Past, present, and future conceptions of adolescence

Educational Theory

Volumn 46, Issue 4, 1996, Pages 453-472

  Lesko, Nancy ^a  

^a INDIANA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0002300470     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.1996.00453.x     Document Type: Article

References (86)

1. Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Boldrick (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), 268.
2. Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990), 11.
3. Jonathan G. Silin, Sex, Death, and the Education of Children (New York: Teachers College Press, 1995), 48.
4. Deborah P. Britzman, Practice Makes Practice (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).
5. The conventional social science and medical-based views of adolescence emphasize their "naturally- occurring" essence. Their natures are flooded by hormones, and the "natural disaster" metaphor of flood or storm is consistent with the status of youth as disequilibrated or diseased. Social scientists have declared teenagers' need to establish an identity and the importance of same-age peers. Educational psychologists have established the inadequate cognitive competence of youth, who are moving toward formal operational thought. Overall, the conventional view confirms an absence or a system out of balance, both of which signal danger. For examples of the mainstream views, see At the Threshold: The Developing Adolescent, ed. S. Shirley Feldman and Glen R. Elliott (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990J. Critics of these conventional views claim that such concepts have little use in understanding the lives and perspectives of youth who are poor, youth of color, or those who are raising themselves.
6. This view emphasizes that youth are preyed upon by relatives, teachers, and parents, and even by medical/psychological providers who exploit the insurance system. See Louise Armstrong, And They Cell It Help: The Psychiatric Policing of America's Children (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1993).
7. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child was unanimously adopted by the General Assembly in 1989 and ratified by more countries than any other UN human rights treaty, although not yet by the United States; it establishes children's rights to a name and nationality, food, clothing, shelter, health care, and education, among others. At a 1995 "Youth Summit, By Youth and For Youth" 130 representa tives wrote a Youth Bill of Rights that included the right to liberty, safety, survival, education, free speech, non-discrimination, free choice, an attorney, and to vote. See Jeanne Lenzer, "Youth Summit 95, " Z Magazine 8, no. 9 (September 1995): 22-25. The rights discourse responds, in part, to the deteriorating material conditions of children and youth, as well as to the dominant view of youth as property. See Marian Wright Edelman, Families in Pent: An Agenda for Social Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987) and Jeanne Lenzer, "Politics of Youth: Youth Liberation" Z Magazine 6, no. 2 (1993): 49-52.
8. This idea draws upon work by Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989) and Robert M. Young, Darwin's Metaphor: Nature's Place in Victorian Culture (London: Cambridge University Press, 1985), both of whom look at how definitions of groups of people carry implicit social policies.
9. The scholarship on these debates is voluminous. Some of the work that has influenced my analysis of adolescence is: Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989)
10. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1990)
11. Sandra Harding, ed., The "Racial" EconomyofScience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993)
12. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989)
13. Valerie Walkerdine, Schoolgirl Fictions (London: Verso, 1990)
14. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983)
15. Julian Henriques et al., Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation, and Subjectivity (London: Methuen, 1984)
16. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (London: Allen Lane, 1977)
17. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1990)
18. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993).
19. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 7.
20. John M. Broughton, "Preface, " in Critical Theories of Psychological Development, ed. John Broughton (New York: Plenum Press, 1987), xv.
21. Dorothy Smith emphasizes that ccncepts are expressions of social relations, and concepts such as adolescence carry "a universe for exploration that is "present" in them but not explicated"; Dorothy Smith, The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), 37. Starting froin a different perspective, Said argues that neither past nor present has a complete meaning alone; Said, Culture and Imperialism, 4.
22. Silin, Sex, Death, 46.
23. Patrick Slattery, "A Postmodern Vision of Time and Learning, "Harvard Educational Review 65, no. 4 (Winter 1995). I draw from Michel Serres's non-linear conception of time. The usual view of time is one in which each successive stage outstrips the preceding one, but that is not time, Serres claims, but a simple competition, or war. He seeks another temporality, a nonmodern way of considering the passage of time. Drawing on chaos theory, he states: "Time does not always flow according to a line nor according to a plan but, rather, according to an extraordinarily complex mixture, as though it reflected stopping points, ruptures, deep wells, chimneys of thunderous acceleration, rendings, gaps - all sown at random, at least in a visible disorder. Thus, the development of history truly resembles what chaos theory describes. Once you understand this, it's not hard to accept the fact that time doesn't always develop according to a line and thus things that are very close can exist in culture, but the line makes them appear very distant from one another. Or, on the other hand, that there are things that seem very close that, in fact, are very distance from one another." Elsewhere he extends, "Time doesn't flow; it percolates. This means precisely that it passes and doesn't pass." Serres adds that the origin of the French verb couler, "to flow, " means precisely "to filter.""In a filter one flux passes through, while anothev does not." Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapiuus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 57-58
