LESSON  7

PEDAGOGICS OF AGE

Theme: Pedagogics of Age

v Age Periodization.

v Childhood as a “Golden Age”.

v Adolescence.

 

Analyze Age Periodization. Personality type refers to the psychological classification of different types of individuals. Personality types are sometimes distinguished from personality traits, with the latter embodying a smaller grouping of behavioral tendencies. Types are sometimes said to involve qualitative differences between people, whereas traits might be construed as quantitative differences. According to type theories, for example, introverts and extraverts are two fundamentally different categories of people. According to trait theories, introversion and extraversion are part of a continuous dimension, with many people in the middle.

v  Determine the significance of social factors in personality development

v  Perform periodization of personality development based on the analysis of theoretical and empirical evidence of psychological literature

v  Identify the crisis moments of personal development

 

Short Account of the Topic:

The view that moral development takes place in function of the formation of a political outlook originates from certain social deformations. In fact, the spirituality of both society and the individual can be morally deficient and the moral crisis is rather one of values. This is due to the fact that morality pushed to the fringes of the spiritual life of man and society and was subordinated to politics and its value system. With the development of social activity and relations, society's value system is restructured and enriched. In these processes morality plays a key role: compared to religion, politics and law, it is the bearer of the greatest human potential. Therefore, the processes of humanization and dehumanization in society are related to the change in the place and the importance of morality in the structure of public values.

MORAL FORMATION AND THE POLITICAL ORDER

The process of moral formation takes place within the framework of action where religion, law, politics and the arts together exert moral influence. These forms of public consciousness intertwine, each being the bearer of particular values which may be reciprocally complementary, incompatible or contradictory. Their adjustments show to what extent morality, politics, law, the arts and religion, as intrinsic values, orient, regulate and shape the personality.

Where one is oriented by a particular kind of value as a norm or ideal (whether moral, legal, political or other) one or another value becomes dominant in the hierarchy of values. Religious, legal or moral forms of social consciousness, which are the bearers of concrete values, "move" either to the center or to the fringe of spiritual life.

Depending on which consistently gives meaning to human activity we may speak of "religious righteousness", "political maturity", "law-abiding person", or "moral maturity". Political maturity may be defined as a stable political orientation, and moral maturity as a stable moral orientation. Such stability comes as a result of the qualitative changes in one's entire development: in one's system of values, needs and motivation, and character traits.

When politics comes to be the nucleus of the social value system the formation of a definite political orientation assumes particular importance and the person's political evolution is stimulated. This creates a situation in which moral development is seen as minor and subordinate to political development and its natural follow-up. Criteria for the moral evaluation of social processes and of personality become politicized. Such politicization of the spiritual life of society stimulates the shaping of a personal world outlook in which political norms, ideals, evaluations, principles and notions are central.

Together, political and moral values essentially orient the person towards socially important targets and are mutually complementary. But does this mean that by molding political views, a person comes to a higher moral level? Does the political evolution lead to moral perfection? The significance of political values should not be belittled, all the more when the activity is oriented to such highly human political objectives as revolutionary restructuring, abolition of slavery, liberation from national and social oppression, etc. The molding of political views and the person's political activity are of essential importance above all to the development of social and class moral values. They create a true sense of social justice, public duty, and the like.

The most turbulent historic processes and the most sudden changes in moral outlook are associated with social and class relations. Motives are of central importance for moral evolution, whether these are moral motives of personal expression or such utilitarian motives as ambition for power, material wealth, social prestige, etc. This rule is valid also for political activity and relations: political evolution is a positive factor in the person's formation when accompanied by a respective evolution of moral values, motives, and virtues. When political goals are achieved at the cost of mass repressions, moral deformation marks the social atmosphere, the harmony between universal and class attitudes is broken in favor of class oriented values, and moral ideals lose touch with real life. Under such conditions, the moral sphere becomes idealized and stimulates normative behavior; the moral norm is raised to a cult and any deviation is rejected. Moral criteria of evaluation are substituted by the political and the universal criteria of a class; the balance between goals and means is disturbed in favor of the former with the result that acts which contradict universal morality are committed in the name of lofty social goals.

These common features of the deformation of the social values effect social moral ideals, evaluative norms and principles. Moral ideals, and social moral patterns in particular, are adapted to the cliches of the deformed conception of the priority of class values over universal ones. The estrangement of these patterns from the truth about society both originates from and intensifies the lack of correspondence between the ideal and the social reality. The absolutization of social values is amplified and becomes total: ideals turn into idols. The principle of social equality is raised to the level of a social value, whereas in social practice inequality is the case. The privileged position of certain strata breeds such immoral phenomena as bribes, protection, etc. In economics there is a slogan that says "everybody gets what he earns," but in real life this principle is substituted by another one: "everybody is paid according to his political and social status."

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT AND MORAL GROWTH

Deformations of social values affect the processes of personality formation. In social practice a number of alarming facts emerge: crime among youth is on the increase; a greater part of graduates from schools and universities is not prepared to participate in real life; skepticism is on the rise among young people, along with estrangement from the ideals of society and the pursuit of social activities outside social life (hippies, rockers, punks, etc.). All these bespeak serious perturbation in personal value systems and show that political stability is not a criterion for personal morality.

Investigations show that, when there is a discrepancy between ideals and reality, formalism on the part of elders in the upbringing of young people engenders in them deep personal conflict. They are torn between, on the one hand, what is inherent in the age as they strive towards fulfillment in the "elders' world", and, on the other hand, a negation of the concrete patterns found in the ideals and idols. This causes feelings of insincerity and estrangement from actual social life. Striving towards social activity is expressed in informal groups formed by young people between fourteen and twenty-four on the basis of common interests and activities and is oriented towards an alternative way of life. The rejection of social values may also assume such undesirable forms as in the absence of an ideal regulating behavior. Decisions are taken on the spur of the moment and impulsively. This implies a step backward in young people's personal development.

One-sidedness and inadequacy in one's concept of values cause a deformation of the regulative aims and their impact on the person. If certain values of universal importance are not moulded, one's system of values remains internally contradictory and underdeveloped; this, in turn, affects one's motivation, the development of inner needs and the peculiarities of moral character. Deformations in personal values are usually associated with immaturity in the moral motivation along with the formation of mercenary or other attitudes. The human character acquires such negative traits as hypocrisy, indifference, cruelty, arrogance, a proclivity towards a symbolic solution of real problems, despotism and irresponsibility. Steady changes set in and are expressed in both individual activity and social behavior in critical situations.

Personal values can specifically regulate behavior only when they are woven into the inner motivations which influence the formation of the human character. Ontogenesis requires change, both in content and inner structure. The most prominent of all expressions of structural development in the sphere of motivation and needs is the building of a hierarchy of motivations. According to A.N. Leontiev, this formation is due to two circumstances. First, in one's activity one is involved in complex social relations--with objective reality, other people with whom one works, one's social group and society itself; thus an activity may have several motivations. Second, these motives have unequal functional weight within the framework of a concrete activity so that one motive may be meaning-forming while another may be an incentive only in a given activity. The hierarchical structure of motives is formed not according to the scale of their proximity to biological needs, but according to their functional significance in a particular activity. In hierarchical relations the meaning-forming motive has higher status than does the incentive power.

