Teen 2.0

Saving Our Children and Families from the Torment of Adolescence

Robert Epstein

• Publisher: Quill Driver Books
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781610351010
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

National Indie Excellence Awards, first prize in the Parenting and Family category Arguing that adolescence is an unnecessary period of life that people are better off without, this groundbreaking study shows that teen confusion and hardships are caused by outmoded systems that were designed to destroy the continuum between childhood and adulthood. Documenting how teens are isolated from adults and are forced to look to their media-dominated peers for knowledge, this discussion contends that by infantilizing young people, society does irrevocable harm to their development and well-being. Instead, parents, teachers, employers, and others must rediscover the adults in young people by giving them authority and responsibility as soon as they exhibit readiness. Teens are highly capable--in some ways more than adults--and this landmark discussion offers paths for reaching and enhancing the competence in America's youth.

Part 1

The Case Against the
Artificial Extension of
Childhood

Chapter 1

The Chaos and the Cause

His thoughts are whacked, he’s mad so he’s talkin’ back, talkin’ black,

brainwashed from rock and rap. He sags his pants, do-rags and stocking cap,

his step-father hit him, so he socked him back.

—Eminem, “Sing for the Moment”

Overview. American teens have long been in chaos, suffering high rates of depression, suicide, crime, substance abuse, pregnancy and other serious problems. Until about a century ago, however, the teenage years were relatively benign, and adolescence as we know it barely existed. Through most of human history, young people were integrated into adult society early on, but beginning in the late 1800s, new laws and cultural practices began to isolate teens from adults, imposing on them an increasingly large set of restrictions and artificially extending childhood well past puberty. New research suggests that teens today are subjected to more than ten times as many restrictions as are most adults, and adulthood is delayed until well into the twenties or thirties. It’s likely that the turmoil we see among teens is an unintended result of the artificial extension of childhood.

In the late 1990s, Americans had a gruesome wake-up call: eight schoolyard shooting sprees took place in less than a year, resulting in seventeen dead and thirty wounded. Although no longer drawing major headlines, the shootings have continued, with more than 350 dead over the past fifteen years, even though carrying a dull kitchen knife to school is now often grounds for expulsion.¹ Here are other disturbing facts about America’s teens:

• Suicide is the third leading cause of death among teens, after homicides and accidents. Medicating our teens in recent years has reduced the suicide rate, but it is still nearly three times what it was in the 1950s. When we medicate less, the suicide rate increases again.²
• We’re now spending more money on psychoactive prescription drugs for teens than on all other prescription drugs combined, including acne medication and antibiotics.³
• In 2007, 38.9 percent of our teens received treatment for a major depressive episode.⁴
• Although illegal drug use by teens has declined for some drugs, it has increased dramatically for others, especially the illegal use of prescription drugs.⁵
• For most crimes, the peak age of arrest in the United States is eighteen for both whites and minorities. For some crimes, such as arson, the peak comes much earlier.⁶
• We’re now seeing a substantial increase in crimes committed by young females, especially violent crimes. Teen females also now equal or exceed teen males in alcohol consumption, drug abuse and smoking.⁷
• The birth rate among teens in the United States had been declining but is now increasing again and is by far the highest in the industrialized world.⁸
• One in four teen females in the U.S. now has a sexually transmitted disease.⁹
• Teens lucky enough to have a father at home spend less than half an hour per week with dad, fifteen minutes of which is spent watching television.¹⁰
• Only one in four high school seniors is now minimally competent in math and one in three competent in reading. Nearly a third of our young people never even graduate from high school, and for blacks and Hispanics, the proportion is closer to one-half.¹¹

In more than a hundred cultures around the world, teens have no such difficulties—no depression, no suicide, no crime, no drug use, no conflict with parents. Many cultures don’t even have a word for the period of life we call adolescence. Why are American teens in such turmoil?

There are the obvious reasons: the easy availability of drugs and guns in the United States, fatherless homes and the abandonment of traditional values, rap music that extols violence, guts exploding on video games, and the fact that more young females are getting involved with gangs. But there’s another factor—a more subtle one—that’s rarely examined. It’s a factor that might help us both to understand and to remedy the plight of our teens. For the first time in human history, we have artificially extended childhood well past puberty. Simply stated, we are not letting our young people grow up. By holding back our young, we have created a new disorder: Extended Childhood Disorder, characterized by feelings of hopelessness, anger, and a lack of control over one’s life.

Through most of human history, our ancestors had children shortly after puberty, just as the members of all nonhuman species do to this day. Whether we like the idea or not, our young ancestors must have been capable of providing for their offspring, defending their families from predators, cooperating with others, and in most other respects functioning fully as adults. If they couldn’t function as adults, their young could not have survived, which would have meant the swift demise of the human race. The fact that we’re still here suggests that most young people are probably far more capable than we think they are. Somewhere along the line, we lost sight of—and buried—the potential of our teens. When and why did this happen, and what were the consequences?

DRAMATICALLY DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES ON TEENS

Paul Koretz is a man with a mission. A Democratic assemblyman from Hollywood, he sponsored a bill in the California state legislature not long ago to raise the legal smoking age from eighteen to twenty-one. At the same time that a legislative committee was considering the bill, tens of thousands of American eighteen-year-olds were carrying heavy weapons and putting themselves in the line of fire in Iraq. Under the circumstances, some committee members thought it seemed hypocritical of them to think about denying eighteen, nineteen and twenty-year-olds the right to risk damaging their health by smoking.

