1999-2000 ALTERNATE ESSAY CONTEST
and
SINGER ACTIVITY
OPEN TO HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE STUDENTS
EVERY SCHOOL ENTERING TEN OR MORE QUALIFYING PAPERS BECOMES AN AUTOMATIC WINNER
SUBJECT: Is It Time For Local Communities To Initiate A Rite Of Passage For American Youth?
First Prize = $100
Second Prize = $ 75
Third Prize = $ 25
The prizes will be awarded to three essays at every school that enters ten or more qualifying papers. The prizes will be awarded at the discretion of the Singer Foundation. The judging will be based on how well the rules were followed, thoughtfulness and a zeal for pursuing the subject as evidenced by the work submitted. Schools entering fewer than ten students, or papers that are too short or do not abide by other rules, will not qualify for prizes. Please consult the rules. All participants will receive certificates. Excerpts from qualifying essays, will be published in a book and offered to the 535 members of congress, the press and other officials around the country. Papers may be emailed to staff@singerfoundation.org anytime before February 15, 2000 to be assured the school is represented in the book which will be published in the spring of 2000. Later entries will be accepted, but without that assurance.
Participation in the Singer Activity is optional. A minimum of one thousand dollars will be guaranteed to any school that submits a minimum of ten qualifying essays and also correctly completes the Singer Activity as described in the rules. Each student's submittal beyond ten, earns an additional $100 guaranteed to the school, per the Singer Activity rules
If you have questions: email staff@singerfoundation.org phone (831) 625-4223, fax 624-7994
Address surface mail correspondence to:
Essay Contest, The Harry Singer Foundation,
P.O. Box 223159, Carmel, CA 93922
RULES
Submittals should have a cover page with the title of the essay,
school name, student's name, date, grade,
class, teacher, school phone and fax numbers.
If you received this information in the mail, please make copies for your
students.
Excerpts from the essays will be posted on the Foundation web site as they are read.
Entries will not be returned, and upon submittal become the
property of The Harry Singer Foundation.
Consider
In Samoa in the 1920's, Margaret Mead found that adolescence was
not a time of stress as it was/is in America.
What was there in Samoa which is absent in America, what is here in America which was absent in Samoa which will account for this difference?
Could the strain our adolescents encounter be attributed to cultural rather than physiological changes? Is the stress inherent in our civilization?
In Samoa, children as young as four and five had definite tasks graded to their strength and intelligence; tasks that had a meaning in the structure of the whole society. "The necessary nature of the Samoan child's task is obvious [to everyone]." Margaret Mead
In the United States "our children are not made to feel that the time they do devote to supervised activity is functionally related to the world of adult activity." Margaret Mead
Even children know when they are being useful; engaged in something of value to the adult world.
In Samoa in the 1920's there was no differentiation between the adult world and the world of children.
In the United States, even seventy years ago, a child's attitude toward school was apathetic! School then, as now, bore no relation to life.
"The Samoan child measures every act of work or play in terms of [the] whole community; each item of conduct is dignified in terms of its relationship to the life of a Samoan village." Margaret Mead
"We will be hard put to devise ways of participation for [American] children, and means of articulating their school life with the rest of life which will give them the same dignity which Samoa affords her children." Margaret Mead
"The principal causes of our adolescents' difficulty are the presence of conflicting standards and the belief that every individual should make his or her own choices, coupled with a feeling that choice is an important matter." Margaret Mead
"To whom much is given, much is required." Freedom is demanding. Choice is stressful. Would we have it otherwise?
Potlatch-North American Indian tradition: "When all goes well and there is money in the house and neighbors think kindly of you, maybe it's proper for you to give it all away and start over. Maybe you must prove yourself again. Maybe you must not rise too high above your neighbors." (From James Michener's novel, Alaska 1988)
Culture and traditions are man-made. Children
realize our society values money above all. How might we infuse character and
other values in our communities?
What do you say
to the idea that there are no adolescents in 1999? There are children and then an abrupt shift to the status of adult. A shift not sanctioned by society. It's a big jump and kids are making the transition on their own without any help from their communities - we have no rites of passage in our present American culture. A diploma and the graduation ceremony no longer fill the role. Okay, some cultures have "coming out" parties and religious ceremonies like first communions and bar/bat mitzvahs, but aside from an orthodox bar mitzvah there is no real struggle to get through, no testing worthy of the event, no proving yourself to yourself and the adult world. Instead we offer parties.
Where's the challenge?
Young American Indians used to prove they could survive alone in the wilderness; they endured hardships and danger. They convinced themselves and others of their bravery and felt worthy of the coveted title of adult. African tribes also tested bravery and self control. So did peoples all over the globe. Even in the early days in this country children proved themselves in the agriculture fields and as apprentices in small towns; they contributed to the social fabric; to the productivity of their farms and communities. They gained self-worth and everyone in the community applauded their energy and acknowledged their worth. Back then manual labor was valuable.
The Harry Singer Foundation is suggesting that our young people today need a rite of passage. They, like young people in all ages and in all regions, crave recognition of their new role in society; they crave acceptance into the adult world; the crave a challenge. If the cry of the X generation was "Show me the money," then we suggest that the cry of this new generation is
"Show me the challenge!"
The Foundation polled students in 21 states in 1997 and found from the two thousand responses that a large percentage of teens cared what adults think of them. We were amazed how high adult recognition was on their list of priorities. Right now teens are devising their own initiation rites, including body piercing, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, violence-all the things that are forbidden to children. Gang initiations are most visible. Kids are banding together, like the green hairs, or the trench coats or the goths, and tailoring their own rites. It seems to us that a lot of kids today figure if they participate in adult activities, they will be acknowledged as adults. We're talking now about indulging in pornography, gambling and the types of activity I just reiterated. Without providing a legitimate rite of passage for our children our culture is allowing ugly things to become symbols of adulthood. Is this what you want? Come on-give it some thought. It doesn't have to be this way. This is the place to share your most creative ideas
Questions To Answer After
Completing The Required Reading
Q1- What does Margaret Mead say at the start of her 1961 Preface to Coming Of Age In Samoa that is reminiscent of a current Army recruiting commercial?
Q2- Which of the following issues of the 1920's are no longer issues today?
Q3- Do you agree with Margaret Mead that "culture is man-made and that man is
free to design it closer to the desires of his own heart"? What definition of
"culture" do you find in your dictionary?
Q4- In her writings Margaret Mead was advocating:
Q5- Comment on Susan's speech (page 60 A Tribe Apart) Do you and your peers really want adults to recognize what is going on and to enforce "boundaries and structure"?
Q6- Write three things that you "absolutely, positively know, saw or experienced concerning drugs and alcohol among" students at your school.
Q7- Do you have a solution for the "plight of the black teenager"? (page 88 A Tribe Apart)
Q8- Would it be a relief if all you had to do was "go to classes and learn"? Would you be happy if you were home-schooled or attended a single-sex private school where academics were presented in an exciting way and learning was admired even by peers?
Q9- Comment on the line from Pete Seeger: "Schools are like prisons because they don't teach you how to live." and Jonathan's comment "People in school are dulled by the remoteness to the real world." Would more classes incorporating community-based learning be helpful? (incorporating activities with relevance to actual real life situations)
Q10- Comment on the "bottom line" (page 364A Tribe Apart)
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
by Margaret Mead
(William Morrow & Co. 1928)
Preface to 1961 edition
I was not arguing with my contemporary theorists in the hope of scoring theoretical points against them but for the future of young people who, in the United States were becoming less than they might be because we understood so little about what a difference culture can make, in terms of stress and strain, in individual fulfillment or defeat. The people whom it was important to reach, it seemed to me, were neither professional anthropologists nor psychologists but teachers and those, just escaped from adolescence, who would soon be parents determining the shape of the world for their children.
It was a young and hopeful world in the 1920s. So many problems seemed capable of rapid solution once we had the necessary scientific facts that would make it possible for us to judge the importance of the language spoken in the home, familial pressures on children, misconceptions about the important of race or color, the effects of artificially separating children from a knowledge of birth and love and death. Methods of studying such questions had just become available to us. It was only necessary, some us believed, to apply the methods and present our results, and great amounts of energy would be released to revise our culture so that it would be more in keeping with human needs and human potentialities. Realizing that culture is man-made and that man is free to design it closer to the desires of his own heart, I saw this book-and those who used it saw it-as a beginning of greater flexibility and imagination.
But this energy was compounded, too, of the rebellion and self-criticism, the hatreds and the cynical despair which were nourished by the growing crisis of the post-World War I world, the economic breakdowns in Europe, the crash and the depression in the United States, the rising totalitarianisms which were to threaten all our gains. Those who saw American society in the 1920s as a rapacious and consuming monster greeted this book as an escape-an escape in spirit that paralleled an escape in body to a South Sea island where love and ease were the order of the day. Perhaps some of the satisfaction which the book gave to those who wished to contrast "the primitive," which was natural and delightful, with "the civilized," which was unnatural and repressive, had its source in my inexperience; for in this first book, when I had yet to come to terms with other primitive people, fear-ridden and hungry and harsh to their children, the Samoans inevitably stood for "the primitive." In those days, as I used to realize when I was asked to lecture, perhaps the hardest thing to convey was the contrast between a simple society, in which individuals must unavoidably partake of that simplicity and so are lacking in complexity, and a society like our own, in which, in our complicated institutions, complexity and strain are accompanied by greater intensity and depth in those reared in it. I used to seek for ways of conveying the sense of how much we have gained in man's long road to civilization, for I was not advocating a return to the primitive but rather greater knowledge which would give modern man more control over the civilizing process itself. I tried to dramatize this by saying that if, like Robert Louis Stevenson, I were dying of a wasting disease, I would love to return to Samoa to spend my last days among a people who would accord me unquestioning and unintense friendliness, a people who were equally accustomed to birth and death, youth and age, but that I did not want to live in Samoa-I wanted to live in New York and make something of what I had learned in Samoa.
