Luck High School
Luck, Wisconsin
Teacher: Barbara Petersen
 

 

A Rite Of Passage

By Amanda Swanson

                                                     

 

 

A rite of passage would not be good to have in a community.  If the person feels that he or she is an adult they need the chance to prove themselves.  Some people consider themselves an adult when they turn eighteen and graduate from high school. Others do when they are sixteen and get their driver’s licenses or when they’re twenty-one. Adolescents are usually not considered adults.  They haven’t learned as much as they should about the real world.  They’re still considered children.  They haven’t experienced the real world until they graduate from high school and get a job or go to college and get a job after that. Teenagers should not have to deal with adult problems until they are older. They have their own problems to deal with. They have to worry about school, homework, and classes. Most teenagers take their education and childhood for granted. They are not ready to become adults. Teenagers don’t need to know what they want to be until they get older.

 

Children are supposed to have fun, play, meet new people, and make friends. They also need to get an education while they are having their fun. Don’t start preparing the children for a particular job; let them experience the world and let them decide what they want to do before  someone decides for them.  People need to stop worrying about teenagers so much.  We can take care of ourselves with the help of our families. But we don’t need to be treated as babies.  We need to experience the world for ourselves.  Our parents don’t understand that we are growing up and need help once in a while. Most of the time we should ask for help when we need it.

 

Teens are growing up in a different world than their parents did. There are definitely social changes in the world. That have changed the world in many different ways. Patricia  Hersch seems to be saying that teenagers aren’t rebelling so much as searching for an identity in a rapidly changing and insecure world (Patricia Herschel). In the nineties teenagers like to do activities that they know their parents don’t want their children to do. The proverbial kisses stolen in the back seat of a car, or the forbidden cigarette smoked behind the garage,(Patricia Herschel) to have the thrill of getting away with doing that. Now days the parents are at work and the relatives don’t live near enough to call mom or dad to get them in trouble.

           

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  (Patricia Herschel).

 

One issue looming largely is drugs. One fourth of Jessica’s class, for example, prepared speeches on teenagers 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.  By the time she got to the 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 the dealer is having a bad day.”  She even addressed how some teens get drugs from their parents who also do drugs: “it is not that such parents give the drugs to the teens. The teens just steal it from mom and dad, and they know they won’t be asked or accused because the parents don’t want their teens to know that they do drugs.” Although a lot of teens 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 teens that leave class to smoke are smoking pot. Within an hour of her speech it was all over the school. The students were astounded by her frankness and admired her for it.

 

“Today’s teens have grown up in the midst of enormous social changes that have shaped, reshaped, and 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.

            - Patricia Herschel

 

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