Last week we looked at puberty as a physical process, and at some of the psychological and social processes that are associated with it in societies like our own. We saw that the changes that take place between the ages of 11 and 16 are considerable, and that they affect both the physique and the mental processes. We noted that differences in development between girls and boys might have important consequences - in particular the fact that girls on average go through puberty earlier than boys.

Individual differences in age at the onset of puberty may have some effect as well

Differences are both genetically based and environmental - early or late puberty tends to run in families, but nutrition and emotional well-being also play a part. We know that environment is important, because the age of menarche has dropped quite dramatically in the industrialized countries over the last century.

B : Adolescence - a social construct ?

At the end of the 17th Century, the word 'adolescent' was little used. According to Furetière 'il ne se dit guère qu'en raillerie. C'est un jeune adolescent, pour dire, c'est un jeune homme étourdi ou sans expérience.' Up until the eighteenth century, we find that most of the time, the rough division into 'childhood', 'youth' and 'old age' is considered sufficient as a categorization of ages - although intellectuals would speak of six or seven different ages, referring to the writers of antiquity.

The definition of the three ages was rather loose. In the 15th Century, Charbonnier found that 'enfant' and 'jeune homme' might both be applied to persons of 18 or even 20 years old. This usage probably can be founded upon the work status of the individual - in agricultural communities, functioning according to strict rules of primogeniture, as in Southern Ireland, the eldest son, who stayed with his parents until they decided to retire, might be referred to as a 'boy' until the day that he took over the farm, which could be quite late in life.

Sociologically, the child is an individual who is still in the power of his parents. Adolescence, or youth, as a fully defined social category, can only appear when a group emerges which, while still not enjoying the full status of adulthood, nevertheless has been largely removed from direct control by parents.

According to Olivier Galland, this status is first discovered amongst the male offspring of the aristocracy. He cites the Chevalier de Fonvielle, who spent his adolescence in dissipation,

"fuyait la maison paternelle pendant huit ou dix jours, nourri par les polissons du quartier"

From time to time, his father, feeling that too much was too much, would call his erring son to order, and have him whipped or thrown in prison for a short period, but this seemed to have little effect.

We may note that there is already a strong link between the idea of youthfulness and the idea of transgression, delinquency, and punishment. This, says Galland, is to be explained by the 'impatience' of aristocratic youth. Between the moment when they are recognized as capable of assuming the responsibilities of an adult, and the moment when they actually do assume them, there is a long period of waiting - waiting for the father to die.

Amongst those philosophers who provided the upper class with advice on such matters as child-rearing, the spectre of the 'spoiled child' was advanced to underline the need for a new pedagogy. The child must be educated so that good moral conduct would become second nature to him; particularly, the young person should refrain from bad behaviour for the sake of their conscience - that is to say, that they should feel guilty of any temptation to transgress. Such a result was best achieved through the inculcation of love, rather than fear. Punishment was regarded as a means of marking parental disapprobation, rather than of simply knocking vice out of the child

Education, for the aristocracy, was as much a means of achieving control over the subsequent behaviour of the young as it was of inculcating knowledge. For the majority of the population under the Ancien Régime, childhood would come to a close at the age of 8 or 13, when the young person would be thrown upon the labour market, where they would simply exchange the authority of their fathers for that of their masters.

As both geographical and social mobility grow through the 18th and 19th centuries, so we find that the young increasingly come to be perceived as problematic. This is particularly the case in the large cities - London and Paris - where the young often provide the unruly mass of which the mob is formed and which threatens violence to life and property, and political revolution.

Over the same period, we find that there is an increasingly rigid distinction between the work-place and the home; the rise of the factory movement changed the work-habits of the lower classes radically : children found themselves working under conditions which took them out of the immediate control of the family. According to many observers, the results were disastrous. Not only was factory work bad for the health, it was also bad for the morals. In the works of the social inquirers who did the spade work for the movement which was to impose factory legislation during the nineteenth century, limiting the hours of work of the young, we find continual cries of alarm.

The factory, they believed, brought the young together in complete promiscuity - both sexual and social. The girls who were to be the mothers of the next generation were corrupted - often having to work semi-naked in the heat of the workshops, they were all too easily lead into depraved behaviour.