Inclusion of personal moral motives in the motivational hierarchy introduces an entirely new meaning. When the moral motive takes a leading place in the activity, it becomes the bearer, not only of an incentive, but also of a meaning-forming function. This has the highest status with respect to other motives, for the aspiration to the good, to moral perfection, justice, etc., gives meaning to activity and lends it moral value.

The formation of the moral purposefulness of behavior is an important step in the moral development of the person. At the same time, for a complete moral formation, it is necessary to take yet another step towards stability in moral behavior. Every time a person is placed in new, untypical conditions he or she must make a decision governed by the socio-moral requirement that already had been assimilated as an inner motive. Thus, moral behavior involves building of a strong, variable and super-situational system, which makes possible decisions in specific situations that correspond to moral social requirements but, nevertheless, are not immediately and one-sidedly determined. Such value-factors are present in the decision as a genetic source of its moral charge. These characteristics of morality suggest that the process of moral formation is above all the creation of an approach to the solution of moral problems in concrete situations and is not reduced to the adoption of ready-made formulas for behavior.

Moral motives are stabilized during the process of development. The unfolding of this tendency contributes to building a so-called "moral approach" to life. The stabilization of moral motives, in turn, is built on the basis of the development of a personal system of values. This would be impossible without the development of moral ideals, norms, and values, as well as of moral thinking and concepts of good (versus bad), duty, responsibility, justice, etc. The formation of a steady moral orientation is possible due to the transformation of moral values into motives of behavior. This is the personal mechanism which ensures the formation of a "moral approach". Without development of this motivational system, which includes personal moral motives as part of the hierarchy, moral values cannot have a tangible effect upon the personality, for moral values and moral motives cannot be stabilized in the motivational hierarchy. While behavior reaches for the ideal, values "come down to earth", to real behavior, in order to "meet" and "construct" a moral orientation. This orientation of behavior turns into a general orientation--what we called a "moral approach"--as soon as the person "breathes" life into his or her intentions and convictions and desire becomes reality. In this process man's moral character occupies an important place.

Morality unites in itself to the highest degree those universal human values which reflect both man's and mankind's value; this is the most intimate point of the human soul. The shift of morality to the fringe of social life is soon followed by negative social and personal aftereffects. Almost irreversible moral deformations set in for the person, social institutions and public sensibilities.

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

The transformation of morality into a spiritual center of personal development is not a theoretical abstraction. Its foundations are laid as early as preschool age when the need of the child to be a "grownup" is being formed. This need has its moral dimension, for in the eyes of the three-year-old and six-year-old, "grownup" and the "good" are synonymous. An elder's model behavior stimulates the development of the personal system of values in the child, its evolution of both motivation and needs, and hence, its whole shaping as a person. Therefore, we may assert that morality is the nucleus of the evolution of the person.

Social development can create particularly favorable conditions for the establishment of morality as a center of spiritual development. Democratization of society liberates morality from the power of political objectives, assessments and criteria, from political intolerance and lack of compromise, and from subjection to the political positions being defended. Thus, universal human moral values and morality as a universal human regulator of social behavior are being revived. The social prerequisites in order for morality to take a worthy place in the life of man and society are being created.

Moral upbringing suffers yet another weakness, namely, the prejudice that problems are solved mainly through intellectual development, which would be the function of education. In fact, the primary task of education is the accumulation of knowledge and erudition as reflected in high grades. In this process, moral education is shifted into the background of seminars or class instruction and is reduced to a moralizing lecture.

In its place, cognitive psychology becomes the theoretical criterion of moral development. Both Jean Piaget and L. Kohlberg investigated the capacity of persons at different ages to carry out moral reasoning regarding norms and prescriptions. They studied reasoning regarding respect for moral norms ("behavior criterion"), and the feeling of guilt when violating the moral requirements ("emotional criterion"). Essentially, we may speak of behavioral and emotional criteria only approximatively, since they have been studying not a real behavior and emotional experience, but moral reasonings with specific content.

Piaget1 and Kohlberg present two types of reasons for introducing intellectual criteria in the analysis of moral development: theoretical and experimental. By means of parallel analysis of the intellectual-cognitive and motivational-need spheres they sought a direct correspondence between intellectual and moral development. The Russian psychologist, D.B. Elkonin notes,2 rightly, a number of basic defects in this naturalistic approach to psychic (mental) development:

(1) The child is looked upon as an isolated individual, in relation to whom society is considered to be only its surroundings.

(2) Mental development is interpreted as a process of adaptation to the conditions of society.

(3) Society is divided into two separate spheres: "the world of things" and "the world of people".

(4) The mechanisms of adaptation to "the world of things" and to "the world of people" are totally different.

Piaget's and Kohlberg's approach to the experimental study of moral reasoning in search of parallels between the development of the reasoning and morality of children, relies mainly on the child's intellectual insight into unaccustomed spheres of knowledge. The complex of notions used in this analysis of children's morality depends upon an integral philosophical conception. Analyzing the development of the child as a component of the "child-society" system, Piaget and Kohlberg evolve the thesis that human development consists in the elaboration of mechanisms of adaptation to the "world of things". This adaptation unites the multiple aspects of a child's development and is the law or universal mechanism of human development. The axis of this adaptive mechanism is one's logical development which implies the introduction of intellectual criterion into the investigation of morality. Their method of investigation is in full harmony with this. 



INTEGRATION OF THE INTELLECTUAL AND

THE MOTIVATIONAL

In D.B. Elkonin's hypothesis regarding regularity of the processes of mental development, he examines the formation of personality in a "child in society", not a "child and society" system. This new vision radically changes the connection of "child-and-thing" and "child-and-grownup". From two independent systems, they are transformed into a unified system, within which the content of each is changed. The system "child-thing" becomes in reality "child-social object", and "child-social grown-up" represents a united process of forming the child's personality.

Analysis of primary activity and its psychological essence indicates that during mental development there are regular periods of the predominant development of the motivation-need sphere which alternate with periods in which the formation of operational-technical abilities of the child are primary. The process of personality development follows an ascending spiral, rather than being linear.

D.B. Elkonin's hypothesis shows, in the first place, the inconsistency of a parallel analysis of the intellectual-cognitive and the motivational-need development of the personality. Secondly, this is important for critical analysis because it shifts the accent from intellectual development as the center of all personality development--including its moral aspect--to the specific characteristics and changes of the social situation in which one's personality is moulded.

Regarding moral development as strongly linked to the development of the intellectual processes it should be noted that this is based on certain irrefutable facts concerning the early evolution of the child's moral reasoning. But to what extent can the maturity of separate moral phenomena be a criterion for the moral maturity of the personality; and more concretely, to what extent could intellectual development in the sphere of morality be an indicator of the entire moral molding of the personality? In our opinion, the early development of a child's moral reasoning is not the key to one's overall process moral development.

