Inventing Adolescence

The Political Psychology of Everyday Schooling

Joseph Adelson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351511537
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

There is a widespread and deep awareness that all is not well with American public education nor with the students, educators, and administrators who are charged with making citizens literate. Joseph Adelson's work has gained considerable prominence in this ongoing reevaluation. Writing with force, verve, and the tools of advanced study, Adelson's book provides what might be the most comprehensive look at American education since the work of Diane Ravitch. The materials include revised and updated versions of essays that caused a real stir when they first appeared in the pages of Commentary, Daedalus, The American Scholar, and The Public Interest, among other places.The work goes against the grain of rhetoric but quite with the grain of the best in social science: That the erosion of trust in the American young has been far less severe than in the American old, that the degree of pathology, alienation, and rebelliousness in the American adolescent population is far from alarming. On the whole, each and every serious research study shows the vast majority of teenagers to be competent, purposeful, at ease with themselves, and closely bonded to their families and their values. This is, however, no pollyannish version of American education, but a tough-minded critique of educators and administrators who prefer ideological generalities to empirical truths, and whose vested interests are not in the requirements of learning, but ultimately in its subversion. The invention of adolescence was a search for a problem child more nearly detected in problematic adults.

Part I
Recent History of the Schools

1
What Happened to the Schools?

It is only recently, and only by hindsight, that we have been able to appreciate the enormous stresses imposed upon the schools in the immediate postwar era. The most visible of these was demographic in origin. There was an extraordinary increase in the number of youngsters to be educated, requiring a vast expansion of the public schools, and ultimately of the colleges and universities. That expansion was carried out remarkably well, or so it seems to me; there were strains, inevitably, but these were compensated for by a sort of euphoria about doing so much so energetically in so short a period of time—not merely the building of physical plant but the recruitment and training of a large body of teachers and administrators, It was a euphoria that extended to the idea of education itself. Education came to be seen as a sort of universal solvent for the problems of the polity. The Utopian tendencies in the American mind were to some large degree invested in the schools, in the notion of perfectibility through learning. As we shall see, there was to be a great fall, indeed one we are still witnessing, but I think it is fair to say that through most of the 1950s the authority of the schools rested upon a sense of inner confidence—they believed in themselves because we believed in them, and we believed in them because they were the repository of so many of our fondest hopes, for ourselves, for our children, for the nation.

There were other outcomes of the demographic pressure, which we are just now beginning to understand and—ruefully—appreciate. One of these was the effect of generation size, that is, not merely the numbers involved in a generation but its size relative to the total population. A baby-boom generation is a crowded one; economic and other opportunities are fewer, and more fiercely competed for. In the fullness of time, we see in that generation an increase in social pathology, and more specifically increases in the rate of suicide, homicide, delinquency, illegitimacy, alcoholism, and the like. That at least is the breathtakingly bold theory proposed recently by a number of economists and demographers, most forcefully by Richard Easterlin.¹ Whether or not the hypothesis is true—and we shall soon know, for it is a hypothesis that tests itself, and that predicts that we should soon be seeing declines in these indices—the fact is that beginning in the 1960s the schools found themselves confronting, rather suddenly, new and unexpected problems in discipline, in student motivation, and in collective morale. Perhaps one ought to stress how quickly it took place. As it happens, my three children, born within a five-year span, went to the same high school. The oldest tells me that he knew no one who used drugs; the second, two years younger, says that drugs were being used, but only by deviant youngsters, the emotionally troubled, and the socially outcast; the third, in school three years later, says that the occasional use of drugs was commonplace and that regular and heavy use was to be found among a substantial minority of his fellow students.

