Many adults feel that young people lack basic values, such as honesty, proper work ethics, and responsibility. For example, a 1998 survey by the Barna Research Group (BRG), a marketing research firm, concluded that many adolescents believe that adults commonly hold them in low esteem. Teenaged respondents were asked to use adjectives to describe how adults view young people, and terms such as “lazy” (chosen by 84 percent), “rude” (74 percent), and “violent” (57 percent) frequently surfaced.

While BRG did not survey adults on their views of today’s youth, Public Agenda, a policy analysis center, published “Kids These Days: What Americans Really Think About the Next Generation” in 1999. In this survey, 71 percent of two thousand adult respondents claimed that terms such as “lazy,” “disrespectful,” and “wild” described their first...