Children must be protected from the media's plague of pessimism.

• Author: Medved, Michael

IN RECENT YEARS, the nation has been torn by fears that immigrants may be bad for America. In April, 1995, however, a major study at the University of Chicago suggested the profoundly depressing possibility that the reverse could be true: America just might be bad for immigrants.

Researchers surveyed more than 25,000 eighth-graders and found that, in every ethnic group, children with immigrant parents perform significantly better in school than those whose parents were born in the U.S.: "Their grades are superior, they score higher on standardized tests, and they aspire to college at a greater rate than their third generation peers." Immigrant mothers and fathers generally "harbor optimism about the advantages of playing by the rules and the benefits that will occur through education. . . . They have a greater tendency to relieve their children of household chores to give them more study time. encourage older siblings to tutor younger children, and restrict television viewing." The defining difference, the report concluded, is "the hopeful attitude of the immigrant parents." Ironically, the longer immigrants live in this society and adjust to contemporary American norms, the more likely it is that they will lose that optimism, and their chances for success suffer accordingly.

That study confirms what thoughtful parents already understand: that children could lose a great deal from prolonged exposure to the dysfunctional elements in our current culture. They lose faith, confidence, and resistance to the most deadly epidemic menacing youth today--which isn't AIDS, gang violence, or teen pregnancy, but the plague of pessimism that has infected tens of millions of young Americans.

That plague's main symptom is a crybaby culture, a national orgy of whining and self-pity. I routinely visit college campuses in every corner of the country and, with a few notable exceptions, I don't see a lot of shining faces or hopeful, enthusiastic students showing the promise of youth as expressed in the traditional university hymn, "Gaudeamus Igitur," or "Let Us Rejoice for We Are Young." Instead, student health clinics at Ivy League universities report that the service they provide most frequently to these privileged young people--aside from dealing with birth control, abortion, and sexually transmitted diseases--involves the treatment of clinical depression. In a national survey of young adults aged 16 to 29 conducted by MTV, the word selected as least describing their generation was "lucky," while "angry" and "stressed out" appeared among the best descriptions of this age group. Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of the rock band Nirvana, who killed himself at the height of his wealth and fame, is hailed widely as the authentic voice of Generation X.

Adolescent depression is nothing new. Some of us are old enough to remember the 1950s, when a small handful of "sensitive souls" dressed in black turtlenecks drank espresso, strummed guitars, and warbled grim folk songs about the end of the world. The excuse for every excess of dementia or delinquency always was the same: "We're living under the shadow of the big bomb, so of course we're going to act irrationally."

What's the excuse now? The Cold War is over. The threat of nuclear destruction is dead--or at least vastly diminished. Yet, instead of the jubilation and atmosphere of celebration one might expect, there instead are a contagious cynicism and bleak visions of the future that reach far more young people than the relatively small percentage who were afflicted with the puerile self-pity of the 1950s and 1960s.

This depressed and nihilistic attitude toward life could be the biggest threat to the U.S. today and the most pressing concern in American education. The University of Chicago study on the offspring of immigrants demonstrates the very essence of our current dilemma: Human beings will not learn, will not grow, and will not develop good character traits if they believe that discipline and hard work are pointless, life is meaningless and unfair, and the outlook for the future is grim.

To understand how to protect our children--and ourselves- from the current plague of pessimism, we first must understand the forces that contribute to this national addiction to despair. One is an immersion in mass media that engages most Americans for a significant portion of their waking hours. As a working...