The functional, genetic and historio-heterogeneity of the processes characterizing the complete molding of the personalities determine the heterochroneity of physical, mental and social development. Heterochroneity is a characteristic feature not only of the integral and harmonious development of the person, but also one's physical, mental and social aspects. Thus, for example, B.G. Ananiev focuses on the heterochroneity in mental processes, and I.S. Konn shows it to be a characteristic of the person's social development.

Experimental data in psychology3 provide grounds for assuming that the separate phenomena typical of morality also are formed in a heterochronological way. Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish between the development of a separate moral phenomenon such as moral reasoning, on the one hand, and moral maturity as an overall feature of the moral development of the person, on the other.

Moral reasoning is one of the earliest moral expressions of the child. In the communication process a child appraises his or her own deed and the deeds of the others, his or her own personality and that of partners; in game situations the child evaluates the performers.

A main conclusion of our investigation4 is that reasoning regarding an action is differentiated from personality in the child's moral thinking. Experiments show that moral reasoning about the person is built on the basis of the maturity of moral reasoning about actions. It is proven convincingly that estimative moral reasoning reaches its maturity at a later stage, though some forms of estimative moral reasoning (eg. regarding the deed) are being shaped at the end of preschool and at the beginning of school age, when personality is still in its initial stages of moral development. As this comparatively early formation of children's moral reasoning is an adequate indicator of the development of moral thinking and of moral intellect, the heterochroneity in moral development devalues estimative moral reasoning as a criterion for the overall moral development of the personality.

Moral development could be characterized by only one criterion, namely, the intellectual, if the functioning and development of the cognitive and moral processes were parallel or if the cardinal issues regarding the functioning and development of morality were resolved in the intellectual-cognitive sphere.

However, the heterochroneity there is an indicator of a rather complicated structure of morality, which is reflected also in differences in the phenomena of action, interpersonal relations, values and thinking, language and mentality. Morality is reflected throughout all these moral phenomena, each of which appears to store in itself the richness of the moral phenomena. The reason for their intermingling in any one moral phenomena should be sought in their proper requirements. Thus, development in moral thinking is inconceivable without a corresponding development in moral action and social relations. Specific moral problems and situations of conflict stimulate the rationalization and analysis of values, the elaboration of moral estimative capabilities, and the development of personal moral reasonings, conclusions, conceptions, etc. Each new step in the development of moral thinking and understanding contributes to a further development in the other moral phenomena.

Such interrelated character of the phenomena in the moral sphere is the main reason for the illusion that, by analyzing one of them, morality as an over all phenomenon is also being analyzed, as with Piaget and Kohlberg. In the sphere of moral thinking, personal motives, moral feelings and experiences, personal values and phenomenon in the world of morality are all reflected in moral language. Similarly, they are reflected by and through thought or cognition without being reduced thereto.

Because moral and cognitive processes do not develop in parallel, we cannot study the sphere of morality by analogy to the intellectual processes. Analysis and synthesis, deduction and moral conceptualization, etc., are necessary moments of shaping moral behavior, social relations, moral motivation and personal value systems. The study of moral motivation reveals the cognitive processes to be of primary importance, for moral thinking and intellect determine the possibility for knowledge of moral values. At the same time, just knowing moral motives and an ability for value analysis are not sufficient to provide moral motivation for human behavior. Intellectual development alone in the sphere of morality cannot bring about the formation of the moral convictions which will provide steady motivation for the person's behavior.

Thus, the significance of the cognitive processes in the moral development of the personality could be characterized by the following specific features:

-The development of social relations and social activity, of estimative characteristics, and of value orientation in the concrete situation result in advancing intellectual development in the sphere of moral thinking. General intellectual development, the formation of moral knowledge, the development of moral reasoning and conclusions, etc., give new meaning to moral values.

-The development of the moral intellect, in turn, is instrumental in the further development of each moral phenomenon. For this reason it is a necessary condition for moral molding of the person.

-At the same time, intellectual development alone is not enough to shape the person morally. Hence, an intellectual criterion is not an entirely reliable indicator of the person's moral formation.

-The interrelation between intellectual and moral evolution is determined by the development of social activity and social relations, where the person is situated due to its overall evolution as a social being.

To overcome the purely intellectual orientation in the moral upbringing we should transform the entire system of education, which should be turned into a formative system, using educative means. The fact that in any moral activity choice is free in no way implies that moral upbringing does not have its own subject matter and its own tasks. It must overcome its own dependence on politics and intellectual development; it must overcome its lack of specific definition and find and defend its specific moral character and "identity". Undoubtedly, the theory of moral education has cultural and social value of its own. 

 

Dangerous Pedagogy in the Age of Casino Capitalism and Religious Fundamentalism

 

All over the world, the forces of neoliberalism are on the march, dismantling the historically guaranteed social provisions provided by the welfare state, defining profit-making and market freedoms as the essence of democracy while diminishing civil liberties as part of the alleged "war" against terrorism. Secure in its dystopian vision that there are no alternatives to a market society, free-market fundamentalism eliminates issues of contingency, struggle and social agency by celebrating the inevitability of economic laws in which the ethical ideal of intervening in the world gives way to the idea that we "have no choice but to adapt both our hopes and our abilities to the new global market."[1] Coupled with an ever-expanding culture of fear, market freedoms seem securely grounded in a defense of national security and the institutions of finance capital. Under such circumstances, a neoliberal model now bears down on American society, threatening to turn it into an authoritarian state. The script is now familiar: there is no such thing as the common good; market values become the template for shaping all aspects of society; the free, possessive individual has no obligations to anything other than his or her self-interest; profit-making is the essence of democracy; the government, and particularly the welfare state, is the arch-enemy of freedom; private interests trump public values; consumerism is the essence of citizenship; privatization is the essence of freedom; law and order is the new language for mobilizing shared fears rather than shared responsibilities;  war is the new organizing principle for organizing society and the economy; theocracy now becomes the legitimating code for punishing women, young people, the elderly, and those groups marginalized by class, race and ethnicity when religious moralism is needed to shore up the war against all social order.[2]

 

Given this current crisis, educators need a new political and pedagogical language for addressing the changing contexts and issues facing a world in which capital draws upon an unprecedented convergence of resources - financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific, military and technological - to exercise powerful and diverse forms of control. If educators and others are to counter global capitalism’s increased ability to separate the traditional nation-state-based space of politics from the transnational reach of power, it is crucial to develop educational approaches that reject a collapse of the distinction between market liberties and civil liberties, a market economy and a market society. This suggests developing forms of critical pedagogy capable of challenging neoliberalism and other anti-democratic traditions, such as the emerging religious fundamentalism in the United States, while resurrecting a radical democratic project that provides the basis for imagining a life beyond the "dream world" of capitalism.  Under such circumstances, education becomes more than testing, an obsession with accountability schemes, zero-tolerance policies and a site for simply training students for the workforce. At stake here is recognizing the power of education in creating the formative culture necessary to both challenge the various threats being mobilized against the very idea of justice and democracy while also fighting for those public spheres and formative cultures that offer alternative modes of identity, social relations and politics.