As the years went by, while I myself was spending as much time as I could in the South Seas, studying the peoples whose old ways of life would surely be swept away forever by the approaching way, Coming of Age in Samoa became standard reading in the kinds of courses we now call the behavioral or the human sciences. When I lectured I came to measure the age of my audiences in terms of whether or not they regarded me as much older than they were because they had read a book of mine in college. This was the period when we emphasized the absoluteness of monographs on primitive societies, valuable precisely because they were the records of an order which would soon vanish never to return. Like well-painted portraits of the famous dead, these monographs would stand forever for the edification and enjoyment of future generations, forever true because no truer picture could be made of that which was gone. We were conscious of the historical caprice which had selected a handful of young girls on a tiny island to stand forever like the lovers on Keats' Grecian urn. There was, in spite of the dynamic content of our subject matter, a certain static quality about our approach. We would add description after description, chosen for relevance, to our knowledge of mankind, building an edifice, and we ourselves would stand on the platform these building blocks made and erect another edifice, better contrived and planned because of our foundation knowledge. Samoa would inevitably change. The lone single moment in history at which I had caught it would pass, and the juggernaut of modernization would pass over it. In the future Coming of Age in Samoa would be read as a way of extending our appreciative experience of what human beings in one culture once had been. Some would read it nostalgically, some with gladness that we are more complex than the Samoans, but all of us would be living in a world to the solution of whose problems studies such as this one had contributed materials. The last chapters, in which our way of life is compared to theirs, would be as happily dead as the dodo, part of a past we had outlived and, having been but recently sloughed off, would be only slightly interesting.
It has not turned out as we expected. In these 35 years the problems of human culture have not lessened but increased in intensity. The excessive strain of many peoples changing at different rates, starting from so many different points, huddled together under threat of annihilation if any people raises a hand against any other but still unused to this closeness and mutual dependency, has intensified our sense of urgency as it has also driven many people into apathetic despair. Instead of South Sea islands for in a literal sense we now know there are no islands-little islands of domesticity have become the escape from the overwhelming problems of the modern world. And today, even more than then, the antidote to this type of escapism-as futile and more dangerous than the escapism of the 1920's-consists in looking forward, not backward, in using our knowledge of what we have been not to construct simple answers but to learn how to move and how the very nature of that movement will determine what the next condition of man will be.
In the years between, anthropology has changed from a discipline that was primarily concerned with recording and analyzing fossil and transient ways of life, the primitive and the near primitive, to the science that is acutely concerned with change. Our tools have been sharpened and new tools have been forged. As once we were concerned with what a culture was and, changing, might lose, so now we are deeply concerned with what each small, once primitive, culture is becoming. And the climate of opinion in the world has affected and has been affected by this transformation of interest. We know now that we cannot build to complete specifications some perfect and satisfying set of institutions to meet all human needs, but rather that each change will create new needs and that what we ask will change the answers living peoples give to the questions about man's place in the universe.
INTRODUCTION
During the last hundred years parents and teachers have ceased to take childhood and adolescence for granted. They have attempted to fit education to the needs of the child, rather than to press the child into an inflexible educational mold. To this new task they have been spurred by two forces, the growth of the science of psychology, and the difficulties and maladjustment of youth. Psychology suggested that much might be gained by a knowledge of the way in which children developed, of the stages through which they passed, of what the adult world might reasonably expect of the baby of two months or the child of two years. And the fulminations of the pulpit, the loudly voiced laments of the conservative social philosopher, the records of juvenile courts and social agencies all suggested that something must be done with the period which science had named adolescence. The spectacle of a younger generation diverging ever more widely from the standards and ideals of the past, cut adrift without the anchorage of respected home standards or group religious values, terrified the cautious reactionary, tempted the radical propagandist to missionary crusades among the defenseless youth, and worried the least thoughtful among us.
In American civilization, with its many immigrant strains, its dozens of conflicting standards of conduct, its hundreds of religious sects, its shifting economic conditions, this unsettled, disturbed status of youth was more apparent than in the older, more settled civilization of Europe. American conditions challenged the psychologist, the educator, the social philosopher, to offer acceptable explanations of the growing children's plight. As today in post-way Germany, where the younger generation has even more difficult adjustments to make than have our own children, a great mass of theorizing about adolescence is flooding the book shops; so the psychologist in America tried to account for the restlessness of youth. The result was works like that of Stanley Hall on "Adolescence," which ascribed to the period through which the children were passing, the causes of their conflict and distress. Adolescence was characterized as the period in which idealism flowered and rebellion against authority waxed strong, a period during which difficulties and conflicts were absolutely inevitable.
The careful child psychologist who relied upon experiment for his conclusions did not subscribe to these theories. He said, "We have no data. We know only a little about the first few months of a child's life. We are only just learning when a baby's eyes will first follow a light. How can we give definite answers to questions of how a developed personality, about which we know nothing, will respond to religion?" But the negative cautions of science are never popular. If the experimentalist would not commit himself, the social philosopher, the preacher and the pedagogue tried the harder to give a short-cut answer. They observed the behavior of adolescents in our society, noted down the omnipresent and obvious symptoms of unrest, and announced these as characteristics of the period. Mothers were warned that 'daughters in their teens' present special problems. This, said the theorists, is a difficult period. The physical changes which are going on in the bodies of your boys and girls have their definite psychological accompaniments. You can no more evade one than you can the other; as your daughter's body changes from the body of a child to the body of a woman, so inevitably will her spirit change, and that stormily. The theorists looked about them again at the adolescents in our civilization and repeated with great conviction, 'Yes, stormily.'
Such a view, though unsanctioned by the cautious experimentalist, gained wide currency, influenced our educational policy, paralyzed our parental efforts. Just as the mother must brace herself against the baby's crying when it cuts its first tooth, so she must fortify herself and bear with what equanimity she might the unlovely, turbulent manifestations of the "awkward age." If there was nothing to blame the child for, neither was there any program except endurance which might be urged upon the teacher. The theorist continued to observe the behavior of American adolescents and each year lent new justification to his hypothesis, as the difficulties of youth were illustrated and documented in the records of schools and juvenile courts.
But meanwhile another way of studying human development had been gaining ground, the approach of the anthropologist, the student of man in all of his most diverse social settings. The anthropologist, as he pondered his growing body of material upon the customs of primitive people, grew to realize the tremendous role played in an individual's life by the social environment in which each is born and reared. One by one, aspects of behaviors which we had been accustomed to consider invariable complements of our humanity were found to be merely a result of civilization, present in the inhabitants of on country, absent in another country, and this without a change of race. He learned that neither race nor common humanity can be held responsible for many of the forms which even such basic human emotion as love and fear and anger take under different social conditions.
So the anthropologist, arguing from his observations of the behaviors of adult human beings in other civilizations, reaches many of the same conclusions which the behaviorist reaches in his work upon human babies who have as yet no civilization to shape their malleable humanity.
With such an attitude towards human nature the anthropologist listened to the current comment upon adolescence. He hard attitudes which seemed to him dependent upon social environment-such as rebellion against authority, philosophical perplexities, the flowering of idealism, conflict and struggle-ascribed to a period of physical development. And on the basis of his knowledge of the determinism of culture, of the plasticity of human beings, he doubted. Were these difficulties due to being adolescent or to being adolescent in America?
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Career Advice for Kids: Play More
by Barbara Moses
Source: Career Intelligence: The 12 New Rules for Work and Life Success
(Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc. 1998)
"Parents who are anxious to give their children a leg up in the world often cram kids' lives with educational and 'enriching' activities computer camp, museum trips, music lessons, and so on. But it may be wiser just to let them play.
'Children learn about how the world operates; its rules, roles, and expectations and about their emotions and sense of self through free play,' says career expert Barbara Moses. 'The current obsession with accelerating children's learning robs them of these vital opportunities.'
Pushing children to make career decisions in their teens, with the goal of giving them an edge, may also backfire, Moses writes in her new book, I. Because technology and the economy change so rapidly, the hot jobs forecasted today many not be hot for long. Even computer skills are no 'magic bullet.' Children who keep their options open, who are flexible and able to deal with ambiguity, may fare better in tomorrow's work world.
Rather than pressuring children to prepare for a particular job, parents should help them identify and nurture their areas of interest and ability. 'Encourage them to choose an academic path that personally engages them, rather than trying to second-guess the future market for jobs,' Moses advise. 'If they follow their true interests and strengths, they are much more likely to attain satisfying work in the end, although it may not be in an area they can currently envisage.'
If a child's academic interest seems to be only marginally marketable, Moses suggests 'combining two areas of study to maximize [his or her] flexibility, such as business with history or art; information technology with English literature; and so on.'
When it comes to education, Moses recommends the critical-thinking skills, the broad context, and the flexibility that come with a traditional liberal arts degree. But she doesn't discount vocational training or specialized degrees such as law or engineering. In fact, executives are evenly divided when asked whether they prefer a liberal arts or more specialized education in choosing a job candidate.
'If they [children] do specialize, they should ensure that they have the foundations (social sciences, writing, and thinking skills) to understand the broader context in which they are carrying out their work, interact with people from different disciplines, talk persuasively, write clearly and effectively, and be able to abstract important information from a situation,' writes Moses.
Cooperative education, which alternates academic study with periods of work placement with organizations, is becoming increasingly popular and is sometimes offered even at the high-school level.
'In theory,' Moses concludes, 'co-op education should be of value not just from the point of view of developing 'hard' job skills, but also for enriching an adolescent's opportunity to discover areas of interest, and just as important areas of no interest.'