24. Alison fames and Alan Prout, "Re-Presenting Childhood: Time and Transition in the Study of Childhood" in Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood, ed. Alison James and Alan Prout (London: Palmer Press, 1990), 216-37.
25. See David Macleod for a discussion of the preoccupation with precocity in the turn of the century United States; David I. Macleod, Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA. and Their Forerunners, 1870-1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983).
26. Alan Prout and Alison James, "A New Paradigm for the Sociology of Childhood?" in James and Prout, Constructing, 22.
27. Joan Scott, "Multiculturalism and the Politics of Identity, " in The Identity in Question, ed. John Rajchman (New York: Routledge, 1995), 3-14.
28. Post-colonialism is a term that is used in many different ways, so I want to stipulate how I use it. As Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin define it: "Post-colonial theory involves discussion about experience of various kinds: migration, slavery, suppression, resistance, representation, difference, race, gender, place, and responses to the influential master discourses of imperial Europe such as history, philosophy and linguistics... However, we would argue that post-colonial studies are based in the 'historical fact' European colonialism, and the diverse material effects to which this phenomenon gave rise... the term 'post-colonial' to represent the continuing process of imperial suppressions and exchanges throughout this diverse range of societies, in their institutions and their discursive practices"[emphasis added]. Bill Ashcroft et al, eds. "Introduction, "The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1995), 2-3. My use of the term, post-colonial, tries to stay true to its base in the historical fact of European colonialism; however since I am looking at scientific knowledge about adolescence in the United States, I utilize the term closer to the ways Homi Bhabha and Edward Said do (which appear to be in accord with Foucault's emphases on the power/knowledge couplet): as interwoven sets of knowledge and administration of a subject peoples that locates itself in the timeless eternal. Bhabha sets the minimum conditions and specifications of a colonial discourse as follows: "It is an apparatus that turns on the recognition and disavowal of racial/cultural/historical differences. Its predominant strategic function is the creation of a space for a 'subject peoples' through the production of knowledges in terms of which surveillance is exercised and a complex form of pleasure/unpleasure is incited... The objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction... colonial discourse produces the colonized as a social reality which is at once an 'other' and yet entirely knowable and visible, " Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 70-71. Said's analysis of the "radical realism" of colonial discourse is also relevant; Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1978), 72.
29. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 6.
30. The following works were helpful in characterizing this historical period: Macleod, Building; Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1967); George W. Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, 1492-Present, 2d ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995); Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Hamilton Cravens, The Triumph of Evolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978); and Joseph Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
31. John Neubauer, The Fin-de-Siecle Culture of Adolescence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
32. Macleod, Building.
33. Haraway, Primate Visions, 26-58.
34. Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts was a textbook case of these connections; he was a military leader in the Boer War and saw first hand the danger of "native" uprisings for the empire. He devoted himself to the Boy Scouts as a way to raise young men to serve England and keep its empire intact. He was particularly concerned that young men learn to take orders, be patriotic, and strong. See Tim Jeal, The Boy Man: The Life of Lord Baden-Powell (New York: Morrow, 1990) and Michael Rosenthal, The Character Factory: Baden-Powell and the Origins of the Boy Scout Movement (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984). Haraway charts how primate researchers produced scientific knowledge about dominance, aggression, and stable groups that directly contributed to imperialism and nation-building; Haraway, Primate Visions.
35. G. Stanley Hall envisioned America as a precocious adolescent, poised between childhood and chaos, promise and degeneration, millennial Utopias and visions of doomsday; Neubauer, Fin-de-Siecle.
36. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 190.
37. Cited in Zinn, A People's History of the United States, 291-92.
38. Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray cited in Nancy Leys Stepan and Sander L. Gilman, "Appropriating the Idioms of Science: The Rejection of Scientific Racism" in The "Racial" Economy of Science, ed. Sandra Harding (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 173.
39. Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthroplogy Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
40. Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1977), 117-18.
41. Serres cited in Gould, Ontogeny, 127.
42. Howard P. Chudacoff, How Old Are You! Age Consciousness in American Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 67 and Gould, Ontogeny, 143.
43. Haraway, Primate Visions, 55.
44. Gould, Ontogeny, 126. Elsewhere Gould commented on how the recapitulatory argument for ranking easily expanded to any set of categories in which wealthy, Nordic males wished to assert their superiority over the lower classes, the Irish, or women. See Stephen J. Gould, "American Polygeny and Craniometry before Darwin, " in Harding, "Radial" Economy, 84-115