The committee stalled the legislation, but, spurred by California’s powerful medical lobby, legislators had considered similar legislation before, and they’ll probably consider the same bill again in the future.¹² Meanwhile, eighteen is still the cutoff age for smoking in California and many other states, presumably because a millisecond past midnight on the day we turn eighteen, we make a quantum leap in our ability to make sound judgments about the merits and demerits of smoking.

But do all eighteen-year-olds really exercise better judgment than all seventeen-year-olds? Do such legal prohibitions actually work? Do they have any negative consequences? And were seventeen-year-olds (not to mention five-year-olds and ten-year-olds) always prohibited from smoking?

YOUNG PEOPLE IN ACTION

Sixteen-Year-Old “Children”

Two San Diego high school teachers were recently placed on paid leave for showing their sixteen-year-old students the infamous videotape of the beheading of American Nick Berg by Muslim extremists. Parents complained that the school should have asked for their permission before showing their “impressionable children” this disturbing tape. Some students defended the teachers, saying that the material was “relevant to learning about war.” But school superintendent Terry Ryan said that teachers don’t have “academic freedom to cause unfettered emotional and psychological damage to children.” Teachers have been ordered not to show the tape, and the school district has adjusted its Internet filters “to block Berg’s name and the words ‘beheading’ and ‘beheaded.’” California’s Education Code prohibits the teaching of “harmful matter without redeeming social importance.” Teaching teens—only a year or two away from the age of military service—about the brutality of terrorism serves no such purpose, according to school officials.¹³

Schoolyard Scuffle

A few years ago, when Edward Brand was superintendent of the Sweetwater Union High School District (located in San Diego County, serving about thirty-three thousand students in grades seven to twelve), he published a provocative essay proposing a simple way of improving secondary education in America.¹⁴

Brand aptly noted that it’s difficult to teach everything one needs to know about the modern world in just twelve years of schooling. That might have worked a hundred years ago, he said, but the world was largely agrarian back then. Some have said that the solution is to extend the school day, or at least to extend the school year, but that, Brand said, won’t work. “[These] approaches raise the danger of learning burnout: many students are easily overloaded by too much information for too long.”

He didn’t address the fact that our education system actually teaches many students very little—that twelve years of schooling in American schools (thirteen, with kindergarten) leaves many students unable to read or perform long division. According to a recent report, 46 percent of incoming freshman at California State University had to enroll in remedial English and 37 percent in remedial math.¹⁵ Nationwide, only about 22 percent of high school graduates are considered qualified to take many basic college courses, and performance levels have been flat for at least the last decade.¹⁶

Brand also failed to note that most of our high school students think school is a waste of time.¹⁷ These omissions aside, he certainly identified a legitimate problem.

His proposal was to add not just “a few more minutes to the school day or a few more days each year” but to extend secondary school “by years’—specifically, to add grades thirteen and fourteen to the school curriculum:

Imagine what students could achieve in that time. From mastering a foreign language, to getting another year of science and English under their belts, students would have greater opportunities to develop the foundation of knowledge requisite for the new millennium…. Learning from a place of maturity would be another benefit. At age eighteen and nineteen, students are more likely to take their studies more seriously.¹⁸

More recently, Arne Duncan, President Obama’s Education Secretary, called for drastically lengthening both the school day and the school year, and Reg Weaver, former president of the National Education Association, suggested extending the mandatory school age to twenty-one.¹⁹

Contrast the proposals of Brand, Duncan and Weaver with the dark and disturbing views of another prominent educator, John Taylor Gatto. An extraordinary jack-of-all-trades, Gatto earned his main living as a teacher in the New York City school system, where he taught for more than thirty years. He was named New York City Teacher of the Year three times, in 1989, 1990 and 1991, and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1990 and 1991.²⁰ That year, announcing his intentions in an Op Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal,²¹ he quit being a teacher, saying he could no longer stand “hurting” our young.

Gatto pulled no punches, insisting among other things that:

Government schooling…kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and teaching disrespect for home and parents….

David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: …when both are 13, you can’t tell which one learned first…. But in school I label Rachel “learning disabled” and slow David down a bit, too. For a paycheck, I adjust David to depend on me to tell him when to go and when to stop. He won’t outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, “special education” fodder. She’ll be locked in her place forever….

I can’t teach this way any longer. If you hear of a job where I don’t have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know.

Following the publication of this bombshell and Gatto’s subsequent resignation, he was invited to give hundreds of talks worldwide in which “hungry” audiences reveled in the truth he seemed to be revealing.²² He also published several provocative books proposing radical changes in the education system—all of which has led to exactly nothing. Our schools, caught in a tangled web of unions, politicians and regulations, are a tough nut to crack. Even when it looks like change is coming, it often turns out to be illusory. As Yale educator Seymour Sarason said in his classic text, Culture of the School and the Problem of Change, when it comes to the American education system, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” (“The more things change, the more they stay the same”).²³

YOUNG PEOPL...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword by Albert Ellis
• Acknowledgments
• Preface to the New Edition
• A Note to the Reader
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Case against the Artificial Extension of Childhood
• Part 2: The Capabilities of Young People
• Part 3: How We Must Change
• Appendix 1: How Adult Are You?
• Appendix 2: Adult and Teen Competency Scores on the Edta
• Appendix 3: A Debate about Teen Crime
• Appendix 4: Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle on Teens
• Appendix 5: Brief Timeline of Teen Restrictions in the United States
• Appendix 6: Resources on Teen Rights
• Appendix 7: Finding the Inner Adult in Your Teen
• Appendix 8: The Young Person’s Bill of Rights
• Notes
• Readings
• Index
• About the Author