 

The search for a new politics and a new critical language that crosses a range of theoretical divides must reinvigorate the relationship between democracy, ethics, and political agency by expanding the meaning of the pedagogical as a political practice while at the same time making the political more pedagogical. In the first instance, it is crucial to recognize that pedagogy has less to do with the language of technique and methodology than it does with issues of politics and power. Pedagogy is a moral and political practice that is always implicated in power relations and must be understood as a cultural politics that offers both a particular version and vision of civic life, the future, and how we might construct representations of ourselves, others, and our physical and social environment. As Roger Simon observes:

 

As an introduction to, preparation for, and legitimation of particular forms of social life, education always presupposes a vision of the future. In this respect a curriculum and its supporting pedagogy are a version of our own dreams for ourselves, our children, and our communities. But such dreams are never neutral; they are always someone's dreams and to the degree that they are implicated in organizing the future for others they always have a moral and political dimension. It is in this respect that any discussion of pedagogy must begin with a discussion of educational practice as a form of cultural politics, as a particular way in which a sense of identity, place, worth, and above all value is - informed by practices which organize knowledge and meaning.[3]

 

An oppositional cultural politics can take many forms, but given the current assault by neoliberalism on all aspects of democratic public life, it seems imperative that educators revitalize the struggles to create conditions in which learning would be linked to social change in a wide variety of social sites, and pedagogy would take on the task of regenerating both a renewed sense of social and political agency and a critical subversion of dominant power itself. Making the political more pedagogical rests on the assumption that education takes place a variety of sites outside of the school. Under such circumstances, agency becomes the site through which power is not transcended but reworked, replayed and restaged in productive ways. Central to my argument is the assumption that politics is not only about power, but also, as Cornelius Castoriadis points out, "has to do with political judgements and value choices,"[4] indicating that questions of civic education and critical pedagogy (learning how to become a skilled citizen) are central to the struggle over political agency and democracy. In this instance, critical pedagogy emphasizes critical reflexivity, bridging the gap between learning and everyday life, understanding the connection between power and knowledge, and extending democratic rights and identities by using the resources of history. However, among many educators and social theorists, there is a widespread refusal to recognize that this form of education is not only the foundation for expanding and enabling political agency, but also that it takes place across a wide variety of public spheres mediated through the very force of culture itself.

 

One of the central tasks of any viable critical pedagogy would be to make visible alternative models of radical democratic relations in a wide variety of sites. These spaces can make the pedagogical more political by raising fundamental questions such as: what is the relationship between social justice and the distribution of public resources and goods? What are the conditions, knowledge and skills that are a prerequisite for civic literacy, political agency and social change? What kinds of identities, desires and social relations are being produced and legitimated in diverse sites of teaching and learning? How might the latter prepare or undermine the ability of students to be self-reflective, exercise judgment, engage in critical dialogues, and assume some responsibility for addressing the challenges to democracy at a national and global level? At the very least, such a project involves understanding and critically engaging dominant public transcripts and values within a broader set of historical and institutional contexts. Making the political more pedagogical in this instance suggests producing modes of knowledge and social practices in a variety of sites that not only affirm oppositional thinking, dissent and cultural work, but also offer opportunities to mobilize instances of collective outrage and collective action. Such mobilization opposes glaring material inequities and the growing cynical belief that today's culture of investment and finance makes it impossible to address many of the major social problems facing both the United States and the larger world. Most importantly, such work points to the link between civic education, critical pedagogy and modes of oppositional political agency that are pivotal to creating a politics that promotes democratic values, relations,  autonomy and social change. Hints of such a politics is already evident in the various approaches the Occupy movement has taken in reclaiming the discourse of democracy and in collectively challenging the values and practices of finance capital. Borrowing a line from Rachel Donadio, the Occupy movement protesters are raising questions about "what happens to democracy when banks become more powerful than political institutions?"[5] What kind of education does it take, both in and out of schools, to recognize the dissolution of democracy and the emergence of an authoritarian state?

 

In taking up these questions and the challenges they pose, critical pedagogy proposes that education is a form of political intervention in the world and is capable of creating the possibilities for social transformation. Rather than viewing teaching as technical practice, pedagogy, in the broadest critical sense, is premised on the assumption that learning is not about processing received knowledge, but actually transforming knowledge as part of a more expansive struggle for individual rights and social justice. This implies that any viable notion of pedagogy and resistance should illustrate how knowledge, values, desire and social relations are always implicated in relations of power, and how such an understanding can be used pedagogically and politically by students to further expand and deepen the imperatives of economic and political democracy. The fundamental challenge facing educators within the current age of neoliberalism, militarism and religious fundamentalism is to provide the conditions for students to address how knowledge is related to the power of both self-definition and social agency. In part, this means providing students with the skills, knowledge and authority they need to inquire and act upon what it means to live in a substantive democracy, to recognize anti-democratic forms of power, and to fight deeply rooted injustices in a society and world founded on systemic economic, racial and gendered inequalities.

 

The Responsibility of Teachers as Public Intellectuals

 

In the age of irresponsible privatization, it is difficult to recognize that educators and other cultural workers bear an enormous responsibility in opposing the current threat to the planet and everyday life by bringing democratic political culture back to life. While liberal democracy offers an important discourse around issues of "rights, freedoms, participation, self-rule, and citizenship," it has been mediated historically through the "damaged and burdened tradition" of racial and gender exclusions, economic injustice and a formalistic, ritualized democracy, which substituted the swindle for the promise of democratic participation.[6] At the same time, liberal and republican traditions of Western democratic thought have given rise to forms of social and political criticism that at least contained a "referent" for addressing the deep gap between the promise of a radical democracy and the existing reality. With the rise of neoliberalism, referents for imagining even a weak democracy, or, for that matter, for understanding the tensions between capitalism and democracy, which animated political discourse for the first half of the 20th century, appear to be overwhelmed by market discourses, identities and practices, on the one hand, or a corrosive cynicism on the other. And, of course, at the present moment a kind of political lunacy that testifies to the rise of extremism in America. Democracy has now been reduced to a metaphor for the alleged "free" market and, in some cases, to the image of a theocratic state. It is not that a genuine democratic public space once existed in some ideal form and has now been corrupted by the values of the market, but that these democratic public spheres, even in limited forms, seem to no longer be animating concepts for making visible the contradiction and tension between the reality of existing democracy and the promise of a more fully realized, substantive democracy. Part of the challenge of linking critical pedagogy with the process of democratization suggests constructing new locations of struggle, vocabularies and subject positions that allow people in a wide variety of public spheres to become more than they are now, to question what it is they have become within existing institutional and social formations, and to give some thought to what it might mean to transform existing relations of subordination and oppression.

