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1. Five Adolescents
WHEN I VISIT schools, I usually ask for a tour of the building and grounds, with a student as my guide. Often my request is granted. Sometimes one learns more about the guides than about the school plant, and one always finds out that the students are more complicated and interesting than even the most elaborate structures. Many of these young people are substantial individuals, Very Grown-Up, as unwittingly patronizing adults would say.
Two students, both seniors and elected officers, show up for my tour in a high school of a wealthy Midwestern suburb. Letâs call them Janet and Will. Janet could have walked out of Seventeen. Pink oxford shirt, blazer, pleated skirt, loafers, hair combed and barretted: she is tall and pretty, and exudes assurance. She had been told the day before that she was to be tour guide for the visitor. Will is almost as preppy, chinos and all, but superficially less assured. His handshake has reserve in it, and he avoids looking me in the eye.
The school buildings are predictable, airplane-hangar-modern, set among lawns and asphalt parking lots, with the usual long halls flanked by built-in lockers and with classrooms on each side. Few students are in the passageways during classes, and all those we see make sure silently with body language that we know they have permission to be out of class. They move past us quickly, with purposeful steps and eyes straightforward.
Do my guides like their school? Oh, yes. All the students are happy. What makes this high school special? The people. Theyâre friendly and get along. Do you mean kids donât get along in other high schools in town? No . . . but of course Iâve never been to Jefferson across town; thatâs a cliquish place. Everyoneâs friendly here. There are no cliques here? No. I protest: I donât believe it; surely the jocks are a recognizable clique, and the cheerleaders. (Laughter.) Oh, yes. (The boy speaking.) The athletes are a group. The smokers, too. The freaks. The brains. What about the preps? (More laughter, this time nervous.)
Why do you go to school? The question is unexpected; both are puzzled. The boy: To get into college. The girl agrees. We talk of their college hopes; each wants to enter a four-year college. Is there any other reason for going to school? Ultimately I pull what answers there are. To learn things. To have fun. Most of all, thatâs what kids our age do. What would we do if we didnât go to school?
The school has an open-campus policy, and students with free periods can go to the cafeteria, get a snack, gossip, study, or do all of these. My guides say theyâve heard that the cafeteria was wild in the early 1970s, with too much noise, litter, unpleasantness. Today, at least, the litter is still there, lying under the tables beside the rows of twitching Adidas, but the atmosphere is friendly-noisy, not challenging-noisy.
Janet is transformed as we enter the cafeteria. Hi, Jack. Hi, Susan. Will and I are quickly forgotten as she works the crowd, not so much politically pressing the flesh as orchestrating the giggle. Sheâs pretty, and the boys look up, but it is the girls she talks with, even as she knows the guys watch her. Her face works constantly, and she swishes her hair, coveting sophistication.
Will stays with me, embarrassed. I am no less embarrassed. Are we supposed to follow our female leader through the room, are we to stand aside, or should we carry on our tour without her? I ask him solemn questions, about graduation requirements and the like. He gives me answers, presumably as accurate as he is diffident, but they are as forgettable as the questions themselves. When the awkwardness is too painful, I ask to see the gym. The two of us leave. Physical education classes are being held in the wide hallways, because it is raining outside. Ping-Pong, mostly desultory, proceeds. The gym is a basketball court, dividable in a number of ways. It is airy but has the familiar tang of dirty socks.
The school is largely on one level, with the principal academic departments occupying portions of each of several wings. As one wanders the corridors, it is easy to eavesdrop, and I and my guide peer into open classroom doors. Some rooms are quiet, with students writing or reading; in others the teacher is talking. Order prevails. Sometimes we hear a roomful of kids chattering among themselves. Such a class is not out of control, however; the gossiping may be nonacademic, but it circumscribes itself carefully. No sound of anger or fear or exaltation or clashing or disagreement or astonishment is heard. The tone is warm, happy without exuberance. If classroom sounds were colors, those in this school would be pastels.
I ask, Do you have a job after school? Yes, I work on lawns. Summer, too. Do most of your friends work? Yes, but itâs tough in season. (Athletic teams practice after school.) For what do you use the money you earn? I save it for college. Really? Youâll pay your own tuition? Oh, no, my parents will do that. But Iâve got to pay for my car. You own a car now? Yes. And the money you earn now pays for it? Yes.
