Tribe Apart

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 in the spring of 1999 and reviewed it for a radio show I was hosting at the time. 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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