 

Critical Pedagogy as a Project of Intervention

 

If educators are to revitalize the language of civic education as part of a broader discourse of political agency and critical citizenship in a global world, they will have to consider grounding such a pedagogy in a defense of what I have called in the past, "educated hope."[7] Such hope is built upon recognizing pedagogy as part of a broader attempt to revitalize the conditions for individual and social agency while simultaneously addressing critical pedagogy as a project informed by a democratic political vision while conscious of the diverse ways such a vision gets mediated in different contexts. Such a project also suggests recasting the relationship between the pedagogical and political as a project that is indeterminate, open to constant revision and constantly in dialogue with its own assumptions. The concept of the project in this sense speaks to the directive nature of pedagogy, the recognition that any pedagogical practice presupposes some notion of the future, prioritizes some forms of identification over others and upholds selective modes of social relations. At the same time, the normative nature of such a pedagogy does not offer guarantees as much as it recognizes that its own position is grounded in modes of authority, values and ethical considerations that must be constantly debated for the ways in which they both open up and close down democratic relations, values and identities. Central to both keeping any notion of critical pedagogy alive is the recognition that it must address real social needs, be imbued with a passion for democracy and provide the conditions for expanding democratic forms of political and social agency.

 

Critical Pedagogy as a Matter of Context, Ethics and Politics

 

In opposition to the increasingly dominant views of education and cultural politics, I want to argue for a transformative pedagogy rooted in the project of resurgent democracy, one that relentlessly questions the kinds of labor, practices and forms of production that are enacted in public and higher education. Such an analysis should be relational and contextual, as well as self-reflective and theoretically rigorous. By relational, I mean that the current crisis of schooling must be understood in relation to the broader assault that is being waged against all aspects of democratic public life. As Jeffrey Williams has recently pointed out, "the current restructuring of higher education is only one facet of the restructuring of civic life in the US whereby previously assured public entitlements such as healthcare, welfare, and social security have evaporated or been 'privatized,' so no solution can be separated from a larger vision of what it means to enfranchise citizens or our republic."[8] But as important as such articulations are in understanding the challenges that public and higher education face in the current historical conjuncture, they do not go far enough. Any critical comprehension of those wider forces that shape public and higher education must also be supplemented by an attentiveness to the conditional nature of pedagogy itself. This suggests that pedagogy can never be treated as a fixed set of principles and practices that can be applied indiscriminately across a variety of pedagogical sites. Pedagogy is not some recipe that can be imposed on all classrooms. On the contrary, it must always be contextually defined, allowing it to respond specifically to the conditions, formations and problems that arise in various sites in which education takes place. Schools differ in their financing, quality of teachers, resources, histories and cultural capital. Recognizing this, educators can both address the meaning and purpose that schools might play in their relationship to the demands of the broader society while simultaneously being sensitive to the distinctive nature of the issues educators address within the shifting contexts in which they interact with a diverse body of students, texts and institutional formations.

 

Ethically, critical pedagogy requires an ongoing indictment "of those forms of truth-seeking which imagined themselves to be eternally and placelessly valid." [9] Simply put, educators need to cast a critical eye on those forms of knowledge and social relations that define themselves through a conceptual purity and political innocence that not only clouds how they come into being, but also ignores that the alleged neutrality on which they stand is already grounded in ethico-political choices. Neutral, objective education is an oxymoron. It does not exist outside of relations of power, values and politics. Thomas Keenan rightly argues that ethics on the pedagogical front demands an openness to the other, a willingness to engage a "politics of possibility" through a continual critical engagement with texts, images events, and other registers of meaning as they are transformed into public pedagogies.[10] One consequence of linking pedagogy to the specificity of place is that it foregrounds the need for educators to rethink the cultural and political baggage they bring to each educational encounter; it also highlights the necessity of making educators ethically and politically accountable for the stories they produce, the claims they make upon public memory and the images of the future they deem legitimate. Pedagogy is never innocent, and if it is to be understood and problematized as a form of academic labor, educators must not only critically question and register their own subjective involvement in how and what they teach, they must also resist all calls to depoliticize pedagogy through appeals to either scientific objectivity or ideological dogmatism. Far from being disinterested or ideologically frozen, critical pedagogy is concerned about the articulation of knowledge to social effects and succeeds to the degree in which educators encourage critical reflection and moral and civic agency, rather than simply mold it. Crucial to the latter position is the necessity for critical educators to be attentive to the ethical dimensions of their own practice.

 

Critical Pedagogy and the Promise of Democratization

 

But as an act of intervention, critical pedagogy needs to be grounded in a project that not only problematizes its own location, mechanisms of transmission and effects, but also functions as part of a larger project to contest various forms of domination and to help students think more critically about how existing social, political and economic arrangements might be better suited to address the promise of a radical democracy as an anticipatory rather than messianic goal. The late Jacques Derrida suggested that the social function of intellectuals, as well as any viable notion of education, should be grounded in a vibrant politics which makes the promise of democracy a matter of concrete urgency. For Derrida, making visible a "democracy" which is to come, as opposed to that which presents itself in its name, provides a referent for both criticizing everywhere what parades as democracy - "the current state of all so-called democracy" - and for critically assessing the conditions and possibilities for democratic transformation.[11] Derrida sees the promise of democracy as the proper articulation of a political ethics and by implication suggests that when higher education is engaged and articulated through the project of democratic social transformation, it can function as a vital public sphere for critical learning, ethical deliberation and civic engagement. Moreover, the utopian dimension of pedagogy articulated through the project of radical democracy offers the possibility of resistance to the increasing depoliticization of the citizenry, provides a language to challenge the politics of accommodation that connects education to the logic of privatization, commodification, religious dogma, and instrumental knowledge. Such a pedagogy refuses to define the citizen as simply a consuming subject and actively opposes the view of teaching as market-driven practice and learning as a form of training. Utopianism in this sense is not an antidote to politics, a nostalgic yearning for a better time, or for some "inconceivably alternative future." But, by contrast, it is an "attempt to find a bridge between the present and future in those forces within the present which are potentially able to transform it."[12]

 

In opposition to dominant forms of education and pedagogy that simply reinvent the future in the interest of a present in which ethical principles are scorned and the essence of democracy is reduced to the imperatives of the bottom line, critical pedagogy must address the challenge of providing students with the competencies they need to cultivate the capacity for critical judgment, thoughtfully connect politics to social responsibility, and expand their own sense of agency in order to curb the excesses of dominant power, revitalize a sense of public commitment, and expand democratic relations. Animated by a sense of critique and possibility, critical pedagogy at its best attempts to provoke students to deliberate, resist and cultivate a range of capacities that enable them to move beyond the world they already know without insisting on a fixed set of meanings.

