Flipping the bird at answers

I often read claims like this:

So is YA taking over the grown-ups’ table? It’s a revealing question, steeped in the kind of condescension that assumes books aimed at young people are intrinsically of less cultural value than the real books, speculative or otherwise, that are ostensibly for adult readers. It’s also drenched in fear because, oh my lord, the young people are invading! With their depressing music and tight jeans!¹

But I’ve never come across anyone actually saying that about young-adult literature – that it’s ‘intrinsically of less cultural value than the real books’.

Are there cases of people saying or writing this? Or is this the inferiority complex of an adolescent genre in an adolescent culture in an adolescent nation?

Whatever the case, I’d like to know the source of this contention. It seems like something worth nipping in the bud.

1. I found this in an article by Karen Healey called ‘Where the Popular Kids are Sitting‘ at Strange Horizons, which I found through Alien Onion [↩]