Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids

Teenagers in an Era of Consumerism, Standardized Tests, and Social Media

Murray Milner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317746591
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids, Second Edition, award-winning sociologist Murray Milner tries to understand why teenagers behave the way they do. The first edition drew upon two years of intensive fieldwork in one high school and 300 written interviews about high schools across the country, where he argued that consumer culture greatly impacts the way our youth relate to one another and understand themselves and society. Milner now expands on that concept with a new year of fieldwork fifteen years after he began. He has uncovered in teens a move away from consumerism and towards the cultural capital of information in a time of social media and standardized tests.

Part I

The Puzzle And The Tools

Introduction

To paraphrase Marx, we must understand that teenage peer groups make their own history, but not under circumstances of their own choosing.

—Jay MacLeod, 1995

A great deal has been written about American teenagers. The first task is to make clear the particular focus of this book.

The Questions

I ask two sets of interrelated questions: First, why do American teenagers behave the way they do? Why are many teenagers obsessed with who sits with them at lunch, the brand of clothes they wear, what parties they are invited to, the privacy of their bedrooms, the intrigues of school cliques, who is dating or hooking up with whom, what is the latest popular music? Why have alcohol, drug use, and casual sex become widespread?¹ Why has the status of cheerleaders and football stars declined in many but not all schools? Why do students in some schools rigidly segregate themselves by race and ethnicity and yet get along together reasonably amicably? Even more frequently students from different crowds and cliques shun one another with all the determination of orthodox Brahmans avoiding Untouchables: Why their penchant for caste-like divisions? Why are teenagers frequently mean and even cruel to one another? Why do the girls see one another as more petty and catty than the boys? How does the experience of being a teenager vary for urban, suburban, and small-town settings, for private schools, religious schools, and military academies? These are some of the questions this book asks—and answers. The usual explanations of teenage behavior tend to focus on the importance of hormones, psychological development, parenting styles, and social background characteristics (e.g., class and race). It is my contention that these factors are much less important than is usually assumed. Rather, a clearer understanding of adolescent behavior requires that we focus on the way adults have used schools to organize young people’s daily activities, and the teenage status systems that result from this way of structuring their lives.

The second set of questions focuses on the connections between teenage culture and the broader society, especially the link between teenage status systems and consumerism. Teenagers have long been preoccupied with the clothes they wear, how they fix their hair, the cars they drive, the latest music, and what constitutes being “cool.” Adults have been complaining about teenagers in general and their materialism and consumerism in particular for more than fifty years. Why has little been done to change these patterns of adolescent behavior? Certainly in other societies and in other historical periods in our own society adults have exercised more control and authority over young people. If so many adults are critical of teenage behavior why have they hesitated to exercise more control and authority? Why have the numerous attempts at curriculum revision and school reform had so little impact on these patterns? Why do adults both bemoan the consumerism of teenagers and yet do many things to encourage it? The answer to this second set of questions has relatively little to do with family values, liberalism, or progressive education. Rather, it has to do with the benefits that adults, especially parents and businesses, gain from the present way of organizing young people’s lives.

Some Headlines

The full answers to these questions require an extended description and analysis of the way adolescents behave and the nature of the social world in which they live. But let me give some telegraphic hints about where we are headed.

A teenager’s status in the eyes of his or her peers is extremely important to most adolescents. Why this near obsession with status? It is because they have so little real economic or political power. They must attend school for most of the day and they have only very limited influence on what happens there. They are pressured to learn complex and esoteric knowledge like algebra, chemistry, and European history, which rarely has immediate relevance to their day-to-day lives. They do, however, have one crucial kind of power: the power to create an informal social world in which they evaluate one another. That is, they can and do create their own status systems—usually based on criteria that are quite different from those promoted by parents or teachers.² In short, the main kind of power teenagers have is status power. Predictably, their status in the eyes of their peers becomes very important in their day-to-day lives.

But why do their status concerns seem so obsessive, superficial, and often mean-spirited? The answer has to do with the nature and sources of status. Let me give three examples of characteristic behaviors and briefly explain why they occur.