 

Against the current onslaught to privatize public schools and corporatize higher education, educators need to defend public and higher education as a resource vital to the democratic and civic life of the nation. Central to such a task is the challenge of academics, young people, the Occupy movement and labor unions to find ways to join together in broad-based social movements and oppose the transformation of the public schools and higher education into commercial spheres, to resist what Bill Readings has called a consumer-oriented corporation more concerned about accounting than accountability.[13] The crisis of public schooling and higher education - while having  different registers - needs to be analyzed in terms of wider configurations of economic, political and social forces that exacerbate tensions between those who value such institutions as public goods and those advocates of neoliberalism who see market culture as a master design for all human affairs. The threat corporate power poses can be seen in the ongoing attempts by neoliberals and other hypercapitalists to subject all forms of public life, including public and higher education, to the dictates of the market while simultaneously working to empty democracy itself of any vestige of ethical, political and social considerations. What educators must challenge is the attempt on the part of neoliberals to either define democracy exclusively as a liability, or to enervate its substantive ideals by reducing it to the imperatives and freedoms of the marketplace. This requires that educators consider the political and pedagogical importance of struggling over the meaning and definition of democracy and situate such a debate within an expansive notion of human rights, social provisions, civil liberties, equity and economic justice. What must be challenged at all costs is the increasingly dominant view, propagated by neoliberal gurus such as Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, that selfishness is the supreme value in shaping human agency, profit-making is the most important practice in a democracy and accumulating material goods the essence of the good life.

 

Defending public and higher education as vital democratic spheres is necessary to develop and nourish the proper balance between public values and commercial power, between identities founded on democratic principles and identities steeped in forms of competitive, self-interested individualism that celebrate selfishness, profit-making and greed. Educators also must reconsider the critical roles they might take up within public and higher education so as to enable them to oppose those approaches to schooling that corporatize, privatize and bureaucratize the teaching process. A critical pedagogy should, in part, be premised on the assumption that educators vigorously resist any attempt on the part of liberals and conservatives to reduce their role in schools to either that of technicians or corporate pawns. Instead, educators might redefine their roles as engaged public intellectuals capable of teaching students the language of critique and possibility as a precondition for social agency. Such a redefinition of purpose, meaning and politics suggests that educators critically interrogate the fundamental link between knowledge and power, pedagogical practices and social consequences, and authority and civic responsibility. It also means eliminating those modes of corporate governance in the public schools and higher education that reduce teachers to the status of clerks, technicians, and, with respect to higher education, to a subaltern class of part-time workers, with little power, few benefits and excessive teaching loads.

 

By redefining the purpose and meaning of schooling as part of a broader attempt to struggle for a radical democratic social order, educators can begin to vigorously challenge a number of dominant assumptions and policies currently structuring public and higher education, including but not limited to: ongoing attempts by corporate culture to define educators as multinational operatives; escalating efforts by colleges and universities to deny students the loans, resources and public support they need to have access to a quality education; the mounting influence of corporate interests in pressuring universities to reward forms of scholarship that generate corporate profits; increasing attempts to deny women and students of color access to higher education through the reversal of affirmative action policies, the raising of tuition costs, and a growing emphasis on classroom pedagogies designed to create marketable products and active consumers. Rather than providing students with an opportunity to learn how to shape and govern public life, education is increasingly being vocationalized, reduced to a commodity that provides privileges for a few students  and low-skill industrial training for the rest, especially those who are marginalized by reason of their class and race. Republican Party presidential candidate Rick Santorum has recently argued that public education is a form of government intrusion and that higher education is simply irrelevant because it is doing the work of Satan by allowing leftist educators to indoctrinate students.[14] That such ideological and political idiocy passes as a legitimate discourse in a presidential race tells us something about the devalued state of public and higher education, not to mention how vulnerable it is to the most extreme authoritarian pressures and policies.

 

What has become clear in this current climate of religious fundamentalism and casino capitalism is that the corporatization of education functions so as to cancel out the democratic values,  impulses and practices of a civil society by either devaluing or absorbing them within the logic of the market. Educators need a critical language to address these challenges to public and higher education. But they also need to join with other groups outside of the spheres of public and higher education in order to create a national movement that links the defense of noncommodified education with a broader struggle to deepen the imperatives of democratic public life. The quality of educational reform can, in part, be gauged by the caliber of public discourse concerning the role that education plays in furthering not the market-driven agenda of corporate interests, but the imperatives of critical agency, social justice and an operational democracy. In this capacity, educators need to develop a language of possibility for raising critical questions about the aim of schooling and about the purpose and meaning of what and how educators teach. In doing so, pedagogy draws attention to engaging classroom practice as a moral and political consideration animated by a fierce sense of commitment to expanding the range of individual capacities that enable students to become critical agents capable of linking knowledge, responsibility and democratic social transformation.

 

 Approaching pedagogy as a critical and political practice suggests that educators refuse all attempts to reduce classroom teaching exclusively to matters of technique and method. In opposition to such approaches, educators can highlight the performative character of education as an act of intervention in the world - focusing on the work that pedagogy does as a deliberate attempt to influence how and what knowledge and experiences are produced within particular sets of classroom relations. Within this perspective, critical pedagogy foregrounds the diverse conditions under which authority, knowledge, values and subject positions are produced and interact within unequal relations of power; it also problematizes the ideologically laden and often contradictory roles and social functions that educators assume within the classroom. Pedagogy in this view can also be reclaimed as a form of academic labor that bridges the gap between individual considerations and public concerns, affirms bonds of sociality and reciprocity, and interrogates the relationship between individual freedom and privatized notions of the good life and the social obligations and collective structures necessary to support a vibrant democracy.

 

Classroom Authority and Pedagogy as the Outcome of Struggles

 

The question of what educators teach is inseparable from what it means to locate oneself in public discourses and invest in public commitments. Implicit in this argument is the assumption that the responsibility of critical educators cannot be separated from the consequences of the subject positions they have been assigned, the knowledge they produce, the social relations they legitimate and the ideologies they disseminate to students. Educational work at its best represents a response to questions and issues posed by the tensions and contradictions of the broader society; it is an attempt to understand and intervene in specific problems that emanate from those sites that people concretely inhabit and actually live out in their lives and everyday existence. Teaching in this sense becomes performative and contextual, and it highlights considerations of power, politics and ethics fundamental to any form of teacher-student-text interaction.

 

It is crucial to reiterate that any pedagogy that is alive to its own democratic implications is always cautious of its need to resist totalizing certainties and answers. Refusing the pull of dogmatism, ideological purity and imperious authority, educators must at the same time grasp the complexity and contradictions that inform the conditions under which they produce and disseminate knowledge. Recognizing that pedagogy is the outgrowth of struggles that are historically specific, as are the problems that govern the questions and issues that guide what and how we teach, should not suggest that educators renounce their authority. On the contrary, it is precisely by recognizing that teaching is always an act of intervention inextricably mediated through particular forms of authority that teachers can offer students a variety of analytic tools, diverse historical traditions, and a wide-ranging knowledge of dominant and subaltern cultures and how they influence each other - for whatever use students wish to make of these tools and knowledge.  This is a far cry from suggesting that critical pedagogy define itself either within the grip of a self-righteous mode of authority or completely remove itself from any sense of commitment whatsoever. On the contrary, at stake here is the need to insist on modes of authority that are directive but not imperious, linking knowledge to power in the service of self-production, and encouraging students to go beyond the world they already know to expand their range of human possibilities.

