Surveying Youth Culture
Fyvel, T.R.
Surveying Youth Culture THE ADOLESCENT SOCIETY By James S. Coleman Free Press. 368 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by T. R. FYVEL Contributor, "Spectator," "Encounter"; author, "The Insecure...
...high school scene would make plain...
...But at this point, alas, the book ends...
...2. The shock of the first Soviet sputnik in 1957 arroused U.S...
...5. This is because American high school adolescents live very much in an autonomous society and take their values from one another...
...3. There has already been considerable response to this challenge at the college level...
...But these are details...
...A discussion of the ways in which American high school life and education are to be reformed would have interested me a good deal...
...They obtained answers to such questions as the value students place upon "being in with the leading crowd," the extent of the prestige accorded athletic stars, the degree to which scholastic achievement is esteemed, and how much such achievement is overshadowed by the desire to be "popular...
...To so structure" seems to me a mere questionbegging phrase...
...educators...
...First, since I consider myself reasonably well educated and yet found Coleman's technical terms and designs' so time-consuming to decipher, I conclude that there must be something wrong with his method...
...After reading Coleman's book, I felt that this was also his strong opinion...
...A commercialized youth culture resulted...
...I am left with strong doubts about Coleman's sociological ingenuity...
...It is up to the adult society to so structure secondary education that it captures this energy...
...The positive danger, it seems to me, is that such preoccupation with problems already wellknown gets in the way of the surely more important question: What is to be done about them...
...Professor Coleman is, of course, a savant of distinction and, in between such phrases as "structures of association and their relations to value systems" (which are not at all difficult to translate into plain English), he writes very clearly...
...Of course, Coleman might maintain that it was not his task to go further...
...What was Coleman looking for that he did not already know...
...Second, I was always conscious that these tables were based on questions put to a lot of kids by fallible researchers...
...What worries me, however, is why it was necessary to embark on such an elaborate statistical investigation in order to reach conclusions which a mere glance at the U.S...
...author, "The Insecure Offenders" Reading a book so intelligently written and yet so inconclusive as James S. Coleman's makes me wonder again where American sociology is heading...
...And after all this...
...is not to slip behind in the present international rat-race...
...I have long believed American high school life is too slack in its educational standards and pushed too far in the direction of hedonism by advertisers...
...Precisely...
...But how is this to be done while advertising within the affluent American society is running at the rate of $12 billion each year, and a particularly deafening barrage is concentrated without pause upon the teen-age market...
...I say this not only because the evident negative danger of the new sociology is that it discovers the known and points to the salient...
...I have a feeling that rivalry from European Common Market countries in the near future will produce a similar shock...
...Their parents and teachers have only a limited influence...
...Coleman's findings from his elaborate questionnaires are displayed in even more abstruse graphs and figures...
...opinion to the need for achieving higher educational standards...
...4. High schools have not yet adapted to this change in the colleges by raising their educational sights...
...But, to conclude with a minor "anti-sociologist" point, if he had translated his phrase "to so structure" into plain English, he would surely have been forced to arrive at a more precise statement of the problems to be faced by U.S...
...He and his collaborators have studied at great length a number of American high schools and classified the ideas of their respective pupils...
...Now it would be hard to disagree with these points in Coleman's study, and he often illustrates them convincingly...
...Indeed, if I have not misunderstood the author, he makes the following sensible points: 1. Some time ago, the broad picture of American education changed from that of a pioneer society to a nouveau-riche society with a nouveau-riche over-emphasis on money values...
...high school society, that its values are massively distorted by an enormous advertising industry, and that clearer educational values for adolescents must be established if the U.S...
...6. Every adolescent society is to some extent autonomous, but the society of American high school students is especially so...
...Coleman cites, for example, the transformation of Harvard from a leisurely gentleman's college into a center of intensive learning...
...It is distorted by the enormous influence of commercial youth-culture advertisers whose voices drown those of parents and teachers...
...Here is his conclusion: "The adolescent is no longer a child, but will spend his energy as he sees fit...
...My main objection is a nagging suspicion as to the rationality of the whole enterprise...
...I do not believe he was unaware that there is a good deal wrong with U.S...
...How is it possible that the results were so precise...
Vol. 44 • December 1961 • No. 39