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Excerpts from "The Rites Of Passage"
by Arnold Van Gennep
(University of Chicago Press 1960 -1972 printing)
"The life of an individual in any society is a series of passages from one age to another and from one occupation to another. Wherever there are fine distinctions among age or occupational groups, progression from one group to the next accompanied by special act, like those which make up apprenticeship in our trades. Among semi-civilized peoples such acts are enveloped in ceremonies, since to the semi-civilized mind no act is entirely free of the sacred. In such societies every change in a person's life involves actions and actions between sacred and profane actions and reactions to be regulated and guarded so that society as a whole ill suffer no discomfort or injury. Transitions from group to group and from one social situation to the next are looked on as implicit in the very fact of existence, so that a man's life comes to be made up of a succession of stages with similar ends and beginnings: birth, social puberty, marriage, fatherhood, advancement to a higher class, occupational specialization, and death. For every one of these events there are ceremonies whose essential purpose is to enable the individual to pass from one defined position to another which is equally well defined. Such changes of condition do not occur without disturbing the life of society and the individual, and it is the function of rites of passage to reduce their harmful effects. the ceremonies of initiation into totem groups are known down to the most minute details for several Australian tribes. In some tribes the novice is considered dead, and he remains dead for the duration of his novitiate. It lasts for a fairly long time and consists of a physical and mental weakening which is undoubtedly intended to make him lose all recollection of his childhood existence. Then follows the positive part: instruction in tribal law and a gradual education as the novice witnesses totem ceremonies, recitations and, above all, a special mutilation which varies with the tribe and which makes the novice forever identical with the adult members. Sometimes the initiation takes place all at once, sometimes in stages. Where the novice is considered dead, he is resurrected and taught how to live, but differently than in childhood. Whatever the variations of detail, a series which conforms to the general pattern of rites of passage can always be discerned. For groups, as well as for individuals, life itself means to separate and to be reunited, to change form and condition, to die and to be reborn. It is to act and to cease, to wait and rest, and then to begin acting again, but in a different way. And there are always new thresholds to cross: the thresholds of summer and winter, of a season or a year, of a month or a night; the thresholds of birth, adolescence, maturity, and old age; the threshold of death and that of the afterlife for those who believe in it.
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How To Fight Back
by Jerry Adler and Karen Springen
(Excerpts from Newsweek, May 3, 1999)
[page 38] "The utopian ideal is for children to stop bullying one another. 'I don't think we'll ever change the reality that kids group themselves into cliques,' says Dwyer. [Kevin Dwyer is a certified psychologist and principal author of a school safety guide the government sent to every school in the country last fall.] 'But it's the respect for the other person that's critical. Bullying should not be tolerated in any school in the United States.' A few schools are beginning to address bullying from the victim's perspective, with programs to teach social skills to kids who don't seem to fit in. Starting well before high school, says psychologist Jan Hughes of Texas A&M University, 'you need to create a culture that promotes prosocial ways of dealing with conflict.' As last week's tragedy demonstrated, we are all jocks and nerds, teachers and parents, even the misunderstood Goths themselves in this together."
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THE MORAL INTELLIGENCE OF CHILDREN
How to Raise a Moral Child]
by Robert Coles
( Penguin Putnam, Inc. Copyright 1997 )
[Re: Teens] page 136
"I have sat with groups of parents of teenagers in several cities over the
years, heard them worry and, most of all, heard them express a host of fears,
especially that of a kind of estrangement: fear that they will be unable to be
heard respectfully by their sons and daughters, and also that they as adults
will lose a capacity to understand those same off-spring, no matter the decade
and more that all parties have spent under the same roof. Most recently, sitting
in my hometown listening to reasonably well-educated, quite sincere and devoted
parents (and teachers, too) speak of adolescents (their own children, and those
who belong to neighbors or, more abstractly, to the world at large), I sometimes
feel we are discussing an alien tribe of sorts, elusive, unpredictable, errant.
'Most of the time we get on fine but that's because we've learned to keep out of one another's way,' a mother of two teenagers, a daughter of sixteen and a son of fourteen, tell us, and her husband nods a bit too emphatically, as if to assert not only agreement but decided resentment. I look at him with concern, friendliness, empathy, and sympathy, or so I hope, but immediate and strong memories of a family's recent struggles deny him a relaxed, reflective response. Instead, he tries valiantly to keep his cool, even as he tells us of tensions, misunderstandings, raised voices, slammed doors; his voice brings it all near at hand: a high-pitched tremulousness, a mix of apprehension and anger that (apart from the content of his remarks) stirs us, unnerves us. Finally, an observation that is also an implied question and without a doubt a plea for assistance: 'It is a 'stage,' I know it is , people keep saying that it must be! But it's not natural that people who belong to the same family have such different values!'
A father of two teenage sons, eighteen and seventeen, [says] 'You have to watch your every word; that's what I've discovered. If you walk as if there's glass all over, it can pay off you avoid those confrontations!'
A mother doesn't like what she has just heard and says so forthrightly: 'I disagree. I think that you've got to put your ideas right out there, and the kids, too [they should do likewise].' She is about to continue but is interrupted by another mother, who takes immediate, strong, lengthy issue. 'You get nowhere pushing teenagers with those frank talks you end up making bad go to worse that way. They love to argue believe me, I know! That's what being a teenager is in America! I mean, argue, argue with moral authority with everyone who has it. That's all I hear from my son [who's sixteen]: authority this and authority that! I've had those 'knock downs 'we've said everything, and you know what? Once you do that, you don't forget what you've heard! I'm not blaming him I'm talking about myself. I've gotten so upset, I've lost my temper. I've told my son that his problem is that he's got an easy, comfortable life, so he can be one of these teenagers who is 'in rebellion.' If he had to go to work so he wouldn't starve to death he'd not be 'in rebellion'; he'd be glad to have a job and obey the people over him! My father grew up in the Depression and he had to work and work, and he brought home money from doing errands and delivering newspapers, and he wasn't out there fighting with his parents, and complaining about how grown-ups were treating him, and how they're abusing their 'authority'! He was glad to slave away at school or in the jobs he found, and he handed his money over to his parents and felt honored to be able to do that! They struggled, those people; now it's gotten so easy for our kids that they don't know how lucky they are!'
She stopped only to gather momentum to continue, and no one seemed willing to intervene. When she resumed she shifted direction, explicitly and dramatically; 'Look, I'm not going to give you folks the speech you thought you'd be getting from me. I tried telling my son long ago what I just told you plenty of that! In one ear, out the other. Oh, I'm not being very fair to him. He let me know: his life isn't his grandfather's, and there's no point in trying to say that it is. I began to realize that my life isn't (it wasn't ever) the same as my mom's and dad's' [She] had essentially told us that she and her son share a point of about life (and the experiences that go with such a point of view) [another woman says] 'I sit down with my daughter, don't get me wrong. I talk with her. She listens; she doesn't always agree with me. But she knows that I believe in something and that I want her to hear me out, and she knows I want her to go along with me. I know this sounds strange to a lot of people these days to some of you, here but I feel my daughter shouldn't be having sex, sexual intercourse, as a high school girl, no matter what (I mean, no matter with whom). I think she's too young; she needs time to learn about herself and others, and I feel it's my job to talk with her, try to persuade her,'
All right, others say, but what if your daughter out and out 'disagrees'? The mother is ready for that line of questioning, pursued by several of her fellow parents. She points out that if one doesn't define one's views, explain them, and ultimately, insist upon them, then one is accepting right off more than the possibility that the youth will 'disagree,' will go his or her way, but will now by implication be encouraged to do so by a parent who refuses to give 'something badly needed,' namely, 'opposition' to what 'seems popular,' what 'they and their friends' think is 'cool,' and is being advocated and practiced by 'everyone.' We are now in the midst of a complex, necessary discussion how to convey one's moral principles to an adolescent bent on independence, on asserting his or her personal initiatives and ideas, in such a way that one is heard, heeded, both. I am asked for suggestions
I tell of what I believe adolescents, all of us, need so very much standards, values, by which I hope I mean not easy rhetoric, including the psychological kind forthcoming from my kind all too readily and welcomed by many rather too readily. I tell of the loneliness many young people feel, even if they have a good number of friends and seem to be in the very midst of things. It's a loneliness that has to do with a self-imposed judgment of sorts: I am pushed and pulled by an array of urges, yearning, worries, fears, that I can't share with anyone, really and don't wish to, even as I wonder about others, their thought, their emotions. This sense of utter difference, this sense of peculiarity, even as one at the same time realizes one'' kinship with family members, one'' substantial affiliation with and resemblance to various friends, makes for a certain moodiness well known among adolescents, who are, after all, constantly trying to figure out exactly how they ought to and might live where, doing what, and with whom.
I call upon some past teachers of mine, including youths who in their often tense, nearly mute manner can covey so very much. I remember out loud a young man of fifteen who engaged in light banter, only to shut down, shake his head, refuse to talk at all when his own life and troubles became the subject at hand. He had stopped going to school, begun using large amounts of pot; he sat in his room for hours listening to rock music, the door closed. To myself I called him a host of psychiatric names: withdrawn, depressed, possibly psychotic; finally I asked him about his head-shaking behavior: I wondered whom he was thereby addressing. He replied: 'No one.' I hesitated, gulped a bit as I took a chance: 'Not yourself?' He looked right at me now in a sustained stare, for the first time. 'Why do you say that?'
I felt that much was at stake. Now I knew I'd come close to something, to someone, yet I also knew that this youth might for that very reason be scared mightily, and so more than inclined to run fast and far. I decided not to answer the question in the manner that I was trained to reply, had become accustomed to reply: an account of what I had surmised about him, what I thought was happening inside him: his moral vulnerability, his self-arraignment at the hands of an over-bearing conscience, which was nay-saying him and everyone else, hence his extreme solitude. Not that I'd have gotten into psychiatric specifics. I would have been, I hope, gently interpretive, would perhaps have commented on the "hard time" I thought he was giving himself, in the hope that maybe he'd take over and tell me about the hard time that he was having, in that way confirming my sense of things. Instead, with some unease (I could always attribute that to the patient, his unease as picked up by me!) I heard myself saying this: 'I've been there; I remember being there remember when I felt I couldn't say a word to anyone. I guess I was saying that to myself, that I had no idea what to make of myself, say to myself. 'That time turned out to be our lowest spell together.'"