As for the boys, in this view they banded together, beyond the control of their elders, and provided the unruly and hotheaded base for the new trade-unions, and for radical politics.

The factory system was seen as undermining the family in many ways; by imposing long hours outside the home, and by employing female and youthful labour rather than that of adult males, the factory owners threatened to destroy the domestic virtues of good mothering and subordination to the male head of the household. The movement to limit and, if possible, exclude women and children from the workplace was an attempt to reinstate the authority of the father and husband. The family was to become, once again, one of the main agencies of social control.

However, if the young were excluded from the work-place at just that time when the father was away from home, could the mother be expected to exert full authority on her own? It seemed unlikely, particularly as the working-class woman was seen as ignorant and undisciplined.

A solution was to be discovered in universal schooling, which would ensure that for most of the daylight hours, on most days of the week, the young would be under the direct control of a substitute father, who would maintain immediate discipline, and who would also instil an internal discipline in his charges which would ensure that they continued to behave well once they were old enough to leave his domain.

This was particularly necessary as factory labour was itself looked upon as degrading and stupefying. As James Mill put it, in 1824

The adolescent, then, is first and foremost, the object of anxiety and fear. The development of the school in the modern age is in large part to be attributed to these anxieties, just as the subsequent development of probation services, social work departments, and youth movements such as the Boy Scouts, can all be seen to spring from a concern to ensure that the passage from childhood to adulthood, particularly among working-class youth, should be navigated with as little friction as possible.

We have seen, then, that adolescence is a social construct more than a biological one. It is a result of the process by which young people were excluded from the labour markets, starting in the nineteenth century, and in which the modern home was constructed around the increasing divorce between the world of work and the world of intimate social relations. Work became the domain of the adult male, while children and women were progressively confined to the household, and, in the case of children, to the school.

Adolescence varies in length, both historically and from one social group to another. Essentially, it can be seen as the period between the full dependence on the family of childhood, and the full independence which involves leaving home and setting up one's own family - that is, the passage between the family of origin and the family of orientation.

It is in this sense that adolescence can be said to be a period of irresponsibility. The young free themselves of parental control, but do not immediately take on the adult roles that would tie them to the social system. Because of this, they are often perceived by adults as being both enviable and dangerous. As Friedenberg put it in 1959 :

He claimed that the teenager was stereotyped as a kind of 'negro'. We must remember this when we read the literature on adolescence : all too often, the young are simply a screen upon which the adult world projects its fears and its fantasies, as well as its hopes for redemption. This often leads those who pretended to expertise on adolescents to depict them as stranger than they actually are. The typical picture of the adolescent was that of a moody, individualistic and anguished rebel, speaking an impenetrable language, and socializing only with others of his own kind. In the 1960s, there was much talk of the emergence of a distinct 'youth culture', the members of which turned their backs definitively upon the ways of the old world.

This feeling still appears to be very strong - in 1980, Nicholson, in an inquiry into attitudes towards youth in the town of Colchester, found that two thirds of the adults interviewed believed that the younger generation had a very different approach to life to their own. Coffield (1986), in a study of attitudes in northeast England, found that adults were quite hostile towards young people - far more hostile than the young were towards adults!

But most surveys that have looked into the attitudes of the young themselves have found that they are, in fact, remarkably conformist. Nor are they particularly subject to deep attacks of metaphysical angst. In their political opinions, in their religious affiliations, and in their attitudes towards such institutions as the schools or the police, they are very similar to their parents. Moreover, as I have already suggested, they are not hostile to adults; they admire and appreciate their parents, even if they do have arguments with them from time to time. Indeed, when they do behave in a rebellious manner, it may be because they have discovered that adults expect them to do so, and they do not wish to disappoint - Nicholson found that

Again, much has been made by psychologists of the so-called identity crisis. This may be because psychiatrists and psychologists come into professional contact mainly with young people who do have problems, and it is certain that a minority of them do - but it is important to stress that it is only a minority. Most young people go through adolescence without the trials and calamities that the literature would have us expect. There appears to be little conflict between the family and the peer group - where the members of the peer group have opinions that differ from those of the family, most young people retain the family's opinions - but in any case, for the most part, the peer groups are made up of young people from similar families, having similar opinions.

