The Transition Of Youth To Adulthood: A Bridge Too Long

A Report To Educators, Sociologists, Legislators, And Youth Policymaking Bodies

B. Frank Brown, B Frank Brown, On Youth National Commission

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367296704
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000306491
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book focuses on the creation of new educational environment for youth; youth employment; crime and the juvenile system; health system; trends in health policy in the United states and other western democracies; and new environment for the transition of youth to adulthood.

Part 1
Transition of Youth

1
Youth in Transition

Recommendation 1: Designing New Environments for Youth. High schools should become action-rich institutions. To achieve this objective, schools must develop heretofore neglected relationships with community-based institutions. High schools can no longer function as the pervasive or exclusive environment for the transition of youth to adulthood.

The transition periods in human development are receiving increasing attention. We are avidly taking our own pulses and sorting out the tangible and intangible factors that influence our directions. Through various creative approaches, we are attempting to ease on down the road.

The transition from youth to adulthood has never been easy. (For purposes of this report, youth are defined as persons between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one. However, it is imperative to recognize that this is not a homogeneous group in which all face similar problems, have similar needs, and require similar program intervention. Instead, the group encompasses a wide latitude of needs, interests, and behaviors.) Contemporary youth move in a society far different from that of their peers several centuries ago. The pace of learning is quicker. Sexual maturity arrives earlier. And yet, through a combination of many factors, youth are held back and shielded from the adult world. The bridge of time between youth and adulthood has become a bridge too long.

The transition of youth to adulthood is difficult even in the best of times. But this is the worst of times for significant numbers of American youth. Many of the traditional institutions that assist youth to adulthood are changing, crumbling, and even collapsing. The decline of the family unit is well documented. Beleaguered school systems are attacked from all sides-by students, parents, and employers-for their failure to teach marketable skills to the young. Governmental bodies on all levels remain largely unresponsive to the serious plight of youth.

In this report the National Commission on Youth hopes to generate widespread discussion and debate on a variety of topics, many controversial in nature, for the purpose of shortening the transition to adulthood for American youth. The recommendations in the report are the products of intensive scrutiny and prolonged debate over matters characterized by complexity and turbulence (Appendix A). Some of the Commission's recommendations are controversial. But controversy is the cutting edge of progress.

The times may seem singularly inappropriate for the announcement of far-reaching recommendations involving fundamental changes in institutional forms and practices. Admittedly, the nation is in a period of conservatism.

And today's educational credos-"back to basics" and "competency-based" education-are important aspects of education. Basic literacy is the essential ingredient in the solution for most youth transition problems and achieving it may be one of our more difficult problems. The fundamentally serious problems of maintaining learning motivation and achievement standards are bound up with reading, writing, and computation abilities (including a new need for computer literacy), and these problems, which are not being solved very well, may account more than anything else for what we call youth maturity problems. Yet, these two credos are inadequate solutions. The need for more aggressive action is almost a moral imperative. Injustice to the nation's greatest resource for the future-our youth-the Commission presents these recommendations.

Because the goal of the Commission is to design wholly new contexts for the transition of youth to adulthood, it must necessarily call to action all segments of the nation. The recommendations are obviously too ambitious to be accomplished exclusively through the actions of any single sector or institution. Collective effort is required. Joint responsibility must be shared by both private and public sectors, encompassing federal, state, and local levels.

Every generation of adults tries to share the benefits of its hard-won wisdom with the young. Although the incremental wisdom of the past, by itself, never suffices to solve present problems, we do benefit from the past. We must utilize our expertise so that in the future the transition time is shorter. The future is now.

Some youth find the future is never. For them, America has become a nation turned upside down. Society has cast them into a state of limbo. There they are held in a stage of dependency on adults and are increasingly denied opportunities for productive labor. Ironically, they are blocked from attaining responsibility by the policies of the very institutions that are supposed to shape their lives for the better.

What is the cost of this malaise to young people? For many, it means a socioeconomic death at an early age, and once the will to strive and attain has been destroyed, it is death in a spiritual sense as well.

Unemployment is rapidly becoming a way of life for many of the young.¹ About half of the unemployed in America are between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four, a disproportionate fraction of these being black or of other minority origins. Of this group, many have never had a job and have given up hope of ever finding one. Many have completed school without education, training, or practical know-how; they cannot compete successfully in the arena of life.

Other youth have the capabilities to make a significant contribution to society but are so "turned off" by the system that they have dropped out. The escape mechanisms they resort to in order to assuage their feelings of frustration have become a national tragedy. Drugs and alcohol have become a quick and easy fix to a fleeting moment of euphoria. Widespread use of such intoxicants in turn engenders delinquency and crime that exacerbate the problems of youth.

Another group of youth languishes in jails and similar types of incarcerating institutions. Many of these young people are simply unprepared for the transition to adulthood. An overwhelming percentage of them are illiterate. Violent and illegal acts are their way of gaining a measure of revenge against the system that imprisons them. Even at a relatively young age many have given up on America.

The frustration is even greater for a final group. It is estimated that one million youth run away from home each year. But action of this magnitude is overshadowed when juxtaposed with a final sobering statistic. Suicide is now the second leading cause of death for youth between ages fifteen and twenty-four. Regretfully, self-destruction has become an option exercised by increasing numbers of the young.

But statistics cannot adequately describe the long-range damage to the spiritual fabric of America when a substantial part of the population has no hope for a productive role in life.

