Andrew Bard Schmookler

     
  WHEN ADOLESCENTS GET REAL by Andrew Bard Schmookler

The other day I heard about the program in Maryland to require high school students to do community service in order to graduate. For some students, we're told, this requirement has been a godsend: the sense of involvement they got from working in, say, a home for the elderly, or in a daycare center, gets them off the path to nowhere and enables them to complete high school. This story helped crystallize my thinking about why adolescence seems to be such a problem in our society. What started me puzzling about this dilemma was my wife's experience substitute teaching in public schools where we live in Virginia. Teaching the little kids in K through 3 is a joy, she's reported; teaching the high schoolers is depressing. The faces of the little ones shine with excitement; they're engaged. Their elder brothers and sisters are bored and sullen; they're serving time. This pattern, I'm told, is found all over. How do we lose them? No doubt, the answer has many parts. But here's the part that strikes me as central: with the adolescent, as with so much else, our society tramples mindlessly over nature. Look what happens to a kid's body between second grade and tenth grade. We like to talk about how immature teenagers are, but nature is telling us something different. The body reaches adult size, the physical capacities approach those of the prime of life, the child of yesterday could become a parent today. Nature is saying, these creatures are ready to carry the weight of real responsibilities. But our schools give them a very different message: you're still just kids; it'll be years before you do anything real. We'll teach you more about how to use language, though nothing you say or write now matters. We'll teach you more about numbers, but you won't be calculating anything that counts. We keep them disengaged from real life, and then we wonder why they are alienated. Only in things like athletics, or their social relationships, do most teenagers experience having an impact on what unfolds around them. That adolescent slang phrase --"Get real"-- captures well the yearning they feel in that inappropriately irrelevant space to which we have consigned them. In other animal societies, the transition to physical maturity means admission into the the real games of life. The juvenile who was allowed careless movement within the group must suddenly observe the rules of territory and hierarchy. Life gets real. We have a problem not because there's something wrong with adolescents, but because our society doesn't know how to engage these newly matured creatures constructively. Indeed, adolescence as a distinct phase of life is the invention of modern industrial society. Obviously, this invention still has a lot of bugs in it. We owe it to our kids to keep working those bugs out. The engagement of community service is a good step, but it's just a start.