Inventing Adolescence

...He was one of the very few to say so then . He is still one of the very few withi n his discipline to apply the insights o f psychology to the political and social world in ways that are enriching rathe r than reductive...

...It is sobering to be reminded of the extent of the corruption of the educational process over these two decade s at the hands of those who should hav e been its preservers and protectors, bu t cheering to view the ruins in the company of one who not only knows wher e the bombs fell but has some suggestions about how we might go about rebuilding now that the war appears t o be over...

...Adelson is unusual among socia l scientists and members of the therapeutic professions in believing that knowledge of the classics an d languages and political theory makes up an important part of what it is t o be educated, and that courses in selfimprovement, family harmony, and th e various watered-down social science s are no substitute for the study o f history, philosophy, and literature in dealing with the moral questions that education must help us frame correctly before we can answer them . Unlike those who have seen the schools as instruments of a secular brand of salvation and thus corrupte d them, he knows that "authoritarian means, however well meant, will not achieve democratic ends . " He asks that we return to what Jefferson and Lincoln meant by equality—equality o f opportunity for the individual, no t group entitlements—and that we rescu e the university from "the sorrowful legacy of the sixties," the attitude tha t has placed research and theory at th e service of political aims, and return t o a more disinterested and less tendentious kind of scholarship...

...Department of Education...

...Like all academic press publications, it isn't easy to find . You won't see stacks of it beside th e cash register at your local B. Dalton . Find a local bookstore and order it . Your bookseller will be encouraged to know that it's still the thought that counts . q 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1986...

...One of them was Joseph Adelson, and rereading th e pleas for sanity, the reminders of reality, and the exhortations to common sense which he has published over th e past twenty years in such periodicals as Commentary, Daedalus, and the Public Interest and in various collections o f scientific articles, is both depressin g and exhilarating...

...What Adelson calls the "traditional strategies of coping," characteristic even then of mos t adolescents-'consumed neither by grievances nor by moral passion'=have been ignored by pop sociology as the y have been by the academics and clinicians whose ideas filter down to TV talk shows...

...He avoids metapsychological abstractions as well as the opposite extreme of using only that which can be quantified to represent the com - plexity of human behavior...

...In "The Political Imagination of the Young Adolescent," Adelson remind s us of what every rigorous study has shown—that emotional turmoil and in - tergenerational strife are not inevitabl e parts of growing up but characteristic s of those special populations that theorists are most familiar with—thei r patients, their students, their ow n children . "The inclination to utopia i s a matter of class and social position, " he tells us, "not fundamentally a youth phenomenon...

...INVENTING ADOLESCENCE : THE POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY SCHOOLING Joseph Adelson/Transaction Books/$29 .9 5 Rita Kramer In the Dark Ages that were known a s the sixties, a few monklike individual s kept learning alive, upholding standards, resisting destructive trends, and preserving the common cultural memory for the young...

...Those teenagers who are deeply involved in political talk and political activity are not usually in rebellio n against their parents but closely identified with them...

...Still, let's be grateful for what it does have—useful ideas gracefully expressed...

...Like James, his understanding of th e sciences is informed by his appreciatio n of the humanities . He too is, in Isaiah Berlin's formulation, more of a fox— one who knows about and can discus s many things—than a hedgehog, wh o knows only one thing...

...What h e has to tell us about how the themes of guilt, dependency, envy, and power emerge from an interaction betwee n values in the child's milieu and certai n dispositions in his personality make s theory come alive and gives meaning to statistical studies . Perhaps that i s because he is a humanist, one wh o reads and remembers the literature an d honors the intellectual traditions of the past, in addition to being a clinicia n and a social scientist . It is this humanism that informs Adelson's views on schooling . Just as he never fell for the idea that th e generation gap was a given, he never fell into the liberal lockstep that mad e numerical equality the prime good an d quotas an acceptable means of attaining fixed group representations . He resisted the fashionable view of revisionist educators that the student was to be liberated from schooling and from teachers, and he knows the kind s of questions to ask : Why did we believe that schools incapable of teaching correct spelling would nevertheless be able to convey the highest degree of moral, psychological, and social insight ? Why were we unable to perceive and reflect upon the uncertain relationship between schooling and later achievement—why it i s that a James Joyce could be delivered ou t of the most rigid Jesuitical circumstances , whereas a hundred Summerhills have yet to deliver a James Joyce...

...In short, the generation gap, like th e presence of acute emotional distress i n the ordinary adolescent, is a myth, a collective illusion shared by much o f the public, the media, and many if not most social scientists and therapists . Many would now agree that the image of the young as victims and visionaries, an oppressed group of revolutionar y heroes, that was dominant in the sixties made, as Adelson reminds us, for "bad art, bad history, and bad social science...

...As both a professor and practitioner Rita Kramer is the author of In Defens e of the Family and a member of th e Elementary Education Study Group of the US...

...We need more foxes like Adelson as we go about the task of repairing the damage done in classrooms by the hedgehogs focused on narrowly defined political aims and social attitudes . One wishes Inventing Adolescence had a more attractive format and mor e careful editing . Like most collections of this kind, it suffers from a certain degree of repetitiousness in the contents of various pieces . And it cries for an index...

...of psychology, Adelson has observed , studied, and treated the young, and in the pieces collected in Inventing Adolescence he has focused on two interrelated questions : what the adolescent is like and how the adolescen t should be educated . In the answers t o both of these questions he distinguishe s himself from his many colleagues— teachers and therapists alike—who were so quick to embrace the youth culture and its values in the process o f doing what Adelson calls "inventin g the young...

...Like the antiwar demonstrators of the sixties, youngster s of the eighties who say they are preoc - cupied with the threat of nuclear war come from families that are politically active and take both their direction and their intensity from their parents . Radical campus activists usually proved to be the children of parents with radical sympathies, raised in a way that valued expression over inner restraint, encouraged challenging authority over conformity...

...In the end, we can say of Adelson what he says of William James in a n essay on The Principles of Psychology, "Still Vital After All These Years...