We talk of student government. The girls hold most of the offices, and I ask why. He shrugs, claiming not to be able to explain. They always do, he says. I learn later from other students that girls hold offices because the offices are not perceived to be a very big deal. I am not sure what to make of that. What do the student officers do? We meet with the assistant principal. We appoint committees and coordinate the money-raising activities of clubs. We help school spirit. Whatâs school spirit? He pauses over that question, since he is both very sure and not at all sure what it is. School spirit is yelling at football games against Jefferson High. Is school spirit the litter in the cafeteria too? He is uncomfortable now and says he has never thought about it that way before.
Are you eighteen yet? Yes. Did you register for the draft? Yes. Did all the guys register? Yes; itâs the law, isnât it? Did any of the girls register? Perplexity. He is embarrassed, but more for me than for him. Girls donât have to register, you know. Yes, I know, but is that fair? Should you have to give up two years of your life and get shot at while the girls get ahead of you at law school? Yes, no. Itâs fair; fighting is manâs business. Itâs unfair; weâre all citizens. Couldnât some of your top female athletes fly bombers as adroitly as guys? Sure they could. Even better than some of the male âspazzesâ in school? Yes, of course. But you say they shouldnât! No, women shouldnât have to fight. They have to be home with the children. Come on, men can raise children! Intense embarrassment. But they donât raise the children. And I wouldnât want to have a girl in a foxhole with me.
We agree that the topic is a complicated one. Did it come up in school when registration was first required by the federal government? No. Did any of the guys decide not to register? No, but some of them may have forgotten to. Did any teacher raise the issue, perhaps in social studies classes? No. Why so little talk of registration, a tough topic that clearly affects you? I donât know, but Iâve got to make my own decisions . . . We donât talk about things like that. What do you talk about? Oh, things. The pressure is beginning to show, and I ease off. His eyes still do not look at me, but the rest of him does.
Janet rejoins us. We discover her in a corridor, during a break between classes, talking to a boy painfully acned, a dermatologistâs disaster. He is shorter than she, or at least appears so. As she talks with him her face is as tender as his eyes are adoring. Will says these two are âgoing out.â She falls into step without embarrassment, and the two deliver me back to the principalâs office. We four chat together, briefly, in his doorway. The talk is easy, assured, full of respect and good will on all sides. I thank the two students, and they depart. The principal says, Theyâre nice kids. I agree.
It was different in an urban school district. I was there visiting a large, well-respected high school, the academic flagship of the system. The drab, boxy building was really a congeries of structures, additions made as the needs of the district expanded. It was set on a small park at the edge of the city; the trees round about were lush, softening the tatty look of the man-made constructions.
My request for a student-guided tour had been overlooked by the principal. We spent too long talking in his office, and it was midmorning before I was able to visit the biology and social studies classes that I had come to see. At luncheon, I pressed him once again about a tour, but it was not until the sixth period that he seriously set about providing for it. Where, though, was a student then to be found? He motioned me into the office of one of the assistant principals. Can you find Mr. Sizer a student to show him around the school? Of course; Pamela here can be the guide. The principal winced. Pamela, sulking in the corner, had been sent to sit in this office for lipping off to her typing teacher. The assistant principal, an assured, experienced woman, made it very clear to her boss that Pamela would do this. While his reluctance was painfully visible to us all, including Pamela, he agreed. Pamela, youâll give the very best tour ever given at Washington High School. Now Pamela winced. So did the assistant principal.
We shook hands. Hers was limp. Her distaste for this exercise was as bold as her principalâs distaste for her conducting it. She was sixteen, an eleventh-grader. She was slight, Twiggy-skinny, but without the pallor of a true anorexic. She wore faded jeans, sneakers, a loose, embroidered, almost sacklike shirt. A twisted, soiled headband cinched her forehead. Attached to it, and spilling down her upper back, was a tassel of large feathers. We eyed each other; my coat and tie and tie clip and pocket watch and green bookbag were no less bizarre a uniform to her than her plumage was to me. The principal cooed as we started off, talking to me while looking at her. Sheâs improving now. He was genuine; his remark was as well intentioned as it was patronizing. Pamela glared at him. The tension eased as soon as his door closed behind us.
