Young Teens and the Learning Passage to Adulthood

By David H. Albert

Excerpted from Homeschooling and the Voyage of Self-Discovery: A Journey of Original Seeking Common Courage Press, 2003 – check it out at www.skylarksings.com and www.educationrevolution.org/books.html

If the future doesn’t come toward you, you have to go fetch it.
— Zulu Expression

“We always used to go explore new and interesting things together – museums, tide pools, astronomical observatories, Now he just wants to sit at home. And he won’t try anything new – even food!”

“She used to love to play her cello, and we loved so much just to listen to her. And we bought her a good one. Now she won’t practice any more, no matter how much we cajole (or swear!), and she wants to quit the youth orchestra.”

”Those computer games! I don’t know what he sees in them. He just plays them over and over again. And it’s not that he’s learning anything new from them – he mastered them a long time ago, and doesn’t seem to want any new ones. And don’t dare ask him to clean his room.”

“He thinks he’s such a tough guy. Big front, big exterior – it’s like he’s wearing a suit of armor. Sometimes he frightens me a little. We can’t seem to talk anymore, though he gets on great with his uncle.”

“She used to have so many friends, and was on the telephone all the time. Now, I almost have to remind her who her friends are! And she used to be so generous – now it seems it’s always ‘me, me, me’.”

“He plays innumerable games of solitaire, hour after hour. I can’t see what he finds in it. And then he sits and counts the stones in his rock collection. He doesn’t really examine them; just counts them. And he’s become secretive. It’s driving me crazy!”

“She says she’s bored! Can’t figure out why – she has every book, every compact disc, every computer game, a slew of musical instruments, everything she wants. If she needs something else, we get it for her – no questions asked. And not only is she bored, but everything we suggest is “boring!” Makes us just want to throw up our hands!”

“Everything has become some kind of drama, even down to the weird clothes she wears. And it’s not like they are the same clothes as her friends’. And those hats! She even tries to wear hats to the dinner table!”

“I just don’t know what happened. He used to be such a nice kid. Now, sometimes I feel I hardly recognize him.”

I have heard all these comments and more from parents attending my lectures and workshops, from perfect strangers who come to talk with me at my book table, from friends whose children are homeschooled or in public or private schools. I’ve become a good listener. I’ve heard these anxious descriptions often enough so that I immediately know what the ages of the kids are – early teens, twelve to fifteen year olds.

Teenagers – “different species,” we may be tempted to say. Only thing is – they’re not. Our culture has come to view teenagers as simply “children with hormones,” difficult to understand, bound to get themselves into trouble, and if we only managed to lock them up for several years (or perhaps a decade), maybe the risks would pass and they’d turn into, well, they’d turn into us!

Consider how relatively rare it is to hear parents express pride in the accomplishments of their young teenagers. With younger children, one is always hearing comments about how cute they are, or funny, or (most often) how precocious. With older ones, sixteen to eighteen, it’s often about how well they are preparing for their futures – what kind of college they will go to, or how committed they are to their religion, or, again, how precocious they are (especially if they are athletes or scientists-to-be). On the whole, we tend at best to view young teenagers as diseased, usually not fatally of course, as we have faith somehow that they’ll get over it.

Unfortunately, as we are all too well aware, many never do. As older teenagers and as adults, so many people carry over traits – emotional, intellectual and spiritual dependence; unmindful impulsivity; a lack of an ethic of personal responsibility that, under healthier cultural circumstances, would have been better left behind in childhood. Much of this, I would suggest, is rooted in a lack of sensitivity in contemporary culture and society for the special needs of young teenagers.

As a student of history and cultures, when I see a condition like this, I have learned to do a scan of other times and places to see if they have something they can teach us. And indeed, when we look at cultures and civilizations around the world over the past three millennia, we find the same lesson. The ages twelve to fifteen are a time for learning how to participate in the adult world, for apprenticeships and mentoring, for ritual initiations and rites of passage, for vision quests and walkabouts, for emergence into a new self beyond the confines of family and peers.

We can of course, reject this wisdom. But I believe we do so, and have done so, at great peril. Just as the butterfly requires different food from the butterfly larva, the young teenager requires a different set of experiences. Those representations related to me by anxious parents are a reflection of hunger. And it is a hunger that parents, by themselves, are unable to satisfy.