There is, of course, the question of what are often referred to as 'youth movements'. This is something of a misnomer, for the concept of a movement implies a level of organisation and unity of purpose that few such groupings have; becoming a punk or a Zulu is very different from becoming a boy scout or a member of the Army Cadet Corps.

For most young people, identification with one or other of these movements is largely playful - it is something that they do at weekends. Whilst some individuals may invest heavily in membership of a group of some kind, and may spend much time and effort in cultivating the right image, these are a minority. Nor is the hairstyle, the clothing, or whatever other signs are considered appropriate to be read as symbols of rebellion

If the young do not reject the family, do they reject the school? Although their feelings about school are obviously more luke-warm than they are about their parents, nevertheless, they are overwhelmingly favourable. In France, the overwhelming majority of young people continually tell researchers that they are happy at school, that they find their teachers are interesting and competent, and that school is important; this, despite the fact that adults are continually talking of a crisis in the educational system!

This sturdiness of the adolescent is admirable, considering the demands made on her by the adult world. This becomes particularly clear when we compare modern industrial societies with older social formations.

In pre-modern social systems, the number of possible roles is limited, and the young are usually conscripted into them without the idea of there being a choice. Life markers are clearly laid out, and neither the individual nor his entourage have any doubt as to his social identity. For most people, destiny is largely determined at birth.

With modernity, there is a radical change in the social role structure. In the first place, the number of roles increases in an explosive fashion, and in the second place, the placement of individuals within specific roles is taken out of the hands of the immediate primary groups, such as the family and the immediate community, and is increasingly bureaucratised - power passes from the network of face-to-face relationships to the more complex and socially distant institutions of the school and the multi-national firm.

Modernist ideology makes the individual personally responsible for his life-decisions, and yet the decision-making centres of those structures within which the decisions are taken appear to be further and further removed from his immediate sphere of influence. Even within the last fifty years, certain social groups have found themselves divested of placement powers that they once took for granted.

Within the relatively stabilized working class communities of the post-war years, skilled and semi-skilled fathers could expect to place their sons in their own places of work, or through the network of relationships of family and friendship, either as workers or as apprentices.

Rapid changes in the job market have deprived the old communities of their economic bases - the old trades and jobs have disappeared, and fathers have found themselves faced with the prospect of unemployment or early retirement - their energies have been taken up with protecting their own positions rather than with looking to the future of their children. The traditional working habits and work relationships of the respectable working classes have been undermined, leaving them far less competent to ensure that their children learn a trade and enter the world of work at the appropriate time.

The increasing belief that the schools are failing in their mission to train people for the world of work is, at least in part, fuelled by the fear that families themselves are no longer able to play their role.

B : Identity and Placement

Adolescence is acknowledged by many psychologists as being a time when identity emerges. The child sees herself as embedded in the family, and has little conception of a future beyond the primary group. The adolescent becomes meaningfully aware of the fact that one day she will leave her family of origin and forge a life for herself apart from her parents and siblings.

In traditional societies, the same need for choice occurs, but is more thoroughly embedded in intimate social practices. The number of roles is relatively limited, and only a small number of individuals will need to be prepared for the few highly specialized positions that exist. Where choices are necessary, they are subject to closely prescribed rituals; thus, for example, among the plains Indians of North America, a young man's life choices are determined by a dream ceremony that takes place during the period of initiation. The young man consumes a powerful drug, and then goes to sleep. While asleep, he has a dream, during which he meets an animal; depending on the kind of animal he meets, and on the style of the encounter, he knows that he has been called upon to fill a given role.. Evidently, there is a great deal of work that has gone on, both before the dream, in pointing the young man in the right direction, and subsequently in interpreting the dream, so that the choice is not simply that of the individual.

In our societies, the choice of future is by no means solely up to the individual either. Social structure, as mediated through the family and through the school, contributes largely to shaping the future of the young; this can leave the young person with a feeling of powerlessness or incipient failure. On the other hand, it can lead to a kind of scholastic fetishism, in which the adolescent substitutes good school marks for any attempt to work out his own future.

