July-August 2001

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From the General Secretary: Whatever Happened to Adolescence?

By Mary Burgan

Allthough I have spent a fair amount of my time visiting college campuses over the past six years, I am concerned that I may be losing touch with students. From outward signs, college undergraduates have undergone radical changes since I last taught them in spring 1994. Many of them are now pierced, tattooed, and in possession of pink, green, or purple hair. Those who don't dress in black or drab 1950s style wear pants that could house two normal-sized legs and have breathtaking exposures in the rear. Despite their costumes, though, I get the sense that many of our undergraduates are very, very smart and very, very good. They spend a great deal of time with computers; they know how to upload and download. They may be techies, but they also have a mystical strain. They seem to do sports and prayer with an equal sense of the need.

Despite their manifest gifts and promise, however, adolescents seem absent from our national attention these days. The 1950s and 1960s were the decades of widespread interest in adolescence. The Catcher in the Rye was a campus text in those days. And Erik H. Erikson's designation of the "identity crisis" as a characteristic of adolescence was extremely influential. The emphasis on avoiding conformity and searching for the authentic self powered many a class discussion and first-year theme. And later, the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam put the burden of the national agenda upon the shoulders of late adolescents. There was exasperation with young people, but there was also respect.

Now, legislators seem to think that the key to all intellectual and social development lies in early childhood. They fund Head Start, or they talk about funding Head Start. They appear in primary classrooms for photo opportunities. But I can't think of many politicians in the past five years who have risked the hazards of a modern high school classroom or a teeming community college campus.

It is true that the last administration helped to raise funding for college students with measurable generosity, but the question of how we relate to students in the first years of college was rarely broached. Significantly, when funding public higher education was mentioned, it was usually in terms of bridging the digital divide. Computers seem to be the universal antidote for such strange creatures as late adolescents. Is it because they are likely to leave us alone if they're safely browsing the Net or chatting online?

An article by David Brooks in the April issue of the Atlantic Monthly describes the current "organization kid" as a throwback to the "organization man" of the 1950s. He finds them, in Ivy League colleges like Princeton, monstrously hardworking, uninterested in the tragic dilemmas of a moral life, and dutifully distanced from the faculty. Brooks speaks of a highly selective sample, but I worry, as well, about that portion of the undergraduate population that hasn't been drilled and tested into achievement by eager parents. That group is left to shift for itself in crowded community college classes or in the packed lecture halls of public universities. Obsessed with measurable "merit," the nation discounts these students. And so do some of our public colleges and universities. Full-time faculty are too expensive to waste on them.

I believe that adolescents in high school and college cannot thrive on computers alone. Nor can they mature without the help of dedicated teachers who will pay attention to them over time. Having taught so many of them in my years as a professor, I know that they have a special need for adult friends who are not parents. They look for verification and criticism from expert grown-ups, who can be objective without being unsympathetic.

The outlandish dress of adolescence is often a silent request for such attention. Because of this request, teaching adolescents is more than a transfer of information; it is the culture's participation in an endeavor that gauges its own vitality.

Indeed, adolescence is supposed to trouble society by requiring its adults to rethink their own values. And more, a society that pays attention to its adolescents is enriched by a social faith as important as any founding tenet. That faith is a dedication to the proposition that teaching can make a difference at any age.