A young person reaching the ages of twelve to fifteen is foremost fixated upon the future, specifically, her own future. She has already learned, usually between the ages of seven and ten, that the artifacts of her life have a history of which she or her parents have no firsthand knowledge and experience, and that living things (including parents and grandparents) age and eventually die. She has also learned, usually between the ages of ten and twelve, that much of our lives are governed by conventions over which we have no control, but which can be learned just as effectively from her own peers as from anyone else.

Where does that leave her? She knows, perhaps only dimly at first, that there will be a time where her parents or family will no longer be there to filter experience for her, and that she will not live with us forever, regardless of how hospitable we currently happen to be. And there comes a point at which peers no longer provide the nourishment necessary to further her on her voyage of self-discovery.

And so there she is, ready and prepared to uncover her future and her place in adult society, but still being fed a steady diet of family and peers, and still hungry. And, she lets you know it in ways to which you as a parent do not take kindly (and are, objectively, “unacceptable”). She sits among the cornucopia or the flotsam and jetsam made possible by modern industrial civilization – books and videos and music and television and computer games – and is bored. They do not feed any sense of who she is meant to become. She counts objects mindlessly, plays solitaire, repeats the same old computer games, seeking within them as if by divination some indication of what the future holds. If she were in school, she certainly wouldn’t find it in her homework.

She knows inwardly that it is time to put away childish things, but has no source of information beyond peers and family as to which things these are. Perhaps the cello is among them. She has never met a classical musician. More critically, perhaps, she has never met an amateur (other than maybe that same old-maid teacher she has had since she was seven, and who teaches for money) who carries a love of playing music on into adulthood. What good is the cello, really, and why would she want to spend an hour a day in the music room when there is no future in it?

The young teenager stands at the threshold, on the margin, at the boundary. Cultural anthropologists have a word for this threshold state – liminality. The term was coined by the folklorist Arnold van Gennep, but is now most closely associated with the work of the cultural anthropologist Victor Turner.

Among most traditional peoples, during this liminal phase the individual is neither a member of the group she previously belonged to nor is she a member of the group she will join following passage through the stage. Having spent their entire lives in the company of their parents (or extended kinship groupings), boys (and sometimes girls) are removed from their previous settings and placed under the care of an older man or women – never their own parents – and are taught and trained in the ways of the community to which they will soon receive full membership. They may be subjected to various ordeals or humiliations, and undergo various tests, before a ritual reintegration into the society of which they will now be fully a part. Among some peoples, teenagers are considered to have died as children and are now reborn as men and women, given new names and then “reintroduced” to their families and friends.

Among the Plains Indians of North America, it would not be uncommon for the young man to undergo a “vision quest.” Following tutelage in the skills and discipline necessary to survive in the wild and as a member of the tribe (which might require several years), the young man would be left on his own in a remote place to discover his true nature in nature itself, and a view of his own future. Guided back to the tribe and for the first time aware of his own name, he is now ready to take on the mantle of authority and authenticity of a new self in adulthood. Similar customs were common about the aboriginal peoples of Australia (the origin of the “Walkabout”), or among the tribes of central and eastern Africa, where initiation might include long periods of ritual seclusion.

This special status and training provided in the liminal phase of adolescence was once common among European peoples as well. They might be attached to religious practice – the bar mitzvah among Jews being the most obvious example. Here, the young adolescent is taken under the wing of an older man or men and tutored in the practices and observances of Jewish ritual life and study.

More commonly, tutelage took the form of apprenticeships. Contracts would be drawn up between family and craftspeople, merchants or artists, with expectations assumed on all sides. On the one hand, youth were usually assigned the most menial of tasks – they were seen as a pool of cheap labor. On the other hand, it was assumed that the masters would eventually impart their special learning and trade secrets to the young man (with very rare exceptions, apprentices were always male), as the viability of trades depended upon the development of new talent to take the place of old. The young teenager was thus recognized as having economic value to the entire society, both in the present and in the future.