Nor is this particularly surprising. Post-modernist societies are characterized by a highly differentiated and rapidly changing role system. This makes the establishment of close links with the workplace difficult; in the past, sons were often placed by their fathers, through their own contacts, or through the network of uncles and friends. This functioned both for the middle-classes and for the proletariat - thus a dock-worker would simply take his son along to the right public house at the right time, and set him on his way, just as the solicitor would groom his son to take over the family firm. These informal means of placement have largely been replaced by the school, and today initial placement is determined by success within the school system.

Families, having had to relinquish a major function to the school - at least, in part - now strive to maintain some form of control over what occurs to their children, particularly at critical moments, when major life choices are to be taken - in the French system, the class conferences at the end of troisième and at the end of séconde are such critical moments.

The parents themselves have different demands to make of the schools, depending on their position within the social hierarchy, on the judgements that they make of their children's capacities, and on their beliefs about the situation in the job market at the time that the child will be entering it. They also have differing amounts of leverage upon the system; depending upon their status and their own educational background, and also upon the depth of knowledge that they have of the system, and their clarity of perception about the job market. All of this means that they will tend to adopt different strategies and different attitudes towards the teachers and the administrators of the system, and towards their own children.

As the family loses much of its power over placement, it loses part of its power over the young themselves. When parents controlled the labour market, they also controlled their offspring, just as they did when they controlled the marriage market.

Modern youth is faced with a set of choices that are unusual in the history of humanity, and it is through the working out of these choices that the modern concept of identity is realized. The question of who one is, is intimately linked to the kind of job and to the life-partners that you choose. It is obvious that it is during adolescence that these questions are posed in their most radical form; the answers that the young person gives to them are clearly understood as furnishing the basis for his or her subsequent destiny.

The identity of the self is determined outside of the family and to a large extent beyond its power. The adolescent's real world begins to centre on wider institutions, and in particular on the school. It is within the school that most young people form the friendships that will take them through their teenage years, just as it is in the university, or in the first few years of work that the young adult forms the peer group that will see them through the largest part of their adult years. It is highly likely that it is through the peer group that the adolescent or young adult will meet the person that they are to marry, and who will be father or mother to their own children.

The idea of adolescence is constructed around these two poles - on the one hand, the search for a stable and meaningful professional identity, translated into the immediate manifestation of school-work, marks, and the judgements of the teaching team, and on the other hand, the search for meaningful relationships, and in particular a meaningful sexuality, which is worked through with the peer group.

The self, then, is measured against two sets of criteria: on the one hand, there are the criteria that are provided by the school, and on the other there are the criteria offered by the peer group. Lack of success in one field by, to some extent, be compensated for by success in the other- the friendless child may do well at school, and the school drop-out may place great importance in his or her relationships. But there is no guarantee that there will be a trade-off - the school failure may also find himself isolated from the peer group. Indeed, many studies have found that the popular teenager is also a successful student.

Failures and triumphs which, to the adult may seem relatively trivial, are of overweening importance for the teenager. A low mark in a test is not simply an indication of one's capacity, relative to some externally defined criteria; it is also a label that the young person wears, and which signals to others his or her worthiness to be considered as a friend. The young person needs to protect him or herself from the possibility of failure, not simply to keep on good terms with the teachers, or to pacify an anxious father, but also to maintain face with the peer group. Any failure has to be identified as determined by external forces, rather than reflecting the person's internal worth.

At the same time, most psychologists would agree that learning can only take place to any meaningful extent when the conditions are such as to help the learner to be receptive - this is what Krashen is referring to when he speaks of the affective filter. The school needs to provide an environment in which the learner feels a sense of security, and in which he or she can make practice runs without failure being of any long-term importance

The school finds itself with something of a dilemma; - on the one hand, it is the task of the school to educate all children - on the other hand, it is the task of the school to differentiate between the different children in such a way that some receive what is socially regarded as a better education than others.

It can be seen that there may be a certain conflict between these two functions, and that this conflict will be felt by the adolescent. In a later lesson, we will look at some of the ways that young people try to solve the problem.

Didactics - Week 18 : Adolescence - a Social Construct?

A : Recap

B : Adolescence - a social construct ?

B : Identity and Placement