[Re: interviews with teens] page 153
"they often connected their loneliness to the intensity of that search for
meaning, as if they felt alone, stranded by their ethical inquiry and the rest
of the world was uninterested. Those youths brought up various ethical
questions: not only how they should behave but why, in accordance with what
larger scheme of things. Here they revealed a tenacious moral seriousness, even
as they weren't sure what to do with it, where to take it, so to speak. 'My
parents, they're ready to talk about sex at the drop of a hat,' a
sixteen-year-old girl from a well-to-do, well-educated family observed, and then
she gave us the details: discussions of contraception, discussions, as she put
it, of whether, when, with whom, how much! She told her friends in that
room the details of those talks, told of her boredom, by now, wit the subject.
Then she became both ironic and sad: 'You know, there are times when I think
that my folks are more into all that than I am! They've read all these books,
they've talked with doctors, and my mother is seeing a shrink, and they're ready
wow, are they ready! to sit with me and talk about 'options,' and 'psychology,'
and the 'stages' I'm going through, and 'women,' and how it's different being
female, and you have to understand that, and 'men,' and what they are
like: I've heard it all! Even our minister, he talks about that stuff all the
time! I went to a 'sexuality' course, a seminar he ran at the church. He and my
parents, they talk exactly alike! I got out of those meetings, and I thought,
this is something! You can't take a breath if you're a teenager without
someone coming at you and telling you that you're going through this 'cycle,'
and you should 'share your feelings.' My grandmother, she told me that when she
was my age she was trying to do well in school and hold down a job, and her dad
was sick, so she worried about him, and no one seemed to be worrying about her,
or talking with her, and that was fine!
What I wish: I wish a lot of people who are worrying about us 'teenagers' I wish they'd be worrying about themselves! I feel so damn odd and peculiar as though I'm the only one I know in my family who's trying to figure things out, as if I'm walking on this street and there's no one in sight. I wish my folks would stop turning me into one more reason not to worry about themselves, that's what I wish! I look at them sometimes, and I think: Lord, they're in a sorry way," I asked what she would as [her dad]. "What would I ask him? I'd ask him hey, Dad, why are you being this way, what for? I mean, what do you believe in? Anything? Nothing? Your job and your hobbies and us, your family? I'd ask him if he thought, if he wished he'd be living like he does now, back when he was my age? I'd ask him what really counts. He goes to church with Mom every once in a while, and she says he's almost fast asleep most of the time! That's what I remember, when I used to go how he'd be bored, he'd be going through the motions, that's all. When I stopped going, Mom was upset, but Dad just shrugged his shoulders. You want to know what I think? I think he shrugs his shoulders a lot at life! the big point for me is this life what does it mean? That's what I keep asking myself that's what I'd like to be finding out, figuring out. I ask my mother about that and she gets this far-off look. She'd much rather talk with me about my boyfriend, and my friends, and their boyfriends. She'd like me to help her with her garden. She'd like me to learn to cook all these exotic foods, the way she's been learning in that course. She'd like me to be better at tennis: 'We could play doubles together; we'd make a spectacular team smashing! She says tennis clears her head. She says that her shrink gives her 'food for thought.' I asked her what food, what thought. she smiled and told me I wasn't to know it had to do with 'your mother and dad's private business.' Sex again! Relationships! 'How are you doing with your friends?' She asks me that once a week, at least once a day! I'd like to think I'm headed for more than this, a repeat of it! I really would!'"
[excerpt from a mother of a teenager] page 156
"Teenagers are looking for something to believe in, that's what is going on.
When they become cynical and fault-finding, that tells you something. They've
got a conscience working inside them or they wouldn't have the slightest
interest in finding fault with anyone, anywhere! They feel critical and 'out of
it' because they're noticing a lot; they're not missing the tricks lots of us
try to brush aside. I get tired sometimes when my son won't let up on something.
He can be so contemptuous of certain people; he calls them arrogant and he
doesn't see his own arrogance, the way he dismisses those people out of hand!
But I stop myself from shouting at him. I say, look: he's sixteen years old and
he's trying to find something to believe in. He goes to a lot of movies; in my
opinion, too many! He'll think about them, though, and he'll talk to us about
them, and it's then that I realize this boy is a man. This son of mine is
looking at the world and trying to sort out all he sees, and most of all, he's
looking for some goals, some path to take. That's what it means to be an
'adolescent,' I believe. You're not yet an adult, you haven't chosen your
spouse, and you haven't chosen your occupation, your profession, but you're in
the process of doing that, so you have to be a little critical and dismissive,
because that is what 'choice' is all about. I realize some people don't have the
choices our children have, I do, but for a lot of us there are so many choices
that it can be a big problem in itself, a buffet so full you can't decide what
to eat!"
[Excerpt from Anna Freud, Yale, 1970] page 157
"A child old enough to enter school has come to terms with his family life,
figured out more or less how to comply with certain demands and rules and
customs. In adolescence, that same person has to go through a similar kind of
accommodation, but now it is not only the family that he has to deal with, but
the world outside it. I often think of young people as caught in the middle: on
one side is the body, on the other side society and they're trying to come to
terms with both."
She went on, spoke at length, as she had before in our talks, of the loneliness that many youths feel to some extent a consequence, she pointed out, of the trouble they are having in understanding what is happening to them, hence a withdrawal from others. She told of some of her patients, how hard it was for her to stay connected with them. She even became a bit rhetorical, a rare moment for her, and told me how important it can be for adolescents to be in touch with at least one adult in some candid and trusting way, even though many young people deny having any interest in such a relationship. She told me of a sixteen-year-old girl who came to see her weekly only to denounce the whole adult world as "'rooked' or 'rotten.' After such condemnatory comments, which lasted about half an hour, she almost feverishly tried to get the answers to various questions that were obviously on her mind, while all the while saying that they were inquiries put to her by others, the answers to which she already knew but wanted to compare with anything Miss Freud might have to say. The moral of all of this: many youths want so very much to rely upon at least one older person, even as they dismiss out of hand all of those whose age is over this or that number. 'Whenever I hear teenagers being especially scornful of their elders,' Miss Freud observed, 'I know they are in need of exactly what of whom they are most scorning.' She concluded on this cautiously upbeat note: 'If they can find that person well, there's a possible second chance: to try to work things out once more.'
Much later, as we were saying good-bye, she repeated herself, as if all of us who work with teenagers need to hear this: 'The more I hear a young person say that he [or she] doesn't trust anyone who isn't his [or her] age, the more I know the need of that person for someone to share things with!' [teens] are struggling hard to figure out how to behave, what to do, and why; they are interested in obtaining for themselves certain credible moral fundamental set of values that strike them as convincing and that, they hope, will give them some reliable and worthy direction. They seek, to put it differently, a kind of moral companionship from an adult or two, be the older person a parent, a teacher, a relative, a friend's kin whomever they can find who is ready to 'level' with them [teens want] help in sizing up some very real moral as well as psychological matters in their lives: whether to use or reject liquor or drugs; how far to go with a girlfriend, a boyfriend; how to deal with vague or not so vague stirrings directed at those of the same sex; and in school, how to handle their competitive side, their envies and rivalries, especially as they could prod one toward cheating in class or being 'unfair' at this or that sport. Many of the options available to the young come at them not from within (the pressure of instinct, of desire, fueling a search for expression) but from without (social and cultural possibilities from a consumerist society ever ready to pester, entice, seduce an audience, an 'age group'). Young people, to repeat, take in values from that world, from the music they hear, the movies and television they see, from the fashion, advertising, and magazine industries as they influence what gets worn, what gets said, how hair is cut or colored, what hobbies are pursued."
*****************************************************************************
A Tribe Apart
A Journey Into The Heart Of American Adolescence
by Patricia Hersch
(Balantine Publishing Group, 1998)
Comments from the director of the Harry Singer Foundation:
I read this book last spring and reviewed it for a radio show I was hosting. The author, journalist, Patricia Hersch spent six years on the book, three in the schools in Reston, Virginia. Reston is a multi-racial middle-class community 18 miles west of Washington, DC. That's where she lives. Reston seemed to be fairly representative of other American communities. Its middle and high schools have a full-time police officer, it has its share of gang graffiti and its kids hang out in parks and malls. It's a civic minded place with numerous community clubs and organizations and a tradition of volunteering. Like all communities today, the big concern is how to deal with adolescents. As Ms. Hersch put it, "Today's teens have grown up in the midst of enormous social changes that have shaped, reshaped, distorted and sometimes decimated the basic parameters for healthy development. They have grown up with parents who are still seeking answers about what it means to be an adult man or woman." She says everyone is improvising. There are no right ways to do anything anymore. Adolescents need to emulate role models more than ever and adults are no longer around."
I've talked on the air, about the adolescent need for a recognized rite of passage. I found agreement with Dr. James Garbarino in his book Lost Boys Why Our Sons Turn Violent And How We Can Save Them, and was happy to discover that same agreement in Patricia Hersch's writings. I quote: "There are few community-sanctioned moments or formalized thresholds that mark steps on the road toward adulthood. Teen life is out of sync. For too many kids a first date, confirmation, a bar mitzvah, or even high school graduation is a side trip on a jagged path to growing up. What is the meaning of a driver's license or turning eighteen when so many kids have already assumed grown-up responsibilities for cooking, shopping, cleaning, self-care and care of siblings for years when they might have preferred playing? What is the meaning of their venturing out from home when the older generation is already gone? Sometimes, as a reaction to the confusion, today's kids would just as likely herald in adulthood with a beer or joint.
