Week 3: In the name of maximizing teens’ energy and talent, might it be time to end the concept of “adolescence”?

To Brett Campbell:  I'm not familiar with the Avalon School, but I visited a school like that in Minneapolis.  It's still compulsory and largely worthless warehousing, however.  The first compulsory education law in the U.S. - enacted in Massachusetts in 1852 - required young people to attend school a few months a year, but only if they didn't know the material.  If they could show that they knew it, they were off the hook.  That's called "competency-based education," and it makes enormous sense.  Our modern school system is based on a factory model (really!), and it's main purposes were (a) to get young people off the streets (warehousing) while their dads were at work - an agenda pushed by unions and moralists - and (b) to teach them everything they would ever need to know for the rest of their lives, most of which they would spend working in business or industry. That might have made sense a hundred years ago, but it doesn't now.  There is no longer a need for the bizarre, largely ineffective factory-inspired teaching model; computers and Internet bring individualized, self-paced education into every home.  And you can no longer cram all useful knowledge into the early years, because the world is changing too fact and there's too much to know.  Education needs to be spread out over a lifetime, acquired according to an individual's needs and desires.

To Nora K.:  Congrats on outscoring the vast majority of adults on the adultness test, and my sympathies on your high infantilization score - although many teens score even higher.  The middle ground I propose in Teen2.0 is a bit different than the one you suggest:  I suggest letting teens test out of the bizarre, media-controlled world of adolescence and into adulthood any time they want to try - in one area, or all areas.  If we made competency tests (think: driving test) available that would allow teens to gain property rights, privacy rights, the right to start a business, the right to leave school, the right to live on their own, the right to make their own medical or mental health decisions, and even full emancipation rights - millions of teens would take and pass such tests every year, infantilization would largely disappear, and society as a whole would become more competent.  Both teens and adults would set their sights on maturity and competence, rather than on the ignorance and incompetence that typify teen "culture."

To Marie S.:  Wow!  I'm amazed that your infantilization score was only 7%, and congrats on the high adultness score.  To answer your questions:  I deal with the consumerism issue at length in Chapter 2 of Teen2.0; it's eye opening.  In short: Teen "culture" is largely the creation of the media, entertainment, and fashion industries; virtually everything teens think of as being "theirs" is fed to them by savvy executives.  On the issue of compulsory, demeaning, largely worthless schooling, please see my article, "Let's Abolish High School," published, notably, as a feature article in Education Week.

Dr. Robert Epstien-Thank you for taking the time to be involved in this project, I have been interested in your work because of how similar it is to the design of my school. Have you by chance heard of Avalon Charter School in Saint Paul? It is an independent project based school, co-run by students and advisors. Avalon basically implements your theory of removing the term adolescence and the negative stigma surrounding it. If you have not heard of it, I welcome you to take a look! I think you would find it of interest to your work.  

My fellow youth-At what point do you think a person has become an adult, and when do “adult” attitudes towards youth begin to change?

What honestly makes us so different?

I noticed that we (as youth) have this negative schema about our capabilities; basically our perspective has been shaped into believing this notion that we are inferior, and need to jump out of that realm into adulthood. I don’t think that we ever stop learning, nor do our beliefs stop changing over time. People are always learning from experiences, and growing wiser. The transition from year to year in school is much like a transition in the job force.  For example, one of our parents might not have been ready to become a manager 5 years ago, but it wasn’t because they were “just a 30 year old.” I encourage you to look through a new perspective at how we view our personal, academic, and job growth over time. Will that process be different when we are age 25? 50?  I honestly don’t think that I will stop learning from new experiences once I reach age 25, and my frontal lobe has fully developed. Yes, the experiences will be different, but is this because my age is different, or because of the effect my past has on my perspective?

I challenge you to think about this idea-Is an irresponsible adult any different than the irresponsible “teenager” sitting next to you in class? Psychologists refer to age as an index variable, and I challenge folks to point out significant differences between those two irresponsible people (other than age) which might be shaping your perspective. Though their irresponsible behavior may surround a different action, is their cognitive framework the same?

Like Kim I am not necessarily choosing a side, but I am helping to play the devil’s advocate.  

It seems to me that there could be a happy medium between maintaining the current stage of adolescence and going from childhood to adulthood with no transition.  One thing that Molly M. pointed out and that occurred to me after reading the discussion prompt was the marriage issue.  Back in the days before adolescence people, especially girls, were married off by their parents while still in their teens, girls often to older men.  While marriage required more responsibility, the married rarely got to chose their spouse.  This still happens in many of the countries in which the teen stage does not exist.

So my question is, what are the consequences of getting rid of the teen stage?  What are the benefits? 

What are the characteristics that define childhood?  Adulthood?  How can we transition between the two stages more smoothly?

That was more than one question.  My apologies. 