The size of the postwar generation had yet another effect that was not immediately evident. School systems enlarged, accelerating a long-standing tendency toward the consolidation of school districts. The figures are quite astonishing. In 1932 there were around 127,000 school districts in this country; now there are about 16,000.² There were many things at work in producing that attrition; the Conant Report on the high schools, published in 1959, placed a particular emphasis on the educational advantages of consolidation. The outcome was a substantial increase in system size, and with it, inevitably, a shift to bureaucratic modes of organization. That shift in turn brought with it a series of changes in the nature and practice of authority in the schools. The change was from traditional modes of authority, that is, direct and personal, to legal and contractual modes, in which the emphasis is placed upon conformity to rules and legal codes.³

The distinction between traditional and legalistic modes of authority is far from a new idea, in fact, it is a central concept in the writings of the pioneers of contemporary sociology, especially Max Weber. But the trend toward legalistic modes of authority, though discernible since at least the nineteenth century, was relatively slow in coming to the schools. When it did come, it could not have arrived at a less propitious time, at least so far as discipline was concerned. Just at the moment when social pathology was beginning its ominous rise, educators began to find themselves being buried in paper, and what was worse, constrained in the performance of disciplinary authority by increasingly complex regulations involving the rights of students, these in turn following upon court decisions that produced a widespread anxiety about litigation.

I remember quite vividly a sort of watershed event in my own experience of the schools, as a parent. This took place a little more than ten years ago. I attended what was advertised as an urgent meeting of the PTO at the junior high school my son attended. Arriving there, I learned that the meeting had been called to discuss some disturbing incidents taking place near the school: some of the older, roughneck children were bullying and extorting money from some of the younger children on the way to and from school. There had been many complaints from parents to the principal but the answers had not been satisfactory. So the PTO had decided to make the issue public. A youngish assistant principal had been sent to calm the multitudes, and I have rarely seen anyone quite so unhappy—he stammered, he mumbled, he hemmed and hawed, he shifted from foot to foot, and his message to us was that they would do their best but that probably not much could be done.

It was a long and rancorous meeting. The assistant principal, though defensive and embarrassed, provided us with a resume of the legal education he himself had been receiving, at the hands of the police and of the school's attorney. That course of instruction told him not what he could do but all the many things he could not do. The audience listened, incredulous, then angry and disgusted. At one point one parent shouted something to the effect that this would not have happened in the old days, and brought forth the name of a revered principal of the recent past who had exercised a benign form of curbside justice. But those days were gone forever.

I do not want to sentimentalize the good old days, nor do I want to focus exclusively upon problems of discipline, important as they are—it is the leading complaint parents bring against the public schools. Yet we see in this example how forces and ideologies both extrinsic and alien to the schools and to education—-in this case, the courts and the adversarial spirit—have begun to penetrate the practice of education in the United States in regard to not only discipline but other realms of educational policy as well.

Perhaps the most important source of the school's diminished authority is the growth—I am tempted to say the cancerous growth—of judicial and bureaucratic intervention, generally at the federal level. The initial occasion was desegregation and racial equity in education; somewhat later, questions of sexual equality were addressed. Yet one now senses that these issues were used merely as pretexts, that a sort of iron law of federal expansiveness had come into play, which at this moment shows few signs of recession. It is an extremely troubling development because neither the courts—given their adversarial style—nor the bureaucracies—given their tendency toward Byzantine inefficiency—are the appropriate forum for the discussion or the making of educational decision.

Let me illustrate by an example close to home—and I mean that literally, for the case I have in mind took place in my own hometown, Ann Arbor, and in fact in my own home neighborhood. I refer to the black English litigation. The case began when a group of radical activists, largely white, sued the school system on behalf of a group of black families. It was their claim that the poor academic progress of the children was due to the fact that their native language, so to speak, is black English, and instruction takes place in standard English, a language these children do not fully comprehend. As a solution, the teachers were to be trained to understand black English, and to respect its linguistic autonomy.

