For the past few opinions I have been writing about the people I spend most of my time with: my students. I chose to do this work freely and have never really regretted putting in the time to improve their minds and morals.
But I am fearful about the future of these people. I like them well enough, and when I have a chance to be friends with them, instead of playing the somewhat restrictive game of teacher/student, I like them even more. But then I read. I read the recent report on education, A Nation at Risk, that everyone is making political hay out of. The statistics are frightening enough, but what is more unnerving is seeing fairly intelligent adults batting this report back and forth for their own gain in the limelight, blithely taking out of their vest pockets complex schemes to further restrict and control the lives of adolescents. I share their fervor for improvement without sharing their taste in solutions. Because the other half of my fear gets its nourishment from the excessive way adults in this country control and deform the lives of children, and the kind of children who emerge at the other end of that process.
To be sure, children need some guidance, which is more synonymous with love than with discipline. They need to share the opinions of others and share the wisdom others have gleaned from experience. But ultimately they have to fend for themselves, and it's this fact that adults ignore. Through an excess of tyrannical love adults have cushioned the world so that adolescents cannot go out and make mistakes, fight for their places, learn what they need to learn to survive. If the school report is so filled with pessimistic assessments of the capacities of adolescents, adults have no one but themselves to blame, for they created a world that, on the one hand, calls for little engagement in it except for the pursuit of pleasure, and, on the other hands, denies the adolescent a full measure of participation in the rewards and punishments of that life. No wonder the news is so bad. If adults had to live with such restraints (and many do), they would scarcely feel motivated to improve themselves or the world around them (and many don't).
Think of their lot. Launched into school at five (or earlier), pressured to do well in ways that mean promotion and pleasing the boss, made to tolerate vast stretches of dullness "for their own good", taught material that is outdated in a way that is also outdated, made to attend school by law without any of the attendant rewards adults get for forced labor, they are then expected to have a compelling motivation to do well "for their own good" and to act in a selfless manner no adult is ever expect to have or achieve.
And when they don't, when they decide it's a hell of a lot easier to play enough of the game to get by and pursue the kinds of pleasures they want when they want to, we suddenly get alarmed and militant about the situation and figure out ways to make better cages. Instead of looking at what we need to do with children to help make them better people, we look at schools and figure that that is where the problem lies.
It doesn't. The problem is adolescence itself, or rather, the age ghetto called adolescence imposed on a captive generation for their own good, i.e., to keep them off the streets and out of the job market. We are raising, and have raised, generations who are lop-sided. They have no valuable work to do in this society, nothing to knit head and hands together, to provide that mix of plain living and high thinking that used to characterize certain Yankees. Instead, adolescents finds themselves being manipulated to buy anything from records to video games so that the industries can live off their money. They are simply expected to consume: clothes, cars, records, their parents' food. In return little is expected except that they do well in school and live a life somewhat in conformance with their parents' values. The adolescent has all the advantages of a pampered class, and all of the fetters as well: prolongation of childhood, inability to make moral calculations, a valuation of feeling over logic, political apathy, fear of engagement with reality. That some do not turn out this way is a testament to the gumption of the individual and parents who love in the right way. But in the society at large there is little place for adolescents: They are in a holding-pattern, bright animals fattened for later use.
I realize the generalizations I'm making. Here at this stellar academy one believes that one sees the future leaders, the antithesis of all my statements. But, if anything, these good people at Exeter have even more to lose if society suddenly decides to ask more of them: their contacts, their fast track upwards, their insulation. And for poor adolescents the society has another fate: invisibility. Adolescence is a burden to carry in this society, a kind of hedonistic powerlessness that makes being powerless palatable. If adults would stop moaning and begin to see the subtle threads between the problems they rue and the indirect ways they participate in those problems, then perhaps this gilded cage of adolescence would open up and we could reasonably expect this generation to become reasonable people.