According to Osho, the generation gap is a new, widening rupture between youth and elders created by modern education and rapid change: children no longer learn alongside parents, spend long years in schools, return knowing more (or different things) than their elders, adopt new values, and thus break the old continuity of life, respect, and authority.
It’s the big difference between kids and parents today because kids grow up in schools, not in their parents’ world, so they think and live very differently.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Question: BELOVED OSHO, WHAT IS THE GENERATION GAP? In other words, what I want to say is that in the past there has never been anything like youth. From children people became adults. Youth was missing. Youth is a new phenomenon, the younger generation is a new phenomenon. It is a by-product of scientific progress. Scientific progress has given so much technology and children are allowed to have many years in the universities to learn. Secondly, when there was no science -- and it was not long ago, just three hundred years -- nothing was changing. Everything was as it had always been. The bullock cart was there for centuries. It was still the only vehicle. So the older generation knew everything, because everything was old. With scientific progress the world of great books has completely disappeared.
Beloved Osho, what is this generation gap? I hear so much about it these days.
I was very much puzzled when I was in the university: my professor of psychology was quoting names and books which had been out of date for almost three decades. And because I was so interested to know everything -- before I entered into myself, I had to know everything that was happening around -- I was continuously in the library. And it is impossible to respect a professor who knows less than you know, who is outmoded. He should be ashamed to remain in the seat of the professor. That's what I told my professor of psychology: "It is simply undignified for you to remain in that seat, because you don't know what is happening in the field of psychology today. You know what was happening thirty years before. Since the day you left your university you have not touched a single book." He was very angry. He said,…
Everywhere now there is a vast generation gap. The parents are responsible for it, because they have been trying to impose their ideologies, political, social, religious, philosophical -- all kinds of things they are trying to impose* on their children. And this is for the first time something strange has happened in the world of which they are not aware. In the past, just five hundred years before, the generation gap did not exist for the simple reason.... It does not exist even now in very primitive societies. The child starts working with his father when he is seven years old, eight years old. If the father is a woodcutter, he becomes a woodcutter. Naturally the father knows more about woodcutting, and the child never becomes young the way today children become young. You send them to the schools, to the university.
Osho, why is the new generation such a problem to the parents?
WHY IS THE NEW GENERATION SUCH A PROBLEM TO THE PARENTS? They are not really a problem: your expectation that they should respect you, that they should respect you as children have always respected their parents -- it is impossible. You start respecting them. You start respecting the new. Age in itself cannot now be any reason for respect. Intelligence, consciousness, they should be respected. And if you respect your children, they will respect you. But only if you respect your children will they respect you. The old way was that you go on humiliating the children, you go on insulting them in every possible way, and they have to respect you -- now this cannot be so any more. The preacher's wife, while shopping, noticed a sign in the butcher's shop: "Dam Ham on Sale." Slightly taken aback by such a name, she confronted the butcher about the use…