P.S I was 96% adult and 30% infantilized

Hello all:

Sorry I've been so slow to respond to the new directions this discussion has taken, but it's certainly a meaty question. After reading The Myth of the Teen Brain and Trashing Teens (still waiting on the book from the library), I agree with Dr. Epstein. A smattering of my thoughts:

According to Dr. Epstein's tests, I am 88% adult and 7% infantilized. A few things account for this last number:

1.) Many of the arbitrary restrictions I used to have to put up with fell away when I transferred to the school I described at the top of the page. 

2.) My parents are very reasonable people and have granted me a remarkable degree of autonomy throughout my life, but especially in the last six years. I can't remember a single time I was told to go to my room; I'm fairly certain I would run up there of my own volition when we argued. I haven't been "grounded" since I was eleven at the very latest. My parents never presumed to schedule my afternoons for me—no “playdates” or ballet lessons I didn’t explicitly ask for. I was allowed to watch any movie I wanted around that time, and until my 17th birthday my folks would just smile indulgently when I sneaked into R-rated movies. I have no list of chores to complete every week and no "allowance". My parents ask politely for help around the house when they need it, and I ask politely for money when I need it. They don't attempt to dictate my diet (at one time they limited my consumption of soft drinks, but that went the way of grounding by middle school) They have never monitored my Internet activity and most importantly, they have never in my life censored what I read.

The one realm where I have most often run into infantilizing is at school. Not so much now, obviously, but I was perfectly miserable in other schools until junior year.  What I grudgingly put up with at conventional schools is familiar to most of us:  school was the only place I was actually forbidden to leave until my sophomore year, and even then only at lunch and only if I arrived on time.  This “privilege” was revoked for the day even if your tardiness was beyond your control.  Only now do I realize how disturbing it was that leaving was a privilege! At my middle school and first high school, an automated phone call was placed to the parents of any student marked absent in any class. My second high school inexplicably employed no janitorial staff, so upper school students were made to wash the staff’s and lower school students’ lunch dishes.

Those were only the most direct means of exerting control over students’ lives. In most schools, teachers come up with assignments and deadlines without consulting either the students or other teachers.  Students are then expected to make these things priority number one. In this day and age then, where four hours per night of homework is not uncommon, students spend nearly twelve hours each day doing things other people have decided they should be doing. Of course, the teacher does not follow his student home and force him at gunpoint to complete his homework.  (In fact, “Nobody’s making you do anything” seems to be a favorite mantra.) But lots of teachers like to threaten a student’s future in order to bully him into doing things he wouldn’t otherwise. (“If your grades don’t improve, you won’t even get into Backwater Community College, young man.”)  A student who fares poorly in such a noxious environment is said to have chosen that outcome, but is it fair to say so when the student was only offered the choice between his autonomy and his academic success, as if no middle ground existed?  I nearly failed biology sophomore year. My teacher told me I chose to receive the grade I did. I told her that in fact, she had chosen to have us all write a song from the point of view of a bromeliad that contained a rhyme scheme but did not rhyme—I am not making this assignment up—instead of working with the class to come up with a mutually agreeable lesson plan, and I had merely chosen not to write the song. The grade, I told her, was a punishment she was now choosing to dole out, which was alright with me. Attributing her poor choices to me, however, was not.

Truthfully, I find the very idea of homework extremely disrespectful to young people. It presumes that nothing else we might do with that time could ever be as important or  fulfilling as schoolwork. It implies that our evenings and weekends are Unproductive Time just waiting to be carved up.

Even my parents, who as you’ll recall are otherwise extremely reasonable people used to turn into micromanagers of the highest order where school was concerned. They logged in religiously to the chillingly- named Infinite Campus (essentially an online version of each teacher’s grade book) to track my progress. If any assignment was listed as missing, they wouldn’t rest until it was finished. Occasionally, an assignment I had completed was listed in the grade book but the grade had not been entered yet. I would then have to spend the next two hours reassuring my parents of that. Now that letter grades are no longer a part of my schooling, I have an even better relationship with my parents than I did before. We don’t have those arguments anymore. They tell their friends want a monstrous thing Infinite Campus was.

I don’t know if I can say what exactly I might have achieved if I’d found a less infantilized school--and I zero in on school because that is the only arena in which I believe I have been significantly infantalized--at a younger age, but I would undoubtedly be a much happier, more confident person. I developed depression in the seventh grade thanks in part to the relentless demands on my time that started then. I would also have liked to have more control over my classes much earlier than I finally got it. I can speak only for myself here, but I have suffered a good deal from others’ attempts to make me a well-rounded person. I’m sure some students genuinely enjoy the diverse, liberal-arts-like lineup of classes they currently take in secondary school, but it’s been a needless hassle for me. I have fairly substantial visual-spatial impairments and my verbal IQ has been found to be at least fifty points higher than my performance IQ, so I’m not about to discover a passion for say, geometry, that I would never have found if I hadn’t been exposed to it. The one-size-fits-all schedules have only left me oscillating wildly between waiting for the class to catch up to me (English, foreign languages, history) and scrambling frantically to catch up to the class (math, the hard sciences).  