 

Academics must deliberate, make decisions, and take positions, and, in doing so, recognize that authority "is the very condition for intellectual work" and pedagogical interventions.[15] Authority in this perspective in not simply on the side of oppression, but is used to intervene and shape the space of teaching and learning to provide students with a range of possibilities for challenging a society's commonsense assumptions, and for analyzing the interface between its members' own everyday lives and those broader social formations that bear down on them. Authority, at best, becomes both a referent for legitimating a commitment to a particular vision of pedagogy and a critical referent for a kind of auto-critique. It demands consideration of how authority functions within specific relations of power regarding its own promise to provide students with a public space where they can learn, debate and engage critical traditions in order to imagine otherwise and develop discourses that are crucial  for defending vital social institutions as a public good.

 

While pedagogy can be understood performatively as an event where many things can happen in the service of learning, it is crucial to stress the importance of democratic classroom relations that encourage dialogue, deliberation and the power of students to raise questions. Moreover, such relations don't signal a retreat from teacher authority as much as they suggest using authority reflexively to provide the conditions for students to exercise intellectual rigor, theoretical competence and informed judgments. Thus, students can think critically about the knowledge they gain and what it means to act on such knowledge in order to expand their sense of agency as part of a broader project of increasing both "the scope of their freedoms" and "the operations of democracy."[16] What students learn and how they learn should amplify what it means to experience democracy from a position of possibility, affirmation and critical engagement. In part, this suggests that educators develop pedagogical practices that open up the terrain of the political while simultaneously encouraging students to "think better about how arrangements might be otherwise."

 

At its best, critical pedagogy must be interdisciplinary, contextual, engage the complex relationships between power and knowledge, critically address the institutional constraints under which teaching takes place, and focus on how students can engage the imperatives of critical social citizenship. Education is not simply about the transmission of knowledge; it is about the producing of subjects, identities and desires - no small matter when recognizing what such a struggle suggests about preparing students for the future. Once again, critical pedagogy must be self-reflexive about its aims and practices, conscious of its ongoing project of democratic transformation, but openly committed to a politics that does not offer any guarantees. But refusing dogmatism does not suggest that educators descend into a laissez-faire pluralism or an appeal to methodologies designed to "teach the conflicts." On the contrary, it suggests that, in order to make the pedagogical more political, educators afford students with diverse opportunities to understand and experience how politics, power, commitment and responsibility work on and through them both within and outside of schools. This, in turn, enables students to locate themselves, within an interrelated confluence of ideological and material forces, as critical agents who can both influence such forces and simultaneously be held responsible for their own views and actions. Within this perspective, relations between institutional forms and pedagogical practices are acknowledged as complex, open and contradictory - though always situated within unequal relations of power.[18]

 

To read more article by Henry A. Giroux and other writers in the Public Intellectual Project, click here.

 

Making the Pedagogical More Meaningful

 

Any analysis of critical pedagogy must stress the importance of addressing the role that affect and emotion play in the formation of individual identity and social agency. Any viable approach to critical pedagogy suggests taking seriously those maps of meaning, affective investments and sedimented desires that enable students to connect their own lives and everyday experiences to what they learn. Pedagogy in this sense becomes more than a mere transfer of received knowledge, an inscription of a unified and static identity, or a rigid methodology; it presupposes that students are moved by their passions and motivated, in part, by the affective investments they bring to the learning process. This suggests, as Paulo Freire points out, the need for a theory of pedagogy willing to develop a "critical comprehension of the value of sentiments, emotions, and desire as part of the learning process."[19] Not only do students need to understand the ideological, economic and political interests that shape the nature of their educational experiences, they must also address the strong emotional investments they may bring to such beliefs. For Emory University professor Shoshana Felman, this suggests that educators take seriously the role of desire in both ignorance and learning. "Teaching," she explains, "has to deal not so much with lack of knowledge as with resistances to knowledge. Ignorance, suggests Jacques Lacan, is a 'passion.' Inasmuch as traditional pedagogy postulated a desire for knowledge, an analytically informed pedagogy has to reckon with the passion for ignorance."[20] Felman elaborates further on the productive nature of ignorance, arguing. "Ignorance is nothing other than a desire to ignore: its nature is less cognitive than performative ... it is not a simple lack of information but the incapacity - or the refusal - to acknowledge one's own implication in the information."[21] If students are to move beyond the issue of understanding to an engagement with the deeper affective investments that make them complicitous with oppressive ideologies, they must be positioned to address and formulate strategies of transformation through which their individualized beliefs and affective investments can be articulated with broader public discourses that extend the imperatives of democratic public life. An unsettling pedagogy in this instance would engage student identities and resistances from unexpected vantage points and articulate how they connect to existing material relations of power. At stake here is not only a pedagogical practice that recalls how knowledge, identifications, and subject positions are produced, unfolded and remembered, but also how they become part of an ongoing process, more strategic, so to speak, of mediating and challenging existing relations of power.

 

Conclusion

 

In the current historical conjuncture, the concept of the social and the common good is being refigured and displaced as a constitutive category for making democracy operational and political agency the condition for social transformation. The notions of the social and the public are not being erased as much as they are being reconstructed under circumstances in which public forums for serious debate, including public education, are being eroded. Within the ongoing logic of neoliberalism, teaching and learning are removed from the discourse of democracy and civic culture - defined as a purely private affair. How else to explain Rick Santorum's rants against higher education, the elites, and that old phantom, the liberal media.   Divorced from the imperatives of a democratic society, pedagogy is reduced to a matter of taste, individual choice, home schooling and job training. Pedagogy as a mode of witnessing, a public engagement in which students learn to be attentive and responsible to the memories and narratives of others, disappears within a corporate-driven notion of learning in which the logic of market devalues the opportunity for students to make connections with others through social relations which foster a mix of compassion, ethics and hope. The crisis of the social is further amplified by the withdrawal of the state as a guardian of the public trust and its growing lack of investment in those sectors of social life that promote the public good. With the Supreme Court ruling that now makes vouchers constitutional, a deeply conservative government once again will be given full reign to renege on the responsibility of government to provide every child with an education that affirms public life, embraces the need for critical citizens and supports the truism that political agency is central to the possibility of democratic life.

