preconditions for various value orientations are present because one culture cannot serve the entire population of the society. In the process of socialization among youth, the basic criteria are formed by means of which they try to place themselves in the world. We refer to the group of criteria which organize and direct aspirations and needs as a value considerably determined by the position which young people assume in contemporary society. In the period when young people are preparing to assume various adult roles (the novitiate), they are simultaneously privileged (non-participation in the routinized, formalized, functionalized and responsible world of production and reproduction of economic and political life) and underprivileged (the impossibility to influence social life). To the greatest possible extent, the type of value orientation is influenced by the type of value socialization (which is mainly one-sided and based on an idealization of reality) and the experience which they gain through interaction (which will depend on the concrete situation of the individual). In this period, the young person is not yet divided among several mutually-contradictory social roles (social schizophrenia) which leads to his relatively complete personality or aspirations towards completeness. The degree to which these personality characteristics will be affirmed and accepted or overcome, checked and destroyed depends on the degree to which society is directed to the collectivity or to privatization. This produces one of the reasons for the conflict between younger and older generations in contemporary industrial society which in a homogeneous and monoculturally heterogeneous society is not possible