In all of these societies, parents had a continuing responsibility for the physical well-being of their children. Disciplinary functions, however, were no longer the domain of parents, but were passed from them to other members of the adult community – other relatives, elders, mentors or masters. The expected norms and codes of conduct expected of the youth were no longer those of the immediate family, but of the larger community and society. A friend of mine – an elder in the Skokomish Tribe in Washington State – notes that vestiges of this division of functions still exist among his people on the reservation. When a young teenager requires discipline, the parent will alert an aunt or uncle or other extended family member to the need, which will usually be met through a teaching story or fable especially chosen for that purpose. The child is expected, at this age, to be growing out of full dependency upon parents, and the point of separating discipline from parenting is not to threaten that natural attachment which should be maintained into adulthood.

The young person in limen – on the threshold – is threatening. He is supposed to be — that is his role. Betwixt and between position assigned and arrayed by law and custom, convention and ceremony – he calls everything into question. The community is called upon to answer, but in doing so, must rethink its own values and commitments, and ways to express them. “Because” is no longer a sufficient answer to “Why?” No adult upon gaining entrance into a community of equals would be expected to accept such non-answers to questions about mores and norms, and youth can no longer be expected to either. In this role, youth is a force for social integration and for social change at the same time.

* * * * *

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

— Paul, First Letter to the Corinthians 13:11

This essay is not a brief for changing society, nor even for reforming education. Needless to say, I see need for both. I like to believe that if everyone cared as deeply about the education of their children and acted upon it as homeschooling parents do, many of the needed changes and reforms would simply take care of themselves. To me, this is not a strategy but simply a statement regarding where we, as a society, now find ourselves.
The reality is that our children are growing up in society as it is now. So the question I seek to address is, given what we know about the needs and gifts of young people, how can we feed our children’s emerging sense of themselves so that they can become empowered, responsible, life-satisfied adults?

The first order of business is to provide young teenagers the opportunity to put away what they consider to be childish things. The fact that they choose to do so does not mean they won’t come back to them later, sometimes with renewed vigor and with new meaning as part of a self-chosen identity. But what is important to the child’s voyage of self-discovery is the knowledge that she is growing into new authority and responsibility for steering the boat.

She will anyway, but the question is whether this will occur in the context of a healthy family and community life. I have often suggested that especially when their children reach age 12 or so, parents should actively ask whether there are activities the kids want to give up. Sometimes, paradoxically, this will drive the children to renewed effort; other times they will be grateful for the open invitation. Trial separations or short-term contracts between parents and child to continue pursuits can help ensure ongoing dialogue.
I have also suggested that when young teens decide to put aside activities that they previously found satisfying, families should celebrate the decision as a “rite of passage.” Making choices like this is a sign of growing up. Hold a karate exhibition for the retiring devotee and invite her family and friends. Ditto with the retiring violinist, etc. Last summer, I made this suggestion to a mother concerned that her homeschooled son no longer wanted to play the piano. The boy studied hard enough to play a single piece of music really well. The family sent out invitations requesting family and friends to come to a farewell concert. The young man played his one piece, and then was feted for the commitment he had made up to that point, and presented with a cake and several compact disks of music he had grown to love. The mother reported back to me that it was a watershed event in opening up improved and more mature dialogue in her family around her son’s educational aspirations. Her son was no longer a quitter, but a graduate.

* * * * *

It is almost impossible to grow up. Most people just get older, and they find parking spaces. . .
— Maya Angelou

Motivation is the key to the development of talent, and we all know it. It is no secret that the reason so many talented young people do not become skilled scientists, able craftsmen or gifted artists, or that those with less talent struggle with the rudiments of verbal and mathematical literacy, is not because they can’t cope with the required challenges, but because they don’t want to put out the effort necessary to learn.

I cannot express strongly enough my belief that unwillingness to learn – which, as the learning capacities atrophy does indeed become inability to learn – is itself a learned behavior. It reflects the development of a personality that feels powerless and alone, fearful and anxious. It is a personality that has been traumatized, as often by rewards as by punishments, trapped under conditions where the development of an autonomous sense of self is suspect, and within a culture that only honors such development in the breach. It is a personality that, instead of growing through the excitement of discovery, has learned to conform to a ceaseless barrage of petty rules. Or, if creative enough, to develop strategies of deceit. It lives and dies wholly in the present.