Dating and Eating

A teenage girl from northern Virginia says, “Another huge part of association … is dating, the importance of which cannot be overstated.” She continues: “Where and with whom one ate was [also] a huge decision to make, particularly during one’s freshman year [when] status roles were so uncertain. The cafeteria was a decent place to eat if one was eating with ‘cool’ people, as everyone could see you, … but if one was eating alone or with those who were not deemed ‘cool,’ then eating outside or some other place not so in view was preferable … Eating maintains its importance throughout [the] high school years …”³

Why are adolescents so concerned about who “goes out with” whom and who eats with whom? It is because they intuitively know that who you associate with intimately has a big effect on your status. In all societies food and sexuality are key symbols of intimacy. Where status is important, people try to avoid eating with or marrying inferiors—as executive dining rooms, upper-middle-class dinner parties, debutante balls, and the marriage and eating restrictions of the Indian caste system all indicate. In contrast, if the occasion is purely instrumental, status concerns are much less important: The beautiful cheerleader can work with a bright nerd on a class project, the Brahman can supervise Untouchables working in the field, the company president can spend all day in a meeting with subordinates and even share a “working lunch”—but when work is done, they go their separate ways.

Clothes and Fashions

A New Jersey girl comments, “Clothes during high school were extremely important. Clothes measured how much money a person had, and how well that person could keep up with the ever-changing fashion world. It was always important to know brand name clothes if you were popular.”⁴

Why are the latest fashions so important to teenagers? To gain status in any group you have to conform to their norms. But this means that insiders, and especially those with high status, have an interest in making conformity difficult for outsiders. Hence, they frequently elaborated and complicated the norms. The elaborate social rituals and dress styles of aristocracies and upper classes are obvious examples. In pre-modern societies, copying your social superiors was often forbidden. Woe to the commoner who tried to dress like a king or the Untouchable who donned the sacred thread of the Brahman. But in contemporary societies most formal constraints on copying superiors have been removed. Hence those at the top must constantly change and complicate the norms. Among teenagers this results in rapidly changing fashions in clothes, music, and the “in” words and phrases. This obsessive concern to have “the latest” is not adolescent irrationality, but a very reasonable response to the power structure within which they must live.

Put-Downs and Meanness

A male from a small Texas town says, “The … gossip was either bashing some jerky guy, someone of the lower economic status, or even back stabbing one of their own …” Another school 1500 miles away: Robert, the only Latino in the group, becomes the … target. “First [Kate] asked him [in a snide voice] if they had chairs in Mexico, and then she made a similar comment concerning pizza. Robert shrugged off the chair comment, but when Kate brought up the pizza comment he seemed irritated.” ⁵

Why are teenagers frequently mean and petty toward one another? It is because status is relatively inexpansible. If everyone receives A’s or has a cell phone, these have little value as status symbols. Because status is relatively inexpansible, if someone moves up, someone else will have to move down. But the reverse is also true; you can move up or stay on top by putting others down. Hence when adolescents are placed in a situation where they have little real economic or political power, and where they can only divide up an inexpansible resource like status, it is not surprising that “put-downs” and “small cruelties” are all too common.

As we shall see these three telegraphic explanations are based on a systematic theory of status relations. This will help to understand a much wider array of teenage behavior, as well as consider each of these examples in more detail later.

Educational Reform

Unfortunately, too many current school reform efforts are beside the point. They are often based on a fundamental misrecognition of the realities both of schools and teachers’ lives, and even more damaging on an ignorance of the daily realities of the children who come to these schools (Michael W. Apple).⁶

Why is it so hard to change things? If both teenagers and adults often express dissatisfaction with many aspects of adolescent life—and they have done so for many years—why does little change? The matter is, of course, complex, but the basic answer is relatively simple. The patterns of behavior characteristic of teenagers result from segregating young people into schools until they are at least seventeen or eighteen and greatly limiting the kind of power they have. Adults and most young people like this age-based form of segregation. Young people are less subject to the supervision of their parents. Parents have the time and energy to do other things with their lives. Competition in the full-time job market is reduced. The direct cost to businesses of training employees is lowered. Students also form a large pool of part-time laborers that can be hired at low wages, with no benefits or job security; moreover, they spend nearly all of their money on immediate consumption items. Certainly, extended schooling and the related social arrangements provide important benefits, and hence they are not easily changed. But they also create the structural basis for an oppositional youth culture that many adults find offensive. The conclusion to be drawn is not that nothing can be done to address the complaints of both adults and youth. It does mean that reforming the curriculum and teaching techniques—however much these may be needed—will not change the structures that produce and sustain the patterns of behavior we associate with teenagers. This is the case for well-to-do students in good schools; it is even truer for young people from disadvantaged neighborhoods and families.