What kind of society are we? On one hand, we worship youthfulness in our culture, raising it to cult status. But, on the other hand, we have, at this point in history, become impatient with our young.² Youth has become the siren-goddess of American society, simultaneously enthralling and tormenting us. For far too many of the young the only role they can envision is to fill the cracks and niches that remain open to them-constructive critic, hedonistic consumer, languid student, embittered victim, and degenerative dropout. Why complain?

The restiveness that characterized American youth of the sixties has all but vanished. As youth have turned inward, it has become a truism for adult America that this bodes well for the nation's future. But does it? Is this turning inward a harbinger of a more ominous trend? Is it not, in fact, confirmation of a shift in youth attitudes from a state of alienation and hostility to a state of hopelessness and despair toward the institutions-the family, the school, the marketplace, the government-that so intimately affect their lives?

How did we get where we are? A backward glance may give us some perspective.

Historical Evolution of the Transition to Adulthood

The continued vitality of a society depends on the degree of success it has in transforming its youth into productive adults. Societies develop institutions to assist in this socialization process. The Presidential Science Advisory Committee's report, entitled Youth: Transition to Adulthood, identified two distinct evolutionary periods in our history: "a work phase followed by a schooling phase."³

The initial work phase was based primarily on economic considerations. Young people were rushed into work roles as soon as they achieved a physical maturity commensurate to the job they were expected to perform. In this early period of American history, the economic productivity of the young was crucial, indeed imperative, to the financial well-being of the family. The dominant institutional influences on the young were the home and the workplace. No sharp lines of demarcation existed between the two. Socialization of the young during this period was a relatively simple process. Youth merely had to emulate the actions of parents.

As America transformed itself from an agrarian to an industrialized society, a whole new array of occupations was created. Many of these jobs were quite different from the occupations that existed in home workshops. At this point, the socialization process of youth to adulthood was characterized by a new phase - an extended schooling phase-designed to produce increased economic opportunity for the young. Direct access to economic productivity was now postponed for the young in the name of increased economic opportunity. Compulsory formal schooling, emphasizing cognitive learning skills, was viewed as a sine qua non for successful performance in the adult world of work. Institutional primacy for the school was ensured through the passage of a series of child labor laws and minimum wage standards. As a consequence, the school replaced the home and the workplace as the dominant socializing force in the lives of maturing youth.

Along with the rising importance of the school, there was a marked tendency in American society to grade and segregate the young by age. This tendency manifested itself in the classification and promotional practices of the school. Age became the major criterion for placement in grade levels. The promotional practices of the school quickly perpetuated the system from the primary grades through the secondary level. The social environment of maturing youth was now monopolized on a formal level by the school and informally by the age group.⁴ The home, the church, and the community had been eclipsed as the major socializing forces on the young.

Fragmentization of the Transitional Process

The emergence of the school as the dominant institutional force in the lives of youth led to a diminution of the home, the church, and the community as settings where youth learned about the transition to adulthood. American society is now characterized by what Kurt Lewin calls "systems in abscission," that is, the various institutions function as isolated entities, cut off from each other. Present societal development is characterized by the progressive fragmentation and isolation of the socializing institutions. A tart observation of Commission member Urie Bronfenbrenner says it best: "We're all in disconnected pieces."⁵

The problems of youth are not rooted solely in the home, the school, or the workplace; they are rooted instead in the external society, which has undermined the capacity of these institutions to operate in optimum fashion. The real secret to successful change lies in focusing our efforts on the connections between these institutions. By severing these interconnections, we have isolated the institutions from each other. But it is precisely these interconnections that count most. Youth have become a kind of "lumpen proletariat," says Commissioner James Coleman, "separated from any institutional base."⁶ Increased numbers of youth fall between the cracks in the institutional framework.

The Protection of Youth

In The Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes portrayed his world as nasty, mean, and brutish. The exploitation of the young in these circumstances was particularly acute. However, the civilizing influences of education, resulting in the passage of enlightened social legislation, have enabled Western civilization to shed a good deal of its Hobbesian flavor. Life need not be all sound and fury or, in Thoreau's term, "quiet desperation." Institutions were developed to protect the young. A condition of full parental authority was transformed gradually to one characterized by shared authority between parents and institutional agents, such as the school.⁷

In their zeal to protect youth from the vicissitudes of life, adults have unwittingly and ironically created a "Catch 22" system. Protection has come to mean isolation Youth are now isolated, restrained, and eventually victimized by the very institutions designed for their protection.⁸ Continued protection for youth remains a necessity. This goal should not be accomplished, however, by isolating youth from the real world.

The schools, as presently constituted, are useful illustrations of this phenomenon. As mentioned above, in this setting children are isolated from each other by grade levels on the basis of age rather than by levels of competencies. Promotional policies institutionalize this isolation. Further isolation occurs when the young are segregated (again on the basis of age) into primary, middle, and secondary divisions. As a consequence of this lack of interaction between the old and the young, there is little "trickle-down" learning.⁹

To fill this need for connections in the lives of youth, incidental and spontaneous structures of socialization such as books, films, and the media-especially television - develop in and around the formally constituted institutions.¹⁰ As formal institutions inhibit and negate the purposes for which they were created, these incidental and spontaneous structures take on new importance. Ultimately they become no less important than the formal institutions themselves. The end result is that the civilizing process grows exceedingly complex for the young.

The implications of this trend are sobering and deserve careful analysis. A host of vexing questions must be considered: What are the environments in which youth can best gr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Recommendations for Improving the Transition of Youth to Adulthood
• Part 1 Transition of Youth
• Part 2 Needs of Youth
• Part 3 Assessing Youth Policy
• Part 4 Evolving Youth Policy
• Appendix A: Schedule of Testimony
• Appendix B: Survey of Youth Policy in the States and Territories
• Index