Motivation, in contrast, always presupposes a future. In its development lies the understanding that the attainment of goals often requires overcoming obstacles and challenges placed in one’s path. But when goals or even choices are unclear and futures cloudy, motivation can be difficult to maintain.

The young teen must thus be given the opportunity to converse with the future, actually many futures, to find the one (or ones) that fits. It is not so much that, as in Renaissance times, he will be making an irrevocable commitment to a career path (indeed, these conversations don’t have to be about career paths per se at all), but rather that they provide the motivation to continue the knowledge quest.

For these conversations with the future to take place fruitfully there have to be guides – mentors, people who are actively engaged in these futures. It is easy to forget how recent is the rift between practice and formal instruction. The idea that the role of the teacher would be reduced to purveyor of information would have been thought absurd even two centuries ago. And contemporary teachers are often purveyors of stolen goods, because they fail to practice the very skills they attempt to convey.

Instead of putting them aside as childish, the young teen might decide to continue to advance her knowledge quests as she grows out of childhood if she is provided the opportunity to put aside childish ways of knowing and learning. The reciprocity between teacher/mentor and student may now emerge as the centerpiece of education. The perfectly competent music teacher may need to be discarded in favor of a new one simply because she was the childhood teacher and had been chosen by the parents. The young teen needs more opportunities to select her own teachers, if only because the relationship more freely entered into should more closely reflect the possibilities of the future. Dad-the-math-whiz may no longer be suitable. While he may be able to provide the requisite knowledge and skill, he cannot himself provide the opportunity for his daughter to find her way in the larger world of mathematics, or anything else. Learning to choose one’s mentors wisely is a critical part of the learning passage into adulthood.

A mentor must be able to convey the joy that accompanies the hardships and challenges of the tasks she undertakes. This can only come through full participation in it – either as career or as serious avocation – so that the transmission of information and skill has a deeply personal context. Does it surprise anyone that to this day, despite their many faults, the best private schools find amusement in the idea that one should be allowed to teach young teenagers solely by virtue of possessing a teaching certificate?

Again, we can look to the experience of pre-industrial Europe. The journeyman craftsman or artisan, like the junior fellow at the university, could carry on a trade, but was forbidden to teach. It was not that the journeyman or junior fellow lacked skill in the domain. Rather it was that they were still so involved in making their own way into the future that they would be less capable of conveying what it would actually be like to occupy it. The master mentor, it was assumed, could go beyond the mere purveyance of knowledge and skill to seek out that spark that makes learning come alive.

The true mentor enables the conversation with the future by the very fact that, in some very palpable sense, she is a stand-in for the child’s own future. By living if only partially in the world of the mentor, the young teenager, learns to taste the fulfillment – the love of the craft and its ideals — that comes from learning to think creatively and actually using the skills to be acquired.

So where do you start? Well, I must forewarn you: there is a vast storehouse of helpful mentors waiting for your call! Does your child think she might be interested in law? Don’t have her watch television: call a local judge. After spending months learning about the Bill of Rights, my older daughter, 13 at the time, spent a week in a local courtroom watching and analyzing a carjacking trial. Thinking about veterinary sciences? Find volunteer opportunities at the local animal shelter, and be sure to schedule them for when the vet comes through. Ask for a chance to spend a week sweeping up in an auto mechanic’s or violin bow maker’s shop. Have your son take a minister out for lunch, or ask whether he can shadow him for a week. If you live in a small town, have your daughter call the mayor, or the guy who owns the local hardware store, or the president of the local YMCA.
Can’t seem to make a connection through family, friends or acquaintances for this purpose? My advice is “Let Your Fingers Do the Walking.” Go shopping for mentors, and assume it will require at least three times the amount of time necessary to buy a new car. You can provide the most amazing experiences for your kids by following their interests into the Yellow Pages and calling people you’ve never met. My general experience is that people love to talk to others who are interested but ignorant about their business or craft — after all, you can’t contradict them! And who knows where it may lead?