To anyone on the scene, the doctrine being proposed was not far from frivolous. Some of the children in question are from poor families. In at least some cases, family life is unstable and demoralized. School attendance is irregular, among other reasons because the families move so often (I am told, for example, that about half of the plaintiff families have already left the district). Given these circumstances, it is hard to imagine how language can be singled out as the prime reason for poor achievement. Nor is there any reason to believe that these youngsters do in fact speak black English exclusively, or cannot understand standard English. They watch television daily, they talk easily with white classmates; all those with direct and extensive experience with these youngsters report that black English is a variant dialect that can be turned on and off depending on circumstances, in much the same way that many middle-class southern children learn to speak both standard English and "country," and switch back and forth between the two depending on whom they are addressing.

Hence, there was no reason to believe that black English functioned as a foreign language, or that it acted as an impediment to learning. Nevertheless, a federal judge decided to hear the case, much to everyone's surprise; and much to everyone's astonishment he agreed with expert testimony that black English was linguistically a distinctive language, and hence a probable factor in the poor school performance of these youngsters. The remedy ordered was that the teachers be compelled to attend a series of lectures wherein they would be instructed on the linguistic merits and integrity of black English. That remedy has now been tested, and the results are precisely what our common sense would lead us to expect: it has not made the slightest difference in the achievement of the children. In short, the nullity of the outcome follows directly from the silliness of the suit, the foolishness of the judicial holding, and the fatuity of the remedy.⁴

What should trouble us most about this case is the ease with which the judge intruded himself into the heart of the educator's domain, into what is to be taught, how it is to be taught, and how teachers are to be trained to teach it. What qualifies a judge to do so? What qualifies a judge to pronounce on the linguistics of English dialects? What qualifies a judge to pronounce on the causes of scholastic achievement, and the means needed to enhance it? The answer is, nothing at all; yet the judiciary now takes it upon itself— here as elsewhere—to settle the most recondite technical and scientific questions. What began as judicial activism in the cause of equality has by some demonic inner logic become a kind of judicial narcissism, wherein the competence of the mediating institutions of U.S. life is systematically diminished by judicial vanity. Here is Martin Shapiro, a distinguished student of the law, now at Berkeley, on this matter:

Our newspapers tell us of judges who forbid the transfer of Air Force squadrons from one base to another, delay multi-million dollar construction projects, intervene in complex negotiations between public employers and their employees, oversee the operation of railroads, and decide the location of schools. In the course of these litigations we have seen judges blithely intervening in precisely the kinds of massive and complex technical matters about which they would have automatically disclaimed competence twenty years ago. Judges now joyously try their hands at everything from the engineering of atomic reactors to the validation of IQ tests. They run school districts, do regional land use, redesign welfare programs, and calculate energy needs. They make policy decisions with massive financial and political consequences for every level of government. They destroy and redirect the building of educational, electoral, tax, and public-utility systems that are the products of thousands of hours of legislative negotiation and hundreds of complex statutes. Today there seems to be no public policy issue, no matter now massive, complex, or technical, that some judge somewhere has not felt fully capable of deciding aided only by the standard processes of litigation.⁵

Shapiro goes on to write that one defense of this process is that the judge is in a position to decide among the rival technical experts of the two parties, and thus free of the domination that technicians exercise over laypersons, who generally see only one side of the issue. Shapiro says that although that may be true in theory, "in reality the judge often cannot understand the technical testimony on either side, has no mode of independently evaluating the accuracy of either, and is reduced to an act of faith in one side's technicians or the other's. The judicial weighing of technical testimony often comes down to a law clerk, fresh out of law school with no technical background, juggling footnotes to support whatever guess the judge is making."

Nor is the judiciary alone in its zeal to administer the schools. Congress has done more than its share, in a series of ill-advised acts of legislation, as has the executive through the bureaucracies. In short, all three branches of government and, furthermore, separate or overlapping or competing units within these branches take it as their privilege to intervene in education. They do so with almost no regard to the financial costs involved. And once they have done so, their decisions, however erroneous or short-sighted they turn out to be in practice, prove nearly impossible to modify or rescind. The fruits of judicial and bureaucratic intervention are painfully evident to those of us in the university: a professor in Georgia jailed for three months in a tenure dispute; or a federal functionary blithely sitting in on university classes to monitor potential bias; or the extraordinary and thus far unchecked growth of a bureaucracy both within and without the universities determined to compose racial and sexual quotas, to rectify an unproved and unlikely pattern of discrimination.