In order to write A Tribe Apart, Patricia Hersch lived among the adolescents and they gradually adjusted to her presence. She eventually made an agreement with eight main-stream kids to chronicle their experiences, feelings and innermost thoughts over a period of three years. She used fictional names and promised not to reveal any of their confidences - all of this with the youngster and the parent's signed permission. The results of this project are absolutely fascinating. Things are not what they seem. Adults are only to happy to assume that what looks good on the surface is the real thing. They have neither the time or energy to explore below the surface. She documented what most of us suspected; there is little intergenerational contact. Kids have very little consistency or structure in their lives. I quote the author: "Technology and the media create a world without boundaries. For adolescents there is available a dizzying array of lifestyle choices, at the same time that home and community fail to provide a balancing sense of security. ...Like a handful of pebbles tossed in a raging stream, young people today, as well as many adults around them, seem rushed along in currents out of their control, often ending up in completely unexpected places."
Patricia Hersch seems to be saying that kids aren't rebelling so much as searching for an identity in a rapidly changing and insecure world. Okay- so this isn't exactly news to you or me - In fact search for identity is nothing new in itself and is not a prerogative of adolescents.
On page 19 Ms. Hersch explains why this generation of teens is particularly hard to know: "It's because we aren't there. Not just parents, but any adults. American society has left its children behind as the cost of progress in the workplace. This isn't about working parents, right or wrong, but an issue for society to set its priorities and to pay attention to its young in the same way it pays attention to its income...Adolescents are growing up with no adults around and no discussion about whether it matters at all.
The most stunning change for adolescents today is their aloneness. Not loneliness---but aloneness. The adolescents of the nineties are more isolated and more unsupervised than other generations. It used to be that kids sneaked time away from adults. The proverbial kisses stolen in the back seat of a car, or the forbidden cigarette smoked behind the garage, bestowed a grown-up thrill of getting away with the forbidden. The real excitement was in not getting caught by a watchful or nosy neighbor who'd call mom. Today mom is at work. Neighbors are often strangers. Relatives live in distant places. This changes everything. It changes access to a bed, a liquor cabinet, a car. There are no more traditional behavioral expectations for young people. In the silence of empty houses and neighborhoods, young people have built their own community. It's a creation by default. The kids have all the responsibility for making decisions, often in a void, so they create a substitute family and let their buddies help them. Their dependence on each other cements the notion of a tribe apart. Their isolation makes them more than a group of peers. They become a separate society with its own values, ethics, rules, view of the world, rites of passage, and so forth. People used to live in houses full of people. If they were wealthy or middle-class they had servants-if poor, they had relatives or boarders. At one time even nuclear families lived in one household. Now a little kid has numerous step siblings, parents and several houses. In the 20th century, not only children are alone, but everybody is alone.
"In all societies since the beginning of time, adolescents have learned to become adults by observing, imitating and interacting with grown-ups around them. It is startling how little time modern teens spend in the company of adults. A study found they spend only 4.8 percent with parents and two percent with adults who were not their parents. It is a problem for the entire community when generations get separated like that. It goes beyond rules and discipline to the
idea- exchanges that do not occur; the conversations NOT held, the guidance and role modeling NOT taking place, the wisdom and traditions no longer filtering down inevitably. How can kids imitate and learn from adults if they never talk to them? How can they form the connections to trust adult wisdom if there is inadequate contact? How can they decide what to accept and reject from the previous generation when exposure is limited? The generational threads that used to weave their way into the fabric of growing up are missing...pure and simple!"
[p21] "Of course, teens have always loved to hang out with each other. From the bobby soxers to the hippies, American teens found a way to make a separate statement of who they were. The 'generation gap' was a rallying cry in the sixties. The term became shorthand for the radically different ways in which the young and the old-at that time, 'anyone over thirty'-saw the world. It was a declaration of separateness. But this separateness paradoxically required that each generation have knowledge of the other's point of view in order to criticize it. From the point of view of the kids, it was their parent's Vietnam War that was hated, their parents' materialism, their parents' racism, their parents sexism. Without the acknowledged values of the mainstream culture, there could be no counterculture. 'Us versus Them' required the active engagement of 'Them.' It was a period of intense interaction between age groups. Teens of the sixties wanted freedom and space. So as today's parents, it's natural for them to think the adolescent desire for space is just a part of growing up. They extend to their own children the privilege of being left alone which they once longed for. The sixties cemented in the public imagination the idea that treating teens as a tribe apart is right and proper. So now when teens act in ways we are not entirely comfortable with, we are not sure whether we should intercede or not. The issue for adults is not necessarily one of neglect but more often of simply wanting to do the right thing-which may be letting teens 'do their own thing.' How much space do kids need? How much should adults intrude? Parents who grew up in the sixties find such issues especially confusing."
Today's generation gap has nothing to do with social change, intellectual questioning or opposition to causes. Instead it arises from a new social reality. Today's kids have too much space---their separateness may be the key. It creates an environment for growing up that adults can't fathom because their absence causes it. Adult absence transforms the environment for all kids, even those with adults in the home or neighborhood. There is no doubt the oldest and the youngest generation share the isolation, the aloneness, the powerlessness.
Parents and members of communities all around the country are trying their darndest to encourage academic excellence. We've seen the bumper stickers displayed by proud parents. Newspapers honor academic scholars in local schools. Numerous civic organizations host similar events and offer monetary awards. The community at large responds in good faith to the plea from teens to be noticed and recognized but there are too often unintended consequences. On page 240 of A Tribe Apart, Patricia Hersch allows us to experience one of those unintended consequences as it plays out in Reston, Virginia. Chris, an eighth grader and one of her eight chosen subjects, makes her aware : This is what she writes:
"There is a school-wide push for excellence at the expense of the kids' community standards. All of a sudden, good students are being showcased in an adult effort to make excellence 'cool.' By the end of first quarter, honor roll students are listed on classroom bulletin boards, they are asked to do special things in the classroom (positioned uncomfortably as 'teacher's pet'), and are even pulled out of class for a special Honor Breakfast. Chris, ( who, as an aside, was voted the 7th grade Boy Most Likely To Succeed) and who at the beginning of eighth grade is absolutely committed to good grades, finds the spotlight an embarrassment. He becomes preoccupied with calculating what is necessary to remain socially relevant to his peers and what is required to ace his classes. His own internal drive for excellence is driven underground."
Do you have any idea what a parent, teacher or employer would give to instill "an internal drive for excellence" in their offspring, student or employee? And here we see, with good intentions and a lot of hard work on the wonna-be-do-gooders part, the "internal drive" that was already there, is being forced underground. Definitely an unintended consequence!
A Tribe Apart leaves no doubt about the need to reform our current system of education. But should billions of dollars be put into renovating old or constructing new buildings with sophisticated surveillance cameras and metal detectors? Should we hire more teachers to be intimidated by students pushing the limits so that class-room time becomes a war of wills where teachers can't teach and students can't learn? It's a trite saying, but it has become trite through constant repetition precisely because it's true---that is: "If you keep doing what you've always done, you'll get more of what you always got." If it didn't work the first time; expanding what didn't work is insanity. But status quo is hard to change.
If you take the time to read A Tribe Apart you will see that being ignored is a key to teen rage. I have become more than a little irritated with the constant reiteration of problems. We talk, talk, talk but how about doing something to solve them? I have researched, considered and offered solutions to various social ills over the past 15 years. It is one thing to have ideas criticized--no one expects instant universal acceptance, but there must be debate, so that ideas may be refined.
In the 1990's I hitched my energy to a viable solution to the alienation in society, the less than ineffectual educational system; the employer's need to go off shore, the need for higher taxes to build and maintain more prisons and job training programs, enterprise zones and all the projects that are needed to pick up the pieces. Pieces that are the result of a costly/ineffectual social policy. I encouraged the Harry Singer Foundation to focus on one project, Another Way. Another Way actually solves so many of the problems I've heard discussed over my lifetime. It encourages young people, especially high school students, to use their capabilities more fully. Something that Patricia Hersch, James Garbarino, the Harry Singer Foundation and countless others who have worked with teens, discovered they are eager to do. Their energy and goodwill may be the nation's greatest untapped resource.
Although our son's death was the catalyst for the Another Way project, the idea came from young people over a period of years. Students were asked to provide solutions, not just reiterate problems in their responsibility essays in 1994. Students in Texas, Wisconsin, Washington, South Dakota and Illinois all hit on a similar idea without any coaching from the rules or required reading provided by the foundation. We isolated a few of these quotes which show a grass roots enthusiasm for sharing and rewarding positive things. We have been publishing them in the preface of Foundation books to illustrate the need for the Foundation's White Hats program the project which rewards local unsung heroes. Ramona Lazanis from Freeman High School in Rockford Washington suggested a larger network - the basis of Another Way. She said: "If we could get volunteers to start in another state and keep extending this program we could have a nation-wide organization of everyone working together. This cooperation and building of trust and talking about problems could eliminate some of the irresponsibility of our nation."
Christie Brady, a high school student in Eureka, Illinois came to many of the conclusions reached by Patricia Hersch: "As society has shifted its values, so have the individuals within it. There is no longer a clear line between the acceptable and the unacceptable. With so broad a spectrum it is no wonder that Americans are confused about many things. Irresponsible behavior stems from many areas, one of these being confusion. When confused and put up against decision making, one will generally go with their instincts. These instincts, for the most part, lead in the right direction. But what about the times that even the instincts are confused? Usually, when someone is confused, it means that they are lacking adequate knowledge in a particular area. As a nation, we seem to be so confused about so many things that it is beginning to affect our actions."
Erik Pollom, a student at Seaman High School in Topeka, Kansas believes young people can help: "The young people of Topeka know what is going on first hand. Instead of tying to use statistics which are either out of date or averaged for the whole nation (thus rendering them irrelevant to a specific community), the youth themselves should be asked for input. They may not have all of the answers, but through their ideas officials may be able to make a better informed decision."
