No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
This essay is intended to deepen our understanding of the fundamental causes of the characteristic features of contemporary adolescence, and of their significance. Since the reader will not be unfamiliar with the phenomena, his personal experience may be relied on to supplement a description which would otherwise be too concise. The description is based on data, research and summary accounts drawn from the literature of various countries, which is suggestive because of its uniformity. It suggests five conclusions which bring into focus the general condition and position of contemporary adolescence:
1. While the development of the adolescent used to take place during the few years traditionally called “adolescence” (ages 15 to 18), it has steadily expanded during the last century, and recently with an ever-increasing speed. Nowadays, it reaches up to age 25, and in many cases and in many areas beyond this, and includes in the opposite direction the majority of the 13-to-14-year-olds without, however, having ceased to exert its attraction on what was traditionally called “childhood.” An enormous extension of adolescence has thus taken place, and this is already reflected to a large extent in the development of legal notions. Modern man spends a considerable portion of his life as an adolescent.
1 On the other hand, the ratio of adolescents in contemporary society is relatively minor, because of the low birth-rate and the high life-expectancy.
2 This is the basis of the dream of the golden age, whose classical formu lation is Ovid's vindice nullo, sponte sua, sine lege fidem rectumque colebat. As to the question whether the element of constraint is less pronounced in less complex societies, which anthropologists have been debating in a sceptical frame of mind, it should be noted that it is not the constraint itself, but the manner in which it is felt, which counts.
3 This notion is not to be confused with the more concrete, but also more dubious, notion of a national character, which is attuned to constitutive elements rather than to structural constitution.
4 Nothing can in general be said about the nature of this dependence, for the mode of dependency may be authoritarian as well as democratic.
5 Compare this, as well as the general introduction, with H. Plessner, "Het Probleem der Generaties," in Groenman, Heere and Vercruijsse (eds.), Het Sociale Leven in al zijn Facetten, part I, Assen, 1958.
In addition, this essay is based implicitly on the following systematic presup positions : Adolescence as a social phenomenon appears wherever the structural growth of society exceeds considerably the confines of the family and of the group related by blood or marriage, and calls thus for special institutions of socialization, which make inevitable the formation of homogeneous age groups. This is to be distinguished from the case in which special historical reasons lead to the assignment of definite functions to the adolescent group. Here, the division into groups does not follow necessarily from the structural complexity of society. This case is illustrated by warrior states like Sparta and by certain African tribes. A third form of adolescence is to be found where the internal structure of the family blocks the way to the succession of the generations. Since the division into groups is not inevitable in this case, this is not a proper form. Mixed forms are, of course, perfectly normal.
This essay deals only with the first form, of which contemporary adolescence is a clear case. The origin of this adolescence is, incidentally, sketched here against the background of European history. This is justified by the fact that contemporary adolescence is the result of an incessant structural growth of society, and that this growth is shown in its most consequential and paradigmatic form in the rise of the industrial society, with its division of labor, in Europe.
6 The thesis of delayed socialization has many adherents in America. This is partly explained by the myth of early economic independence, which was created in America's agricultural past where it could come true under conditions of unlimited supply of virgin land, and carried over successfully to the industrial present where it was even strengthened.
7 Cf. Philippe Ariès, L'Enfant et la vie familiale, Paris, 1960.
8 D. Riesman, in The Lonely Crowd, Yale University Press, 1950, has grasped this, but only on the descriptive level. It has not been sufficiently ob served to what extent the intellectual movements of the modern era, and especially of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, were rooted in the disturbances entailed by the structural growth of society beyond traditional forms of life. The need for a new way of stabilizing life by means of an ideal paradigm, dictated by the functional demands of the social conditions, can be shown by biographical as well as textual evidence to be behind a great many of those intellectual achievements. It is plain that the need for intellectual stabilization must have been especially urgent in Germany, where lack of national and cultural unity did not even allow of such national standardization of behavior as was to be found in England or France. Here is the social clue to an understanding of many facets of German intellectual history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and among others, of such unmistakable phenomena as the Bildungsroman and the fondness for historical paradigms.
9 For reasons of space, the positive form of youth has only been developed here from the point of view of its function. This method, which is of course historically inadmissible, may be excused because we are still only concerned to prepare the argument. In this connection, a word about S. N. Eisenstadt's bril liant book, From Generation to Generation: Age Groups and Social Structure, London, 1956, might not be out of place. This publication, which is indispensa ble for a serious treatment of the problem, suffers from the central weakness of unmitigated functionalism: It thinks it can derive social and historical facts from social requirements.
10 It has been predicted that in the United States, the decreasing age of marriage and early birth of children will result by 1980 in the fact that a child will be independent and ready to go out into the world by the time his parents are forty years old. This implies that the child will have practically no contact with persons over 35 years of age. Nevertheless, this development seems to be welcomed without any misgivings whatsoever.
11 The best longer discussions of contemporary adolescence are to be found in P. H. Landis, Adolescence and Youth, New York, 1952, and H. Schelsky, Die skeptische Generation, Düsseldorf, 1957. It should be noted that in each case we are dealing with an analysis of adolescence in a certain country. For a more general treatment, see Parsons and Bales, Family, Socialization and Interac tion Process, Glencoe, Illinois, 1955. This work also contains some evidence for the thesis that the contemporary family socializes "away from itself."
12 The social sciences have been reluctant to acknowledge this inevitable consequence, for understandable reasons. It is true that its acknowledgement might easily lead to evaluations of which the distinction between "primitive" and "civilized" peoples is still remembered as an unfortunate example. It is also worth noting that the structure of a person has so many dimensions, whose relative importance is not easily evaluated, that it is virtually impossible to apply this concept in a comparison of individual cultures. On the other hand, this concept can very well be used in speaking of single stages of a culture or of general types of culture which are suitably formed. For similar views, see A. Gehlen, Die Seele im technischen Zeitalter, Hamburg, 1957, especially p. 58 ff. On the connection between socialization and organization of the personality, which is mentioned below, see especially M. Mead, "Age Patterning in Personality Development," in D. G. Haring (eds.), Personal Character and Cultural Milieu, Syracuse University Press, 1948, in addition to the specific discussions of this topic.
13 For related views, expressed in connection with the problem of learning a language, see P. Schrecker, "The Family: Conveyance of Tradition," in R. N. Anshen, The Family: Its Function and Destiny, New York, 1949.
You have
Access