45. Thus, when children, and by extension, youth are undeveloped (or immature), the familiar litany of primitive characteristics is called forth: emotional, irrational, conforming, incapable of independent judgment and thinking, lazy, and unproductive
46. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 92.
47. Hall's pedagogical recommendations included lots of physical exercise, limited book study, chaste living, funneling of the passions of youth into religion or patriotism, and strongly differentiated school curricula for the lower and upper classes and for girls and boys. For a discussion of Hall's educational responses, see Dorothy G. Ross, G. Stanley Hall, the Psychologist as Prophet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972) and Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, chap. 3.
48. See Nancy Leys Stepan, "The Role of Analogy in Science, " in Harding, "Racial" Economy, 160-82.
49. This analysis is limited by my sole focus upon the origin of modern conceptions of adolescence in the late 1800s. Certainly, scientific developments since then (for example, in the culture and personality school of anthropology in the 1930s and in Erik Erikson's and James Coleman's work in psychology and sociology in the 1950s and 1960s) also need to be evaluated for their impact on conceptions of youth. A more comprehensive analysis of the pasts in present visions of youth would include these scientific bodies of knowledge.
50. Gould, "American Craniometry, " 84.
51. Recapitulation theory was widely believed for a short period of time, approximately 20 years. However, recapitulation theory lived beyond its spokespersons. Gould identifies recapituiationist legacies in many scientific disciplines, among them educational psychology. See Could. Ontogeny, for examples of recapitulation in Piaget and Dr. Spock.
52. Ashcroft et al., "Introduction, " 1.
53. For child-centered pedagogy, see Valerie Walkerdine, "Developmental Psychology and the Child Centred Pedagogy: The Insertion of Piaget into Early Education, " in Henriques et al., Changing the Subject, 153-202. For developmental psychology, see Broughton, Critical Theories, and Burman, Deconstructing. For critical and feminist pedagogies, see Elizabeth Ellsworth, "Why Doesn't This Feel Empowering? Working Through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy, " Harvard Educational Review 59, no. 4(April 1989): 297-324 and Jennifer Gore, The Struggle for Pedagogies: Critical and Feminist Discourses as Regimes of Truth (New York: Routledge, 1993).
54. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 80.
55. Fabian, Time, 68-80.
56. John R. Morss, Growing Critical: Alternatives to Developmental Psychology (London: Routledge, 1996), 150.
57. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, cited in David Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1983), xix.
58. Landes, Revolution in Time, 7
59. E.P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism, " in Customs in Common (New York: The New Press, 1993), 394-95.
60. Chudacoff, How Old, 91.
61. The study from which these quotes are taken investigated the views of adolescents held by undergraduate students in teacher education in a public university during the 1993-94 academic year. A graduate assistant and I interviewed four students across two semesters while they were enrolled in teacher preparation courses in educational psychology and multicultural education. We used individual and group interviews that focused upon aspects of their education classes, memories of their own teenage years, and ideas about teaching teenagers. Both women quoted in this article were white/ Melanie identified herselt as working class from a small town and Renee was middle class from a suburban area. Both names are pseudonyms.
62. Nancy Lesko and Sharon Sperry, "Defining Teenagers: Interpretive Politics and Teacher Education" unpub. msp., 1996, 25.
63. Chudacoff, How Old, 126-32.
64. Morss, Crowing Critical, 158.
65. Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 40.
66. Bhabha, Location, 80-81.
67. Burman, Deconstructing, 181.
68. Burman, Deconstructing, 153-155 and Couze Venn and Valerie Walkerdine, "The Acquisition and Production of Knowledge: Piaget's Theory Reconsidered, " Ideology and Consciousness 3 (1978): 67-94.
69. Erik H. Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis (New York: W.W. Norton, 1968).
70. Nancy Lesko, "Act Your Age: Time, Mechanics, Youth, " paper presented at Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice Conference, October 1994.
71. Frances Chaputt Waksler teaches a sociology of childhood class in which she asks college students to write about their most difficult times as children. She found that a "rewriting" of events from the parents' perspective (as in Renee's second account) to be common. When she confronts her students with this pattern of accepting the parents' view as naturally best, most of them drop it. I never confronted Renee in the way Waksler suggests, so I do not know how durable the revised story would be. See Waksler, "The Hard Times of Childhood and Children's Strategies for Dealing with Them, " in Studying the Social Worlds of Children: Sociological Readings, ed. F.C. Waksler (London: Palmer Press, 1991), 216-34.
72. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans Charles Lam Markmann (1952; reprint, London: Pluto Press, 1986), 100.
73. Ashcroft et al., Post-Colonial Studies, 9.
74. Abdul R. JanMohamed, "The Economy of Manichean Allegory" in Ashcroft et al., Post-Colonial Studies, 18-23.
75. Mike Males and Faye Docuyanan, "Crackdown on Kids: Giving Up on the Young"The Progressive (February 1996): 24-26
76. Emmanuel Levinas cited in Young, White Mythologies, 13.
77. H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team, A Dream (New York: Basic Books, 1986).
78. Morss, Growing Critical, 158.
79. Broughton, Critical Theories, xi.
80. Burman, Deconstructing, 185.
81. Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 172.
82. Silin, Sex, Death, 114.
83. Broughton, Critical Theories, 12.
84. Donna Gaines, "Border Crossing in the U.S.A, " in Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture, ed. Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose (New York: Routledge, 1994), 230.
85. Waksler, Studying, provides examples of such work.
86. Bhabha, Location, 66-84.