We believe the young people are the only ones that can change our society around. It has to be a philosophical, soft-power change from within and they start out with hope and such promise-adults only have to nurture what is; or at least not trample and destroy it.
A ten year involvement with high school students has convinced the Harry Signer Foundation that young people have the ability to research, analyze and recommend solutions to social problems. Problem Solvers was conceived as a school-based club, but could be a regular part of the high school curriculum as an elective or worked into social studies, government or a similar class. In the fictional account of Another Way, problem solving students research real life community problems and make recommendations on the radio. Callers suggest issues and discuss possible solutions on the air with the students. Students then expand the initial ideas with research and come back with refined solutions and ask for more. In one example the kids discovered that they could take the money used to post temporary signs and knock on doors informing residents on an annual cleaning - street sweepers in Mapleton could post a regular monthly cleaning schedule on permanent signs. That's eleven extra cleanings for the same cost.
Kids also tackled a problem that stymied adults. The neighborhood wanted an all day kindergarten but there was no room at the school and no money for a full-day teacher. Two large problems, yes? The adults first reaction was to apply for federal funds. No surprise there and no help either. That cookie jar had been cleaned out. The kids took over and interviewed working mothers, people living close to the elementary school, parents, employers and groups in the community that care about giving kids a good start in education. They discovered that working mothers had to leave work in the middle of the day to pick up children at noon and schlep them across town to daycare. They came up with several suggestions: For instance, have the affected employers help out with donations that could be leveraged through the community dream machine to recruit volunteer drivers. They also thought of getting volunteers to remodel extra space the students located, through their interviewing, in a retirement complex in the neighborhood. (1) Morning kindergartners wouldn't have to be driven across town. (2) Students at a nearby community college jumped at the chance for gaining hands-on educational experience working with kids and (3) many of the older residents in the proposed complex were eager to assume grandparent roles and would find satisfaction in a such a relationship.
[teachers should do their job] page 60
"Adolescents no longer live in a protected sphere. They read newspapers for
current events, watch the news. The woes of the world belong to them too.
When they talk about homelessness or budget cuts or health care, Mrs. Nance [teacher] looks proud. But when they take on the issues of their adolescent world, Mrs. Nance and the administrators freak. The paradox of the middle school concept is that it derives from an understanding of early adolescence as a time of special vulnerability, especially in a world where young people face unprecedented choices and pressures. Middle school is designed to meet the specific developmental, emotional, and educational needs of young adolescents, to nurture them and prevent the proliferation of risky behaviors related to sex, substances, absenteeism, and violence. "This is the age when young people begin to wonder about and want to understand great themes such as power, justice, beauty, compassion, courage and faith," writes psychologist Peter Scales in Boxed in and Bored, the Search Institute's latest study on middle schools. "They can be deeply engaged by discussions of sex, race, gender, wealth and poverty, prejudice and privilege, and any number of moral and ethical issues found in current events." But as the speeches in Mrs. Nance's class reveal, there is a tug-of-war between the nitty-gritty of what young adolescents deal with and the readiness of the schools and larger society to deal with kids directly.
One issue looming large for them is drugs. One fourth of Jessica's class, for example, prepared speeches on kids and drugs, and of those, several focused on substance abuse in school. In this area where adults and adolescents desperately need a dialogue, the response is less than embracing. Mrs. Nance is nervous.
She'd already had quite a bit of fallout from Susan's speech in her first-period class. The speech, 'Looking Beneath the Surface,' carefully detailed the use of substances in middle school, which Susan felt 'teachers fail to address.' 'I know you're saying, kids can't drink and not get caught. Oh yes they can. How? Most of the kids in Reston have parents that drink, who have bars in the basement, or have wine cellars in the home.' With a generous supply available carrying liquor to school is easy. 'All they have to do is take some rum and put it in a water bottle and add some soda. Or maybe mix some vodka and orange juice. The teachers think they are having breakfast.' Susan warned that the drinkers may not be obvious. 'Many are A or B students.'
By the time she got to drugs, the adults in the classroom were practically apoplectic. 'Last year, there was selling of drugs in the locker commons, outside and even during classes. Lots of kids know exactly how much it will cost, and when they can get things cheaper because a dealer is having a bad day.' She even addressed how some kids get drugs from their parents who also do drugs: 'It is not that such parents give the drugs to their kids. The kids just steal it from Mom and Dad, and they know they won't be asked or accused because the parents don't want their kids to know that they do drugs.' Even though a lot of kids think it is really dumb to do cocaine or crack, they think pot is okay, that it's just a little worse than cigarettes. Sometimes kids who leave class to smoke are smoking pot.
But the teachers don't put it together, Susan said. 'I know you are asking yourself: How can kids use drugs, drink, and smoke at school without getting caught? They are smarter than you think. They watch teachers and see when they're going to certain places, and at what time. Or they steal office passes and say they had to talk to a teacher, and when they come in later, they don't get into trouble.'
Susan ended with a plea that would be repeated over and over in conversations with adolescents, a plea that asks for boundaries and the structure that comes from being known: 'Just remember, that quiet girl in the back of the class may not be what she appears. That boy that never talks to anyone and loves to read in his spare time may be extremely out-of-control on Friday nights. You adults need to give us more attention. We are not as innocent as you may think. You need to talk to us and watch us and be alert. It is very easy to fool you. It is very easy to lie to you. Teachers and parents need to be smarter about us and stop denying what is really going on.'
Within an hour of this speech, it was all over the school. The students are astounded at her frankness and admire her for it. Many students openly concur with what she said. Jessica and Katy talk about the speech during a break in their class. 'Almost every single party you go to has a bottle of vodka,' confides Katy. Jessica is exasperated that no grownup at Hughes seems inclined to pay serious attention to her friend's speech: 'I'm sorry, the teachers have to be stupid or something not to know that kids are coming to school on drugs.'
The kids' eagerness to share what they know is surprising to teachers swept into conversation, but the teachers are clearly reluctant to get too involved because, as one confides off the record, 'It sets into motion a whole line of reporting responsibilities.' Another adult reaction is to focus solely on Susan and believe that the problems she described are her own, or are wildly exaggerated. Yet an informal survey done later of all the classes on the team corroborated the contents of the speech. Students were asked to write anonymously three things that they 'absolutely, positively knew, saw, or experienced concerning drugs and alcohol among kids in Reston,' and only two could not think of any.
Ironically, at precisely the same time as Susan's speech there is a big move among adults in the school to convene drug discussion groups at parents' homes, since every time the school or PTA has called an adult meeting on the topic, few showed up. The October Parents' Bulletin states: 'Reducing alcohol, drug and tobacco use among public school students is a priority to school officials, parents and community members.' It exhorts parents to sign the Parent's Pledge for Drug Free Youth. The Fairfax County Public Schools biennial substance abuse survey is conducted in classrooms all over the county the same month, and it yields the information that the most dramatic increase in 'gateway drugs' cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana occurs between seventh and eighth grades and that one third of all middle school students consume beer. National figures corroborate the story in Reston.
Yet nobody wanted to listen to the kids. Copies of Susan's speech and a compilation of the classroom survey were never circulated to an adult audience even while teachers, administrators, and parents professed to grapple with the problem. When the school convened its home meetings on drugs and youth, hardly anybody came."
[Katy spoke on Freedom of Speech] page 63
"When my class was given this assignment we were told to talk about what was
on our minds. But how can we talk about what is on our minds when they limit the
issues that we can talk about? When you are a teenager, you are supposed to be
finding out about who you are, but if opinions are outlawed, how will you find
out how you feel?"
The day of assembly arrives and representatives of the Silver Streak Team deliver their speeches on "approved topics like health care policy, education, homelessness, unemployment, crime, and the national debt. The official representatives of the two political parties respond, and the meeting is open for discussion from the floor.
Without missing a nanosecond, Katy asks their opinion on abortion, Jessica on teen pregnancy. Over their "mealy-mouth answers" Katy shrieks: "Why aren't you addressing these issues and why don't you care about what we care about?" The kids scream in wild approval, while teachers try uselessly to hush them. Jessica tries to get the adults to acknowledge the ties between teenage pregnancy and abortion, homelessness, and censorship. "The reason so many girls are getting pregnant is because they need to be informed," she insists. Pretty soon the kids have taken charge, to the teachers' chagrin. They want answers on drugs, on juvenile crime, on issues that directly concern them. When the bell rings for the next class they keep talking and asking questions, ignoring their teachers. They are insistent and want answers from these adults who represent the political parties. They follow the speakers out of the auditorium until finally they agree to come into their classroom for the remaining minutes between periods."
[Plight of the black teenager] page 88
"Unfortunately, the odds are stacked against Charles in a world that sees a
black male adolescent as potential Trouble. It is an everyday thing for him to
walk into a convenience store for a candy bar, or a record store for a tape, and
be eyed suspiciously. 'Oh, yeah, people in stores always see a black male as
stealing,' Charles says. 'Whenever we go to High's, they make us leave our
backpacks at the door. I've been in stores with my friend Jerome, who's Indian
but looks Hispanic, and nobody ever trusts us. People are always following us.'
Does it make him angry? He sighs. 'It's more like an annoyance than an anger
because it is a fact of life that people are going to see me that way.' Two
classmates describe in the same calm voices being tailed by salesclerks, being
stopped by police on the shallowest of pretenses when in cars with black
friends. Restraint is the only way to protect their status. So these boys use
words like 'ignorance' or 'stupidity' or 'acting dumb' to describe acts of
racial prejudice that are enraging. They swallow indignities, they walk away,
distance themselves. To react with rage to what amounts to an almost constant
stalking by white society would be to validate what everybody expects.