I do have a (mostly tangential) question for Dr. Epstein: How, if at all, does teenage consumer culture play into this dynamic?  As you probably already know, there exists in the marketing world a phenomenon known either as age compression or KGOY (Kids are Getting Older Younger) wherein increasingly younger consumers become target markets for increasingly “older” products, and it is by all accounts harmful.  For better or for worse, it appears that the advertising and marketing industries were among the first to recognize the true sophistication of young people. Might this draw teens further into “teen culture”?  That is, do the infantilized teenagers turn to consumer culture to try to reclaim some sort of empowerment?

Liz -- Earlier, Dr. Epstein wrote: "The fact that the teen brain differs in some respects from that of young children and older adults tells us nothing at all about the causes of teen turmoil.  Difference alone reveals nothing about causation; the brain scientists who have claimed otherwise have mistakenly connected the differences they see in teen brains with cultural biases about the dysfunctional teen, thus improperly drawing conclusions about causation from a mere correlation - the kind of blatant error students are typically warned about during their very first year of university training.  Environmental events alter brain chemistry and structure; thus, some characteristics of the teen brain may actually be the result of the bizarre lifestyle that we force our teens to live rather than the cause of that lifestyle."

Liz, a lot of people fear what you fear would happen. Policymakers included. This is part of the reason why they continue to add more restrictions on teens. Right now the brain argument is being used nationwide to justify laws that will raise restrictions on your driving. Can you all think of any other group in this culture where people could put out this kind of information and it would be acceptable and go largely unquestioned?

The point of us exposing you to this is to for you to consider (especially when you read Dr. Epstein's points about other cultures),, as part of our discussion about achievement, what would/could happen to teens and adults if people were entirely raised in a new culture for teens? In today's culture for teens, nothing magical happens when you reach 19 or 20 years old. For example, your point about drugs -- just turn on the tv to see many adults (also raised in this culture) risking their health in that and in other areas everyday. 

If we just switched over today, yes there would be some consequences. But what if the whole culture were different from the time of birth for the next group of teens? If you re-read Dr. Epstein's posts he gives several ideas for what would be different in this culture (you would be more around adults, for one).

***

I gotta say, it's interesting to me that most of you seem to easily cover the potential negative results right off the bat (and really hang on tight to those), but very few of you are taking on the question about what you might achieve IF (I'm still holding out that you'll go there). I don't mean this in a negative, condescending or passive aggressive way at all. It's just really intriguing given the nature of the conversation. Could this be a result of your expectations for one another, rooted in today's culture?

As part of this, I want to note as moderator that Semeo seems to be in a school climate that has far different expecations about teens and his perspective on this also seems to differ from most...

Let me be clear that I'm not here to advocate for either/or. I AM here, however, to push you to consider the whole gamut...

To Liz F.:  What you have read about the teen brain on a "website" is incorrect.  I hope you will take some time to read the investigative article I wrote on this topic for Scientific American, called "The Myth of the Teen Brain."  The claims you have heard about a faulty teen brain could not possibly be true; teen turmoil is entirely absent in more than 100 cultures around the world, and it was also absent through most of our own history.  If that turmoil were the inevitable result of normal brain development, we would see it everywhere; we do not.  As for the decision making abilities of teens, the kind of experiment you have suggested has been conducted a number of times (see Chapter 7 of my book, Teen 2.0).  That research shows clearly that teens make decisions about health just as competently (and as incompetently) as adults do.  Cordially, /Robert Epstein

Hi Dr. Epstein! Yes, I guess I sort of misunderstood your question. Just a few thoughts on what would happen if we did, though. I think it'd be cool to have, just out of curiosity, projects like these where students and capable teens make "simulated" decisions during the same time as other "adults" to see which decision makes more sense and in the future, which one will lead to better results. 

Are you suggesting that in number 6 of the Young Person's Bill of Rights, teens should be able to be responsible for themselves despite their own decisions (such as drug use)? But I might still be a bit naive about this - wouldn't it be bad for our health? Could you please clarify why you think we should have rights to harming ourselves? Shouldn't we all put something in to our community (such as getting rid of the right to harm ourselves, even if intentional) to get something good out of it (safe, healthy, mature, responsible, can make good decisions)? Please excuse my foolishness, but  I don't think I quite see where that right is going towards. Some of those rights I strongly agree with; such as privacy, civil duty, ownership and work, and curfew; just to name a few. 

From a website, it says that "the part involved in judgment, organization, planning and strategizing - gets all its gray matter by age 11 or 12. But the myriad connections from the frontal part aren't completely wired to function like an adult for at least another decade." What if some of the risks that we involve by agreeing to having our rights include brain damage or mood disorders? 

To Liz F.:  I think you are misunderstanding my new question.  I would never advocate that we create or maintain a stage of life in which we encourage people to be irresponsible.  That's what we have now!  That's "adolescence," which I am determined to abolish.  It's a harmful and unnecessary stage of life that was created by modern Western culture.  Please see http://Teen20.com, and especially look at the "Young Person's Bill of Rights" that I proposed last year:  http://drrobertepstein.com/Teen20/billofrights.html.  Also check out http://NationalYouthRightsDay.org.  Sincerely, /Robert Epstein