She marched me down the hall, positively, even though she had no idea what she was to show me. Shortly: What do you want to see? You decide; you know the school. We continued to walk briskly to nowhere in particular, she providing no travelogue, no chatter. Finally I asked, Whatâs special about this school? Pamela: How should I know? I havenât been to any other. She said this as a matter of fact, not pugnaciously. I tried fishing. Well, whatâs really good about this school? Pamela: Donât ask me that question. I donât like this school. Why? Her specific gripe was that she felt that all the adults assumed she would be like her older sister, who recently had left and who was a heavy drug user. Iâm not a druggie, Pamela said, but they think I am. They think my sister is no good. She went on, trying to articulate her resentments, but unable to do so very well. One strained out of her words her anger over what she felt were the patronizing, stereotyping attitudes of adults.
We were walking too briskly to eavesdrop usefully on teaching, and, furthermore, the classroom doors were all closed. However, one could see through the paned windows in the doors the teachers talking and the students writing. Pamela was still going fast to no place in particular. I suggested that we go outside and visit the athletic area and the physical education classes being held there. She quickly assented, grateful that I had given some direction.
The school was surrounded by fields and parking lots. The former were lumpy, with but scraggly grass in tufts. As this was the Southwest, even this green would probably be gone by June. One wondered how infielders plied their trade on these uncongenial fields. Flaccid softball was going on, girls only, with as much gossiping as throwing or hitting. The fielders stood clumsily with their gloves, balancing their weight awkwardly. Their attitudes at our distance said boredom and lack of interest. There was some shouting but no enthusiasm.
Pamela brightened up as we entered the sea of cars in the parking lots. She launched unasked into an exquisite disquisition on the sociology of the school as exhibited by cars driven, where the cars were parked, and what the drivers wore. The preppies drove Daddyâs Le Mans and parked it over there. Preppies wore Topsiders, clean jeans or chinos, collared shirts emblazoned with alligators and other living things. Preppies are smart, Pamela said. They have special classes. Later I figured out that she meant Advanced Placement classes; the preppies were the set bound for four-year colleges.
The freaks. Pamela said she was a freak. That did not necessarily mean she was a habitual drug user. The freaks were those who conformed to nonconformity. Pamelaâs outfit was of their genre. They did not bring cars to school, nor did many even own them.
Pamela pointed to the lot that had older cars and a sprinkling of pickup trucks. These vehiclesâ drivers she called ropers, but she slurred the pronunciation so that it came out âgopers.â Elsewhere, ropers are synonymous with cowboys. A goat roper is a cowboy who is also a jerk. Pamelaâs gopers said a bit about her view of the boot-and-worn-jean-wearing, tanned, noisy, physical kids in this group. Some at this school probably were farmers; most were not and just pretended they were. Adolescent Marlborosâ ads.
Pamela was white. I asked of blacks and Hispanics. Did race cut across these groups? Somewhat, she said, especially if the kids were athletes. But mostly minority kids stayed by themselves. They didnât own cars.
Pamela wanted to be a model. Her stringbean look could have made the pages of Vogue, even if her current wardrobe would not. She loathed school. Would she drop out when she reached seventeen? No, sheâd stay on and finish. Why, if school was so odious? She wanted the diploma so that she could get a job. What kind of a job? Any kind, typing, maybe. I took this opening to ask her about her altercation with the typing teacher; she would say only that the instructor kept riding her, and when she had had enough, she had told the teacher off, in colorful language. You hate school, and typing is hardly your favorite activity, and a typing job is what you see two years hence? Yes, because I need money so that I can leave home. I canât stand my mother.
On our return to the assistant principalâs office, Pamela abruptly took her corner seat and resumed her sulk. I was an instant nonperson.
Louella and Margery were not guides at their inner-city Catholic high school. In fact, they were brand-new students there, even though this was February. I met them by chance when paying a visit to the schoolâs guidance office, and I listened to their stories.