Charles's dilemma represents the world of striving black middle-class adolescents. It is life lived on the defensive, a constant tightrope to be navigated between two cultures: a white culture that never fully embraces them, and a black peer group that disdains black achievers. If hip-hop extols the black underclass, then where does a kid like Charles belong? 'It's a mess,' says Langston Hughes eighth grader Annie Jeffreys. 'I don't even know how the stereotype got started. Because the whole civil rights struggle was because there were intelligent black people who deserved rights and could do the same things that whites do. But after we fought for all these rights, we're trying as hard as we can to get back to the stereotype.'
Just like earlier teen subcultures peopled by beatniks, rock 'n' rollers, and others, members of the hip-hop generation adopt a shocking veneer not just to unnerve adults, but to cover the acute self-consciousness and painful vulnerability of being an adolescent. To most kids, this is a 'style.' But hip-hop has a new dangerous twist: race. Like the many-headed Hydra, it frightens outsiders with its tangled dimensions of negativity, violence, offensive language, celebration of the inner city, and adulation of the black outlaw.
Hip-hop keeps at a low boil the legacy of racism in a country where it needs no encouragement. Maybe kids can separate the style from reality, but adults can't. So if a bunch of white, Asian, and black kids are 'pimpin' (a style of walking) down the hall, the adults see the black kid first. The brutal truth is that black students are disciplined, suspended and expelled at a higher rate than white students.
As with the Hydra, when one problem is dealt with, one head lopped off, others grow in its place. The racism now brought into the heart of adolescence in the suburbs creates a tension played out in school. For a small group of kids, the negativity at the core of hip-hop gives them license to not do well, and for some, unleashes destructive anger and even violence. Hip-hop confuses issues and inflames stereotypes, escalates levels of fear in complex times when the problems of society play out in the schools. An increasing number of students come to school already weighted down with problems like racism, poverty, lack of guidance, loss of hope in the future, and anger at family situations, abuse, lack of attention. Hip-hop doesn't create the problems, it merely gives them a voice and a stage. But the popularity of the style among all kinds of kids 'creates an undertone to school life,' according to Jim Hoy. 'The subculture keeps things not quite right.'"
[Disruptive behavior] page 89
"'Parents don't have a clue to what school is like these days. If all I had
to do was go to classes and learn it would be a huge relief,' says [a student.]
'But every day, we have to deal with being knocked around the halls, having to
look over our shoulders, having classes absolutely taken over by rude kids.
School is basically chaotic and it is really hard to learn.'"
[Honor and Other Relative Things] page 101
In the Girl Scouts of America survey, it was found that by a huge margin the
youth problems of the headlines peer pressure, drugs, alcohol, sex, gangs were
not the 'crisis issues' for kids. Their major concerns were "the social
expectations of the adult world which all have to do with pressure: the pressure
to obey parents and teachers (80%), to get good grades in school (78%), to
prepare for the future (69%), and to earn money (62%)." In times when society
lacks clear ethical guidelines, when parents neither spend the time to educate
about time-honored values such as honesty, integrity, and personal
responsibility nor necessarily model consistent values in their own lives, kids
are responding to the one message they hear loud and strong from the adult
world: Succeed. Do well. Do whatever you need to do. One of the girls at
Jonathan's table is almost apologetic. 'We know what the right answer is. We
know the difference between right and wrong but we have to live in the real
world.'
'There have been more ethical scandals in the last five years than in the previous five decades combined,' writes Michael Josephson in Ethical Values, Attitudes, and Behaviors in American Schools. 'In every field of endeavor business, politics, entertainment, sports, law, accounting, religion, and even the nonprofit community prominent organizations and famous people have found their name in the news because of illegal or unethical conduct.' The ethics of this generation are but an 'amplified echo,' according to Josephson, 'all of the worst moral messages of their elders.' Kids have grown up with a regular diet of people like Leona Helmsley, who ripped off the government; Mayor Marion Barry, who was reelected after being in prison for cocaine possession; Michael Milken and his junk bonds; Ivan Boesky and insider trading; Pete Rose and gambling. The list seems endless; Watergate, Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, Lorena and John Bobitt, Whitewater. Stories of killings for sneakers, parents who abandon their children, drive-by shootings. The students see inconsistent punishments or no consequences at all. Their ethical discussions have less to do with issues like Would you die for your country? Than Is it justified for an abused woman to whack off her husband's penis with a kitchen knife? They have grown up in the quicksand of an ambivalent moral society.
It's no wonder many youths draw darkly cynical conclusions. 'Life is all about getting it,' explains one of the seniors. 'Some kids may go to college to get it; some go to Columbia. Legal, illegal it just depends what side of the law you want to be on.'
It starts young and adults don't even know it. Sometime during his sixth-grade year Chris Hughes told his mother, in a discussion about how a repair person had cheated her: 'Well,' as Arnold Schwarzenegger said, 'Basically everybody is out to get everybody else.' Shocked, she asked him why he thought this. 'That is the way it looks,' he said with great seriousness. Somehow people keep on expecting kids to have a certain belief system or a commitment to certain kinds of values that are not evidenced with any regularity in their environment. Values do not spring fully formed out of nowhere. And cheating, among all the things people are doing that are not right, turns out to be fairly benign.
Jonathan, who craves honesty and moral purity, not because he is a holier-than-thou type, but rather because he wants a rudder to navigate the world that lies ahead. Later, in private reactions, kids admitted a feeling that it was all too late. They have fended alone when perhaps their world would have felt safer, more certain if they'd had some clear rules to follow. The sadness is that by the time they are seniors, their innocence is long gone and they feel like their destiny is about to be sealed.
It's not that they are jaded, or says Josephson, 'moral mutants,' but rather that they hold morality tightly to their immediate lives, where they might have a glimmer of control. Mostly, they gauge morality in terms of their friends. 'I think as long as you don't betray your friends, it is okay,' explains a former school paper editor. 'Betrayal of your friends would be stealing or lying to them, being two-faced, pretending you are friends with them then going behind their back, making them lose respect in the eyes of other people.'
Trying to look on the bright side, Jonathan conjectures: 'I think each of us has our moral values, whether we know it or not, that we use to make our decisions. But very few people make them in the manner they describe in the seminar. They just make their decision based on their prior experience.' If part of growing up is figuring out what matters, in an era of situational ethics adolescents have to make sense of everything. Nothing is sacrosanct, everything is up for debate from the meaning of calculus to the meaning of life itself.
The best thing about the seminar, according to Jonathan, is that 'people we normally don't hang out with see how we think.' The discussions were more about life than most of what is done in school. He quotes a Pete Seeger song to make his point: 'Schools are like prisons because they don't teach you how to live.'
'I find it disgusting that the high school is offering , in their senior year as the kids are walking out the door, a one-day seminar on ethics and values when they had twelve years or thirteen years to educate these kids,' says John Hawley. 'What the hell are we doing as adults if we are not doing something to foster a set of values?'
The thing that makes the biggest impression on Jonathan is something Jim Vance says I his final remarks. 'The deal is this folks: of the many things that I am grateful for, one of them is that I am not you. I am exceedingly grateful that I was seventeen in 1959 and not today. You have more in front of you, and over you, and behind your back than I even had to consider when I was seventeen years old. I can tell you sincerely from the bottom of my heart that I have consummate respect for each and every one of you for being able to cope and survive in this jungle that you have to deal with today.'
[learning outside the school environment] page 222
"Jonathan writes on evolution: 'Everything about an animal can be seen by
looking at it. That is to say, it forms to what it is and becomes a piece of the
earth not by choice but because it is the only way to survive. Any creature
becomes part of the landscape it lives in.'
That's the good news in the wild and the bad news in school. To Jonathan, school is an unfriendly environment that shapes its inhabitants in twisted, nonproductive ways. 'People aren't comfortable in school,' he says, 'so they never learn the joy of putting everything they've got into learning.' He gives the example of a recent wilderness first aid course he took in New Hampshire where the instructor began with the comfort of his students. He strolled into the barn, greeted the students, and invited them to make themselves comfortable because, he said, 'that is the most important thing about learning.' They were in a big barn and people set up hammocks or stretched out on their sleeping bags, settling in with cups of fresh coffee and glasses of juice. There were no expectations to sit in hard chairs in rows for seven hours a day. Jonathan never forgot that lesson he learned along with the first aid.
Just as important is to be comfortable with the people sharing the learning process, both students and teachers. In high school that doesn't happen. 'We don't even introduce ourselves. Teachers just say 'Okay, you're in physics.' Everybody's looking around thinking, That person's cooler than me, that person's not as cool as me, that person's hair doesn't look good today.' When Jonathan becomes a teacher, as he plans, the first thing he will do is 'take however long it takes until people get comfortable.'
The uncaring environment of the school does not facilitate communication. In classes and walking down the corridors, this verbal young man goes silent. 'I hardly communicate in school. Not at all, not the whole day,' says Jonathan. 'The most I'll say to someone is, 'How are you doing?' Or maybe I'll talk to Andy or Bill a little bit, but everybody's just sort of down on everything, including myself.' Bottom line: he gets a bad feeling talking to people in school, but he knows it is because they don't have a good feeling either. 'You walk by people and say, 'How's it going?' and they are like, 'How's it going?' And what are you supposed to say, 'This place sucks, man'? Or are you supposed to say, 'I'm great'? He thinks people really don't want an honest answer. 'Everybody is talking about nothing,' Jonathan explains. 'I like to talk about something.'
In school, Jonathan concludes, 'There's really no room for being honest. It just breaks your spirit. You get farther and farther down in a hole.' Lost in that educational void is the dynamic substance of Jonathan. His teacher, Mary Ann Brown, who has known him since he was a little boy wandering around the townhouse development where both families live, says, 'Jonathan is the kind of kid that if you had a question, you could say to him, 'Okay, find out the answer for me. Go to the library, here's a computer, go online and find out everything you can and share with us.' Ideally, that is the way education should be but it isn't. Not with this many kids. And not many kids are like Jonathan, so self-motivated.'