Thus the authority of education—at all levels—is weaker today, far weaker, than at any other moment in memory. The schools do not fully govern themselves; they do not freely choose their own goals; they are not guided by their own values. Above all, they cannot bring themselves to resist these false or meretricious or merely foolish ideas imposed on them by others. Here I come to the point I want to stress, that our inability to resist those ideas stems in part from our inability to develop or sustain a coherent idea of ourselves, and of our own essential values.

In their relation to the federal courts and to the bureaucracies, the schools have had to confront institutions that, like Isaiah Berlin's famous hedgehog, know but a single thing, that thing being a distended and distorted idea of equality, distended in that it puts equality above all other values, and distorted because it has transformed the original idea, of moral equality, the idea of Jefferson and Lincoln, to the idea of numerical equality, that all groups must be represented equally in all statuses.⁶ A corollary idea is the notion that variations in achievement are due only to error or malevolence, which in practice amounts to a charge either of negligence or willed malice in the schools. In their defense of their single idea, the courts and bureaucracies behave not like the ordinary hedgehog but like a fierce and demented one, which knocks down anything that gets in its way—in short, a hedgehog with the ambitions of a fox. Whether the schools could in fact educate the courts on their narrow idea of equality is unclear; that idea has the fatal attraction of a vulgar belief understood to be advanced. Yet one can say with some confidence that they will be unable to do so until they are ready to plead publicly the traditionalist values they hold privately.

Far more than any other institution in U.S. society, the schools have become an arena for the struggle between the values of traditionalism and of modernity. Among the values of traditionalism are merit, accomplishment, competition, and success; self-restraint, self-discipline, and the postponement of gratification; the stability of the family; and a belief in certain moral universals. The modernist ethos scorns the pursuit of success; is egalitarian and redistributionist in emphasis; tolerates or encourages sensual gratification; values self-expression as against self-restraint; accepts alternative or deviant forms of the family; and emphasizes ethical relativism.

I think we do well here to distinguish between the universities and the schools, the former having been simultaneously the seedbed, staging area, and ultimate haven of the modernist temper. Not entirely, of course, because important segments of the university—I have in mind the sciences and some of the professional schools—have been largely immune to the modernist spirit, especially so with respect to the values of merit and success. On the whole, however, the intellectual debacle of the universities, which began in the 1960s and continues to this day—a debacle the symptoms of which were and are grade inflation and various curricular travesties—was the inevitable result of a tacit submission to modernist ideology. I want to quote a marvelous pair of sentences from Lionel Trilling, who wrote that "ideology is not acquired by thought but by breathing the haunted air. The life in ideology, from which none of us can wholly escape, is a strange submerged life of habit and semi-habit in which to ideas we attach strong passions but no very clear awareness of the concrete reality of their consequences." Breathing that haunted air, the haunted air of modernism, meant that we no longer remembered what we believed in, or why. I recall my first recognition of this, in the late 1960s, when our faculty faced a student demand for a new bachelor's degree, the major reason being the desire of some students to escape the requirements for a modest degree of proficiency in a foreign language. Heart-rending stories were told of students possessing the highest degree of sensitivity and moral conscience yet failing the French examination for the third time, and thereupon being cast out into the darkness. What struck me most was the apparent inability of our faculty, collectively, to frame a cogent response, to argue the case for language. And listening to that debate, or rather that nondebate, I felt I was gazing into the void. For if one could not answer the question, why language? one could not, if pressed, answer the questions, why mathematics? why science? why literature? why history? why anything else?

The situation in the schools—I mean here secondary education in partic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Recent History of the Schools
• Part II Current and Recurrent Problems of American Education
• Part III Adolescence and Its Politics
• Part IV Adolecents and Their Politics
• Part V Psychology and Psychoanalysis