If It’s Only Teenage Wasteland, Could the Label Be to Blame?

Imagine a world without teenagers. Before 1941, there was no such thing; the term simply didn’t exist--at least as far as magazines and newspapers recorded.

And if Thomas Hine has his way, the term will fade from use sometime in the next millennium.

That’s because Hine, whose recently published “The Rise & Fall of the American Teenager” (Bard Books, $24), says the term, which became widespread during World War II, has contributed to the perception that these young people are more children than adults and, therefore, incapable of serious work and in need of a protected environment.

For most teens, this has meant consignment to high school, an institution that Hine believes is failing too many kids and should be revamped.

“There is always a tension between the desire of adults to make young people juvenile and the desire of young people to be grown-up,” Hine says. “The concept of the teenager has been an impediment that has kept them from becoming the people they were ready to be.”

The term “teenager” is often associated with recklessness and immaturity, Hine believes.

“Teenagers have this license to be irresponsible, and then they are being blamed for being irresponsible,” Hine says.

In the centuries before the invention of the “teenager,” young people in their teens often left home after varying amounts of education to start independent lives. A 16-year-old boy might have been a general or a physician in the 1700s; 100 years later, a teen-age girl may have worked in a factory while her brother was a businessman.

It wasn’t until about the turn of the century that experts and educators began to see adolescence as a special time of life that deserved special treatment.

Hine ascribes this thinking to a psychologist and educator named G.S. Hall, who published a book in the early 1900s describing adolescence as an unavoidable period of storm and strife.

“Hall said that things considered symptomatic of madness in adults would be normal in adolescents,” Hine says.

That book established a field of “adolescent psychology.”

It was also around the turn of the century that educators began thinking about redefining high school. Only about 20% of youths were receiving a high school education at the time.

High school was seen as a means of passing on the culture with “extreme social efficiency,” Hine says. That idea flourished during the early 1900s as a way of protecting students from a working-class culture.

High schools started having their own dances to keep students out of dance halls, and boosted their athletic teams to keep them out of local sports clubs.

“High schools were no longer about going and learning certain subjects,” Hine says. “They were a locus of social life.”

Still, only about one-fifth of teens were in high school, with 60% to 65% working and largely handing their paychecks over to their families. (It’s not entirely clear what the other 20% were doing, but it’s thought that many were employed on the streets as messengers. Prostitution was also widespread among the young.)

It was during the ‘30s that--because of the need to save jobs for breadwinners--that the majority of teens started attending high school. With property taxes plummeting because of the Depression, this meant educators had smaller budgets with which to handle more students.

“It was really kind of a mess,” Hine says.

But the separation of teenagers from the rest of society contributed to the blossoming of a culture during the ‘30s and ‘40s for youths in their teen years, and eventually to the invention of a special name for them.

Hine found what he believes is the first published reference to the word “teenager” in a 1941 article in Popular Science magazine.

It was the 1950s, however, that Hine sees as the golden age of the teenager.

“This is the one time when the whole thing seems to be working,” Hine says. “You have just about everybody going to high school. You have the ability to support a family on one income. The young person is at home, and there is somebody else at home.”

It is also in the early ‘50s that educators began supporting plans for huge comprehensive high schools that educated everyone together, whether a future physicist or a future car mechanic.

The ‘60s followed with the first edge of the baby boomers hitting teenage years, and the launching of a huge focus on youth culture.

It was during the ‘70s and ‘80s that society saw the burgeoning of teen crime, drug use, unmarried teen mothers and other social ills.

Hine sees the huge comprehensive high schools as part of the problem. The institution fails to engage all students, marginalizing and alienating many.

“For many individuals, such a long period of education, exploration and deferred responsibility has been a tremendous gift,” Hine writes in his book. But for many others it has kept them in a holding pattern where they are “often judged to be less able than they are.”

Hine doesn’t want to abolish high school. But he believes there should be more choices for students, perhaps more options that would immerse them in the community and into real-life work sooner. And he believes schools should be smaller to ensure that students are known to teachers and administrators.

“There are a lot more ways of succeeding in life than there are of succeeding in high school,” Hine said. “We have to look for ways for young people to succeed, so there won’t be such disaffection, such despair.”

Experts on adolescence such as Temple University professor Laurence Steinberg concur that high school isn’t working for many kids and that making high schools smaller is certainly high on the list of remedies.

But Steinberg says, “The evolution of the labor market has been such that work requires much more education than it did. We keep kids in school as long as we do because we believe they need certain skills in order to be productive.”

Creating more training programs or “apprenticeship” programs to take the place of high school, Steinberg fears, could create “second-class citizens.”

“And you can pretty well imagine who’s going to be sent down that path, and it’s not going to be white, middle-class kids,” he says.

In any case, Hine believes the new millennium offers an appropriate time to reconsider high school, particularly as the largest generation of youth in history develops.

Generation Y is about 30 million strong now, with experts predicting the number will rise to 33.6 million in the United States by 2005.

“This will be the largest generation of teens. I think it’s going to have real cultural implications,” Hine says.

He is hoping people will stop dismissing young people as hormone-crazed teenagers and, instead, see them not as “fundamentally different from adults” but as inexperienced and, therefore, in need of extra patience and attention.

He suggests we call them “beginners.”