Jonathan's potential languishes in a stultifying school environment. 'I spend all my time trying to make up for the losses I get in school,' says Jonathan. 'It tears your soul to pieces. It is devastating to self-esteem. Everything in there is awkward.' In his English class, he was struck by a poem that said, 'Man, you're even collective in your isolation.' At the end of it, they were supposed to write about it. 'One thing I figured out was everything in nature fits into nature best by being what it is. That's not happening with the people at the school, they become dehumanized.'
Jonathan wrote a poem that captures how, when people raise their hands in class to talk, they speak in inhuman voices. 'There's nothing personal, nothing individual about it,' he explains. 'They don't want to let who they are come out. It happens to me, too.' He likens the phenomenon to a sculpture his class studied in art, a flat sculpture covered with five blobs that look remotely human and then one face. 'You can barely tell they're human,' he says, 'and then one face is at the bottom looking at them. That's what's happening in school.'
This trip is proof of how nature is a powerful educator, according to Jonathan. 'If you spend some time in nature, something catches your eye and you're like, Geez, how does that work? You don't ever answer that question. You figure out half of it and you ask another question.' People in school are dulled by the remoteness to the real world. High school takes ninth grade kids and turns them into a metal pole. It takes off all the edges."
[need for reform] page 246
"Kids are sick and tired of all the ominous warnings about everything. What
they yearn for is to grow and learn alongside each other with time to socialize
and space to adjust to their rapidly changing selves.
Health class, required of eighth graders, is supposed to assist. This quarter, physical education class moves from the rules of sports to the darker side of life. With the emphasis on rote learning rather than discussion, it heaps buckets of definitions, explanations and statistics about abuse, sexual and verbal, sibling, spouse, elder and the line between neglect and abuse. Chris and his classmates learn that one youngster in four becomes the victim of sexual abuse before he or she reaches eighteen. Sexual topics are touched ever so carefully. They learn to "Just Say NO" for about the millionth time and get a rundown on the usual litany of drugs from tobacco and alcohol through heroin. It's so boring.
What the students don't get, according to health teacher Carol Clark, are enough real-life coping skills. 'We don't have time to do more than a short unit on decision making. We need to have role play for kids to get them to work it out,' whether it be around drinking, smoking, sex, fighting or teen abuse. 'In my gut I am scared to death because you can't choose their friends. They have to start making their own choices and decisions.'"
page 278
"'If they are going to force me to go to school, I'm not going to do a good
job.' Basically you watch a whole year go by while you are in school, says
Brendon, and then at night you come home and do homework. 'It's just a big game.
I knew what I wanted to do early on and I think I should have been able to go to
a special school or take more art classes. There are classes I shouldn't have
had to take like gym. I got a little out of English and government and history
but I have interest in that stuff, and I could learn it on my own. I think I
should have been able to draw for three or four periods a day. My parent pay tax
money. There is no respect for students. You feel like cattle when you are in
school.'"
[community matters! Good parenting is not enough] page 255
"Regardless of the values held in adult society, in the adolescent community
video games, ice skating, partying and drinking are equivalent. Kids feel the
choice is up to them. In Healthy Communities, Healthy Youth, the Search
Institute discovered that 'Care and support within the family do not necessarily
spill over the family's borders.' If a community does not assume responsibility
for all of its children through strong supportive institutions and programs for
all kids, once a child leaves the family incubator, it is all a crap shoot.
[Jessica and grandfathers in general] page 262
"She loves her grandfather's slide photo collection. She thinks it is the
neatest thing, all arranged chronologically in books. She loves how she can just
tell him a time her baptism, or her dad as a young man and he gives her a
personal slide show. She is crazy about her grandfather. She loves the family
stories. 'This summer when I went up there I was asking him to tell me stories
about his childhood. He told me one story where he saved his little brother's
life or something like that. I said, 'Oh, really, did you tell your parents
about that? He said, 'Jessica, my parents didn't care where I was, when I got
home, unless I was not home for dinner.' He vowed never to do that to his
family, so he was a very good father.' Her monologue creates for her a tapestry
in her mind, woven with a knowledge of where she is from, and her feeling of
uniqueness in a family of three kids. But her friends know none of this side of
her because she feels compelled to edit herself in the adolescent community."
[commitment] page 288
"Courtney displays no apparent intellectual curiosity, no passionate
commitment, no respect for rules in school. The one place where she is different
is at her job at the dry cleaners. She seems to thrive on the responsibility
vested in her and the structure of clear demands. It is grown-up work, not
childhood obligations. It is an arena she chose that is separate from her family
and teachers. 'If I could choose any job I wouldn't say, 'I want this one,' but
it's not bad to work here.' she likes her job and is committed to it."
[drop outs] page 301
"His class this year is smaller by 70 students, down to 420. Sophomore
principal Hoy says it is because, of the 60 kids who failed, only 10 went to
summer school to bring their grades up. Another 20 were thrown out of school at
the end of the year or are not returning. What amazes Charles is that among this
group were a bunch of kids that had repeated their freshman class with them, and
some of them had even been freshmen a year before that. 'Do we really need these
people in there?' Charles wonders. 'The way I figure it, if they don't want to
be there, why are we forcing them to be there?' Also this year the state
increased the dropout age from sixteen to eighteen. 'They're forcing you to be
there and if you don't want to be there, you're just there to cause trouble,'
says Charles. 'The one thing that people don't need is trouble when they're
trying to get an education.' He hoes that this purging of his class will
eliminate the problem of its being referred to as 'the Ghetto.'"
[adolescents coping] page 303
"Not just in Fairfax County, Virginia, but across the United States, today's
adolescents are police patrolled. The emphasis has shifted to control, not fun.
The feeling that surrounds kids is that they are always a nano-second away from
something going very wrong."
page 322
"Over the years, Ann has also encircled herself with a number of caring adults,
teachers, friends' parents, and the families she sits for. She says, 'I go over
there and have conversations with them that I should be having at home.' These
adults counter the angry, demeaning voices in her own house by telling her,
'You're doing such a great job, and you're so wonderful.'"
[bottom line] page 364
"Every adolescent needs a mentor, not just the 'deprived' children of the
inner city. Kids need adults to listen to them and serve as role models.
Grown-ups who, by their availability and presence, convey a sense of safety and
control. Kids need a community that rallies round what kids need from adults is
not just rides, pizza, chaperones, and discipline. They need the telling of
stories, the close ongoing contact so that they can learn and be accepted. If
nobody is there to talk to, it is difficult to get the lessons of your own life
so that you are adequately prepared to do the next thing. Without a link across
generations, kids will only hear from peers. The Carnegie Council on Adolescent
Development report A Matter of Time found: 'Young adolescents do not want
to be left to their own devices. In national surveys and focus groups, America's
youth have given voice to serious longing. They want more regular contact with
adults who care about and respect them. The issue is friendship: adolescents are
interesting folks to know even when you are not getting to the core. And for
every moment spent with them, they are learning, just as you will.
These years can be characterized by the symbols of doors and passages. When the door of the middle school opens for them, a process begins where it seems they are invited into a new world (they see it that way and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy) and parents feel they are increasingly shut out. Other doors open and shut the front door, the bedroom door, the car door. In a community of adolescents where for hours each day most kids inhabit empty houses, doors previously controlled by adults are in the charge of kids. The world of this book is surprisingly not one of doors slammed in the face of parents, because that particular gesture of defiance is not always necessary and in fact seldom represents the major struggle. The turbulence of adolescence today does not so much from rebellion as from the loss of communication between adults and kids, and from the lack of a realistic, honest understanding of what the kids' world really looks like. The bottom line: we can lecture kids to our heart's content but if they don't care what we think, or there is no relationship between us that matters to them or they think we are ignorant of the reality of their lives, they will not listen.
[1995 new Carnegie study, Great Transitions: Preparing Adolescents for a New Century] concludes that things are absolutely no better. 'By age 17,' it reports, 'about a quarter of all adolescents have engaged in behaviors that are harmful or dangerous to themselves or other: getting pregnant, using drugs, taking part in antisocial activity, and failing at school. Nearly half of American adolescents are at high or moderate risk of seriously damaging their life chances. The damage may be near term and vivid, or it may be delayed by a time bomb set in youth.' The statistics are staggering and the behaviors are being tracked in younger and younger children. The Monitoring the Future study for 1996 showed marijuana, tobacco and alcohol use 'still rising' among eighth and tenth graders. The Josephson Institute of Ethics in the 1996 Report Card on American Integrity finds that since its original 1992 report, 'the hole in the moral ozone is getting bigger still.' Statistics can easily be piled up to make a case against our adolescents.
Nothing has changed, and wave after wave of children are growing up in this world of adolescence that surrounds them with risk even the 'regular' kids. They take this world for granted, as their stories have displayed. It is just the way the adolescent community lives. The developmental tasks of adolescence are consistent, but the context is remarkably changed. Denying the truth does not help. Even the very best kids are often in danger. Adolescence is rife with drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, sex, lying, violence, unstable and broken families and so on. This is the mainstream of adolescence today.
Kids growing up know no other reality. Adults do. Maybe it is time to decide that the amount of risk to the nation's teens is unacceptable. We don't need another study four years from now to remind us again. Concerned adults always act like the solutions are too complex to imagine. That's why all the studies. Maybe some of the answers are a s simple as an all-night party that has made a significant dent in teenage fatalities on graduation night, that at its core is just one way for adults to be involved in the lives of adolescents. It is an occasion where adults are part of the fun, not just monitors to keep order like they were at the mosh pit. Kids always know the difference. We have to reconnect the adolescent community to ours. It is not so hard. We just need to reach out and embrace them and take the time to get to know them one by one, as individuals, not a tribe."
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