Each was fifteen years old, nominally in the tenth grade. One was white, the other black. Both came from very poor families. Both were skinny and looked more like older children than young women. Though they had met but ten days before, they were now fast friends.
In September, each had started at her neighborhood public high school, on opposite sides of the city, but had skipped classes almost from the first day. Within a few weeks, both were on the run, absent from home as well as school. Margery picked up with a long-distance trucker, and for over three months accompanied him on trips from this Midwestern city to places up and down the East Coast. Louella had been taken on by a pimp and added to his string of prostitutes. She had been beaten badly several times; her face showed disfiguring, fresh scars.
They giggled and squirmed during our talk, sometimes erupting with mirth, trying to cover it with hands over their mouths. They were not very articulate but were remarkably candid (and thus trusting), probably because Bill Conroy, a popular administrator, was with us for part of the conversation. They showed off for him shamelessly. Conroy described to me later the cruelties both of these girls had suffered in the preceding months. Think of all the most horrible things that could happen to teen-age girls under their circumstances, he told me, and you will still not complete the catalogue of horrors these waifs have experienced.
Behind the fifteen-year-old giggles were two very tough kids, street wise and, on occasion, surely petty thieves and perhaps even purse snatchers, muggers of much older, defenseless people. Both had mothers who struggled to help them. Indeed, it was the mothersâ pressure that had gotten them to this private school, a place Margery said âis our last chance.â How the tuition of $40 per week was to be covered, I never ascertained. Conroy merely said that it would be found.
Why had they come? I asked them. They could not directly explain, but it soon became clear that they had almost backed in, pushed by their mothersâ desperation, dragged by their own inertia and by the pain that had followed their truancy of the previous autumn. They had no particular plans, but seemed disposed to settle in. Would they run away from this school? No, they said. (Conroy stayed deadpan: the odds were that they would.) Why not? I asked them. Both girls talked about how they liked the teachers, the warmth of the place, the fact that people seemed to accept them. The attitudes of the teachers toward them appeared crucial: that muchâand it was genuineâcame through the yarn these street kids were playfully spinning for the oddly serious visitor. I asked them what classes they had signed up for. They couldnât remember. They did remember luncheon, however, and left us, happily, for the cafeteria.
Adolescents, like these five young people and like all of humankind, are complicated. They come in all sizes and shapes. There are good ones and bad ones, saints and liars, bores and inspirers, quick ones and dullards, gentle ones and brutes. Besides their age, they have in common the vulnerability that comes from inexperience and a social status bordering on limbo. They are children, but they are adults, too. Many are ready and able to work, but are dissuaded from doing so. They can bear children, but are counseled not to. They can kill, and sometimes do. They can act autonomously, but are told what to do, with some orders, such as school attendance, having the force of law. They share the pain of a stereotype, of gum-chewing, noisy, careless, bloomingly sexual creatures who are allowed to have fun but not too much of it. When they raise hell, they win sobriquets like that applied by a Boston bus driver, âlittle maggots.â When they excel at some community service, such as sandbagging levees during a flood crisis, they win the surprised, happy plaudits of their elders.
We adults too easily talk of these adolescents as an undifferentiated blob of people, as a Client Group or an Age Cohort. We are quick to generalize about themâunless, of course, they are our own children. Then we feel the intensity of specialness; these young people are our own flesh and blood, each of unique promise. That Age Cohort we talk about professionally is full of other peopleâs youngsters, grist to become Products of the System, faceless agents of national defense, social orderliness, and economic revival. We forget James Ageeâs quiet reminder that each child, ours and every other one, âis a new and incommunicably tender life, wounded in every breath and almost as hardly killed as easily wounded.â
After meeting and listening to hundreds of Janets and Louellas, Wills and Pamelas, and visiting the high schools that their communities or their parents have provided for them, I have fresh respect for the variety among young folk. Inevitably, though, I have looked for generalizations, for patterns among these many young people and among their schools, and it is these generalizations which inform this book. Schools should be designed to follow our conceptions of adolescence: one starts with the students.
My view is that American high schools today too readily stress the vulnerability and inexperience of adolescents and underrate the potency and authority that young people can exhibit. Many adolescents are awkward; so much in their lives is new. H...