In some cases, if you’re lucky — and manage to get out of the way — the kids by themselves will seek out adults who will share their own interests and passions. Almost like clockwork, when my younger daughter Meera passed her twelfth birthday she went from a seeming complete lack of interest in the adults around her to an almost obsessive hunger to know all about them. She befriended a local (and childless) librarian whom she had known in passing at our Friends Meeting for a decade. The librarian volunteers at the local animal shelter, and the librarian’s husband recently returned from a peace team fact-finding mission to Israel/Palestine. She joined a cousin of my wife who organizes a monthly adult Jewish-Moslem dialogue group in town. Having attended a jazz concert, she struck up a relationship with the saxophone player who is confined to a wheelchair as a result of childhood polio, and who has assisted her in educating herself about jazz as a supplement to her more classical piano studies. And, having read a book about polio as an outgrowth of this relationship, she has started up a written correspondence with the author who, as it turns out, lives only about 90 minutes from our home.

Virtually all of Meera’s reading and writing projects over the past six months have been linked in one way or another to these burgeoning relationships. She is creating her own learning passage!

* * * * *

I have lived on the lip of insanity,
Wanting to know reasons, knocking
On a door.
It opens.
I’ve been knocking from the inside!

— Rumi
The Illustrated Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

The future-seeking of the young teen will not be denied; we can either decide to channel it or it will go where it may. What is important in thinking about this particular learning passage into adulthood is that it is this very future-seeking that provides the impetus for skill-building. The young teen finds herself in a paradoxical and precarious balancing act between the playful aspects of seeking new challenges and the sometimes very serious work necessary to overcome them.

I was on a panel several years with an extraordinarily articulate young man, age twenty. He related how, at the age of sixteen and a high school dropout, he had worked himself up to head a $1.5 million business. He supervised over 35 employees, was responsible for all hiring and firing decisions, and for his employees’ health and safety. He was responsible for the purchase of and payment for all products at wholesale to be sold, for setting up and maintaining all distribution networks, for advertising, for setting prices, and for dealing with competitors. He handled all finances, and made all decisions about expansion plans, all this until he had to put the business on hold as he found himself in state prison. He was a cocaine dealer. Now he was expected to be thankful for the opportunity to sweep floors at Burger King.

Clearly he had gone down a wrong road. He had chosen his mentors poorly, or there were few available to him. Putting aside ethical considerations, his chosen field of endeavor entails more risk than is healthy for a young teen. But the barely concealed pride with which he told his story spoke volumes about both his yearning for and his satisfaction at having learned as a young teen what was necessary to be a leader in his own, if somewhat limited world. (P.S. I knew he wouldn’t be long for Burger King. Last I heard, he made his living going into middle and high schools – dropout and all – to lecture about alcohol and drugs.)

Perhaps in the first inklings of a new self-awareness, the child-man wrestles with the paradox of the Tao Te Ching:

In the pursuit of learning, every day is something new acquired.

In the pursuit of Truth, every day something is dropped.

The teen’s paradox is that she won’t try anything new, even as her actual capacities for dealing with the new seem to be expanding. But look more carefully. What is really happening is that the young teen is dealing with the new, confusing, and somewhat terrifying all the time – the truth of her new self knocking from the inside. This can make young teens extremely glum, for as the literary critic Walter Benjamin once wrote, “To be happy is to become aware of oneself without fright.” And to be sure, there is fright!

I like to think of young teens as blue hard-shelled crabs who are in the process of molting. The haughty disdain and diffidence on the surface is often a cover for the tenderness and even fear to be found beneath. In the proper safe environment, and provided the necessary nourishment and the opportunity for passage, she will be free to cast off the shell. Without them, she will be unable to carry over that spontaneity – the gift of childhood – into a fulfilling adult life.

Or, I am now reminded by Aliyah, like snakes before they shed. Because before they slither out of their old skins, their eyes cloud completely over and they have no clue where they are going!

Hannah Arendt once wrote, “Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from the ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable…and where we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.” And, truly, it is in working with young teens that we irrevocably make that decision.

And so we are confronted with paradoxes. Except we are not. We are confronted with miracles. This time of the great turning is no less than the miracles by which our children learned to take their first few halting steps, or tie their shoes, or make out their first few words. Only here they are confronting a new body, a new sense of self, new intellectual and emotional capacities, new intimations of a future into which we ourselves are refused entry.

The doors are opening for our children: we must stand back in awe of these wonderful, brilliant, brash, annoying, headstrong, foolish, scary, fearful, complicated, paradoxical perfect beings, and allow them to step on through.
 

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