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Should we skip right over those pesky adolescent years? Apparently Newt Gingrich has been advocating this move for years, and the former U.S. House representative reiterated it last week. Says Gingrich in Business Week,
It's time to declare the end of adolescence. As a social institution, it's been a failure. The proof is all around us: 19% of eighth graders, 36% of tenth graders, and 47% of twelfth graders say they have used illegal drugs, according to a study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the University of Michigan. One of every four girls has a sexually transmitted disease, suggests a recent study for the Centers for Disease Control. A methamphetamine epidemic among the young is destroying lives, families, and communities. And American students are learning at a frighteningly slower rate than Chinese and Indian students.
The solution is dramatic and unavoidable: We have to end adolescence as a social experiment. We tried it. It failed. It's time to move on. Returning to an earlier, more successful model of children rapidly assuming the roles and responsibilities of adults would yield enormous benefit to society.
Prior to the 19th century, it's fair to say that adolescence did not exist. Instead, there was virtually universal acceptance that puberty marked the transition from childhood to young adulthood. Whether with the Bar Mitzvah and Bat Mitzvah ceremony of the Jewish faith or confirmation in the Catholic Church or any hundreds of rites of passage in societies around the planet, it was understood you were either a child or a young adult.
Boys to men
Many, many male bloggers seemed to appreciate Gingrich's suggestion to abolish adolescence. And I can understand why: Gingrich talks largely of the success of men many in the U.S. consider to be heroes.
As proof of the benefits of a system when "early adulthood, early responsibility, and early achievement were the norm before the institution of adolescence emerged as a system for delaying adulthood and trapping young people into wasting years of their lives," Gingrich reaches back to the late 18th and early 19th centuries, citing Ben Franklin's apprenticeship in a print shop at age 13 (note: Franklin ran away from his apprentice responsibilities, becoming a fugitive at age 17, and he was apprenticed to his brother, not to his uncle, as Gingrich claims in a video), Daniel Boone's yearlong trek in the wilderness at age 15, and John Quincy Adams's employment at age 14 as interpreter to the American ambassador to Russia.
I'm skeptical. After all, here we have someone championing the conative domain by citing examples of young white men who succeeded in a country established by and for white men. And oh? All this happened more than 200 years ago.
Adolescence happens in bodies
Gingrich's arguments hinge largely on the intellectual development of adolescents. He proposes we provide financial incentives for students to study, as well as provide scholarships to students who finish high school a year or two early.
Gingrich ignores the fact that adolescence is very much an embodied experience. This willful ignorance of embodiment is exactly what Donna Haraway has called "the god trick" and "the view from nowhere." It is the privilege, accorded typically to educated white men, of being able to speak without people questioning one's motivation for speaking, as if one is speaking the universal truth instead of speaking from an embodied perspective.
Let's talk for a moment about embodiment. Remember puberty? Gingrich would probably consider my own adolescence a successful one: I enrolled in an "accelerated" curriculum for gifted students, developing my mind while pretty much ignoring the changes in my body because they made me deeply uncomfortable. Psychologically, I'm still paying for not taking the time to be an adolescent, to grapple head-on with my pubescence and new sexuality, instead of a junior intellectual.
Adolescence is tough on all genders, but from my observation and experience it's particularly tough on girls because their bodies are the ones that change most dramatically. They not only need to get used to their own new bodies, but also must put up with the frequently unwanted attention that comes their way as a result of their developing curves.
If anything, I needed more, not less, time as an adolescent. It's an important period of physical and psychological transition, and it shouldn't be rushed. Does that mean we have the adolescent years figured out and our current educational system meets all adolescents'