Consumerism

A girl from an East Coast high school: “Clothes are not used as an important status distinguisher because many groups wear expensive clothes …”⁷

Proms are not what they used to be. The prom has gradually moved from the high school gym to the luxury hotel. Many students now rent limousines or expensive luxury cars (e.g., BMWs, Porsches, or Range Rovers) to go to the prom … Proms epitomize the expansion of a distinct youth consumer culture and the spending power of youth … [T]he process of being schooled can no longer be separated from commodity culture … Buying french fries from McDonald’s to eat during study hall, drinking Diet Coke bought from the soda machine, or listening to music on a CD Walkman on the way to class … [C]onsumerism has become part of the everyday dynamics of school life … ⁸

As the first quotation above indicates, in some schools expensive clothes are so much the norm that the cost of clothing is not what differentiates many of the peer groups. Of course, clothes and their cost are important in some schools, but the more general point is that consumerism in high schools is not only about clothes, but also a broader array of expensive items, such as the limousine to go to the prom or the hotel suite that is rented for the all-night party afterward, or where you will fly to for spring break.

The effect of consumerism is a two-way street. Teenagers are targeted as an important market by businesses and are strongly influenced by consumerism and commercialization. On the other hand, the success of many businesses can hinge upon whether they can predict the fashions that will appeal to teenagers—who are often style setters for those who are both younger and older.

The links between the organization of secondary education, the resulting youth culture, and American consumerism are not trivial or secondary matters. These are key features of American consumer capitalism. By consumer capitalism I mean simply the kind of societies characteristic of the contemporary U.S. and most developed countries. The term “consumer capitalism” is not pejorative, any more than terms such as “industrial capitalism,” or “merchant capitalism.” Rather the phrase distinguishes the particular type of society in which we live at the beginning of the twenty-first century. One implication of this phrase is that while innovative and efficient production is still important, much of the energy of businesses and the government is focused on stimulating consumption.

Our secondary schools are one of the important mechanisms for accomplishing this. Perhaps the thing that American secondary education teaches most effectively is a desire to consume. This is not primarily accomplished via the formal curriculum, but through the status concerns and peer groups that intensify during adolescence. The teenage preoccupation with status and status symbols creates inclinations and perspectives essential to contemporary consumer capitalism. We cannot adequately understand the contemporary world of high school teenagers apart from the context of consumer capitalism. Conversely, we cannot understand the dynamics of twenty-first-century American capitalism if we do not see the important role that secondary school status systems play in stimulating consumer demand.

In Max Weber’s famous essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, he argues that the Calvinist version of seventeenth-century Protestantism played a vital part in providing the impetus and legitimation for the development of early bourgeois capitalism. He does not claim that this is the cause of capitalism or even a logically necessary condition. The Protestant ethic happened to be an available ideological and moral framework, which encouraged hard work and saving. This greatly contributed to the particular form of capitalism that emerged in Europe. My argument, though narrower in scope, is similar: The status systems of high schools were and are an important contributing factor to the creation and maintenance of consumer capitalism.

What’s New?

Many books and articles describe and attempt to explain teenage behavior. Some of these emphasize status concerns and peer relationships. What is new here, however, is the description and organization of these patterns in terms of a general theory of status relationships. This enables us to see the sources of a wide array of adolescent behaviors, their interrelationship with one another, and how these processes are not unique to teenagers, but also shape behavior in quite different historical and cultural settings. But what insights do the theory of status relations offer that are not already available in existing theoretical frameworks? The answer is twofold. First, most existing theories point to and describe the differences between types of social formations, such as political parties, social classes, and status groups. Previous theories do not, however, provide systematic explanations of why these are different from one another; that is, why a particular kind of social formation has the one set of attributes and another has other characteristics. For example, why are the details of behavior different in status groups than classes? Second, existing theories of status groups do not indicate why status differences are...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface: Fifteen Years Later
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Fifteen Years Later
• PART I: THE PUZZLE AND THE TOOLS
• PART II: EXPLAINING TEENS’ BEHAVIOR
• PART III: WHY SCHOOLS VARY
• PART IV: TEEN STATUS SYSTEMS AND CONSUMERISM
• PART V: FIFTEEN YEARS LATER
• APPENDICES
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index