I hate to say it, but that Socrates quote wasn’t really from Socrates, although it was a distillation of complaints made about youth by the ancient Greeks.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/
Although sadly, without the help of the internet I would not have gotten the source of @doschicos’s quote.
@Sue22, what a buzz kill.
LOL.
I know. I just couldn’t resist after the post about us oldsters believing everything we read on the internet. 
I was born at the tail end of the boom. I remember as a teen being vaguely jealous of people just a few years older than I. It seemed like they had marched and fought for so many important things-voting rights, desegregation, the end to the Vietnam War, and by the time I and my peers were teens that had all burned out and we were left with the Reagan Right and Yuppiedom. I did march for reproductive rights and gun control and as an adult I’ve been involved in grassroots community work, but as a teen and young adult I didn’t experience the same dedicated activism and striving toward social justice I felt in that earlier generation and that I see in youth now.
But really, Socrates or not, the point is how far back we can go and find adults who dissed the next generation(s.) I’m sure some of it is self aggrandizement and some is encounters with troublesome youth. Or, unfortunately, this tendency to take anything published as authoritative and make it a discussion.
But when one’s view of them is superficial, you miss all the amazing kids out there. Enough to sustain our world. Think about it, how many leaders in all fields today are young. I’m not talking just some subject specially, a doctor or tech guru. There’s breadth along with the depth. I encourage anyone with limited exposure to them, as a group, to purposefully find ways to interact.
And we parents have done things right, do deserve some credit.
I was musing in the shower this morning that one of my favorite books I read for school was The Count of Monte Cristo. Currently I’m reading The Librarian of Auschwitz (true story). I’m at the point where one of the ladies is recounting the story to the main character and how she loves it.
It’s pretty neat being able to have that extra understanding and connection regardless of the decades between us.
FWIW, I read The Great Gatsby for “fun” when my son was assigned it because we didn’t get it in my high school. Eh, not my book. That doesn’t mean I dislike all the classics though. I think it means I’m typical that there are some I love, some I’m ok with, and some I don’t care for. I loved the Grapes of Wrath. My own reader son disliked it. Such is life. (We both think the Librarian of Auschwitz is worth reading.)
Off to enjoy my life with the next generation now…
@Sue22, I felt exactly as you did. Especially when I met my husband, who is almost 9 years older than I am, and he told me what it was like. He and his older sister got to experience things I never did. It was all “me, me, me” by the time I got to college. 
@Creekland I think the first adult book that got me rolling was The Human Comedy, by Saroyan, 8th grade. Funky teacher who loved lit and kept us to one chapter/week. Certainly not one you’ll find on any list of best sellers today or hot YA. The next year, it was Great Expectations. In 8th, we also started Shakespeare. What memories. There were others, of course. But along with family, I do credit teachers for exposing us.
@Sue22 It wasn’t the Boomers that led the civil rights protests. Its peak in modern times was in the 1950s, when boomers were mostly toddlers or in grade school. The oldest Boomers were only 17 during MLK’s March on Washington in 1963, they were only 14-15 during the sit-ins and the Freedom Riders in 1960-1961. The Civil Rights act was passed in 1964, while MLK and Robert Kennedy were assassinated in 1968, when the very oldest boomers were 22, and most boomers were still in their younger teens.
The Boomers missed most of the Civil Rights era, and were only at the forefront of protesting against being sent to fight in Vietnam, and even for that, the majority were OK, since the the majority of 18-29 year olds voted for Nixon in 1972, and the 18-26 year olds were the Boomers.
The Civil Right activities of the 1950s and 1960s were led by the “Silent” Generation, and the Greatest Generation.
MWolf is right… Boomers like to claim a lot of accomplishments that were actually the work of their parents’ generation.
Wait a sec. How about we claim what WE did do?
My mother did take us, until we got old enough to take ourselves.
Let’s not get OT, arguing which generation… oh, we are…
Boomers did benefit greatly from the expansion of state universities with then very low in state tuition, while high school graduate jobs still paid enough to live on one’s own with a bit left over for that tuition and books. So many of them could proudly say that they worked their way through college.
The generous GI bill helped many get higher educations. One of my relatives spent a few months in the military as a messenger in a Jeep in our state and then honorably discharged after serving his time. The GI bill and working part time allowed him to get out of state BA, JD and MBA! Many of his generation got their degrees via the GI bill.
Unless, of course, you were Black. Most Southern universities were not open to Blacks in the 1940s and 1950, and, at that point, almost 80% of all African Americans in the USA lived in the South. There were the HBCUs, but there were way too few, and, of course, they did not have a huge amount of resources.