 

The greatest threat to our children does not come from lowered standards, the absence of privatized choice schemes or the lack of rigid testing measures. On the contrary, it comes from a society that refuses to view children as a social investment, that consigns 16.3 million children to live in poverty, reduces critical learning to massive testing programs, promotes policies that eliminate most crucial health and public services, and defines masculinity through the degrading celebration of a gun culture, extreme sports and the spectacles of violence that permeate corporate-controlled media industries. Students are not at risk because of the absence of market incentives in the schools; they are at risk because, as a country, we support an iniquitous class-based system of funding education and, more recently, are intent on completely destroying it precisely because it is public. Children and young adults are under siege in both public and higher education because far too many of these institutions have become breeding grounds for commercialism, racism, social intolerance, sexism, homophobia and consumerism, spurred on by the right-wing discourse of the Republican Party, corporations, conservative think tanks and a weak mainstream media. We live in a society in which a culture of punishment and intolerance has replaced a culture of social responsibility and compassion. Within such a climate of harsh discipline and disdain, it is easier for states such as California to set aside more financial resources to build prisons that to support higher education. Within this context, the project(s) of critical pedagogy need to be taken up both within and outside of public and higher education. Pedagogy is not a practice that only takes place in schools; it is also a public mode of teaching, that is, a public pedagogical practice largely defined within a range of cultural apparatuses extending from television networks to print media to the Internet. As a central element of a broad-based cultural politics, critical pedagogy, in its various forms, when linked to the ongoing project of democratization, can provide opportunities for educators and other cultural workers to redefine and transform the connections among language, desire, meaning, everyday life, and material relations of power as part of a broader social movement to reclaim the promise and possibilities of a democratic public life. Pedagogy is dangerous not only because it provides the intellectual capacities and ethical norms for students to fight against poverty, ecological destruction and the dismantling of the social state, but also because it holds the potential for instilling in students a profound desire for a "real democracy based on relationships of equality and freedom."[22] Given the current economic crisis, the growing authoritarian populism, the rise of religious dogmatism, the emergence of a failed state, and a politics largely controlled by the bankers and corporations, critical pedagogy becomes symptomatic of not only something precious that has been lost under a regime of casino capitalism, but also of a project and practice that needs to be reclaimed, reconfigured and made foundational to any viable notion of politics.

Adolescence (from Latin adolescere, meaning "to grow up")[1] is a transitional stage of physical and psychological human development that generally occurs during the period from puberty to legal adulthood (age of majority).[1][2][3] The period of adolescence is most closely associated with the teenage years,[3][4][5][6] though its physical, psychological and cultural expressions may begin earlier and end later. For example, although puberty has been historically associated with the onset of adolescent development, it now typically begins prior to the teenage years and there has been a normative shift of it occurring in preadolescence, particularly in females (see early and precocious puberty).[4][7][8] Physical growth, as distinct from puberty (particularly in males), and cognitive development generally seen in adolescence, can also extend into the early twenties. Thus chronological age provides only a rough marker of adolescence, and scholars have found it difficult to agree upon a precise definition of adolescence.[7][8][9][10]

A thorough understanding of adolescence in society depends on information from various perspectives, most importantly from the areas of psychology, biology, history, sociology, education, and anthropology. Within all of these perspectives, adolescence is viewed as a transitional period between childhood and adulthood, whose cultural purpose is the preparation of children for adult roles.[11] It is a period of multiple transitions involving education, training, employment and unemployment, as well as transitions from one living circumstance to another.[12]

The end of adolescence and the beginning of adulthood varies by country and by function, and furthermore even within a single nation state or culture there can be different ages at which an individual is considered (chronologically and legally) mature enough for society to entrust them with certain privileges and responsibilities. Such milestones include driving a vehicle, having legal sexual relations, serving in the armed forces or on a jury, purchasing and drinking alcohol, voting, entering into contracts, finishing certain levels of education, and marriage. Adolescence is usually accompanied by an increased independence allowed by the parents or legal guardians and less supervision as compared to preadolescence.

In popular culture, adolescent characteristics are attributed to physical changes and what is called raging hormones.[13][14][15] There is little evidence that this is the case, however. In studying adolescent development,[16] adolescence can be defined biologically, as the physical transition marked by the onset of puberty and the termination of physical growth; cognitively, as changes in the ability to think abstractly and multi-dimensionally; or socially, as a period of preparation for adult roles. Major pubertal and biological changes include changes to the sex organs, height, weight, and muscle mass, as well as major changes in brain structure and organization. Cognitive advances encompass both increases in knowledge and in the ability to think abstractly and to reason more effectively. The study of adolescent development often involves interdisciplinary collaborations. For example, researchers in neuroscience or bio-behavioral health might focus on pubertal changes in brain structure and its effects on cognition or social relations. Sociologists interested in adolescence might focus on the acquisition of social roles (e.g., worker or romantic partner) and how this varies across cultures or social conditions.[17] Developmental psychologists might focus on changes in relations with parents and peers as a function of school structure and pubertal status.[18]

Biological development

Puberty in general

Puberty is a period of several years in which rapid physical growth and psychological changes occur, culminating in sexual maturity. The average onset of puberty is at 10 or 11 for girls and age 11 or 12 for boys.[19][20][21] Every person's individual timetable for puberty is influenced primarily by heredity, although environmental factors, such as diet and exercise, also exert some influence.[20][22][23] These factors can also contribute to precocious and delayed puberty.[10][23]

Some of the most significant parts of pubertal development involve distinctive physiological changes in individuals' height, weight, body composition, and circulatory and respiratory systems.[24] These changes are largely influenced by hormonal activity. Hormones play an organizational role, priming the body to behave in a certain way once puberty begins,[25] and an activational role, referring to changes in hormones during adolescence that trigger behavioral and physical changes.[26]

Puberty occurs through a long process and begins with a surge in hormone production, which in turn causes a number of physical changes.[20] It is the stage of life in which a child develops secondary sex characteristics (for example, a deeper voice and larger adam's apple in boys, and development of breasts and more curved and prominent hips in girls) as his or her hormonal balance shifts strongly towards an adult state. This is triggered by the pituitary gland, which secretes a surge of hormonal agents into the blood stream, initiating a chain reaction. The male and female gonads are subsequently activated, which puts them into a state of rapid growth and development; the triggered gonads now commence the mass production of the necessary chemicals. The testes primarily release testosterone, and the ovaries predominantly dispense estrogen. The production of these hormones increases gradually until sexual maturation is met. Some boys may develop gynecomastia due to an imbalance of sex hormones, tissue responsiveness or obesity.[27][28]

Facial hair in males normally appears in a specific order during puberty: The first facial hair to appear tends to grow at the corners of the upper lip, typically between 14 to 17 years of age.[29][30] It then spreads to form a moustache over the entire upper lip. This is followed by the appearance of hair on the upper part of the cheeks, and the area under the lower lip.[29] The hair eventually spreads to the sides and lower border of the chin, and the rest of the lower face to form a full beard.[29] As with most human biological processes, this specific order may vary among some individuals. Facial hair is often present in late adolescence, around ages 17 and 18, but may not appear until significantly later.[30][31] Some men do not develop full facial hair for 10 years after puberty.[30] Facial hair continues to get coarser, darker and thicker for another 2–4 years after puberty.[30]

The major landmark of puberty for males is the first ejaculation, which occurs, on average, at age 13.[32] For females, it is menarche, the onset of menstruation, which occurs, on average, between ages 12 and 13.[22][33][34][35] The age of menarche is influenced by heredity, but a girl's diet and lifestyle contribute as well.[22] Regardless of genes, a girl must have a certain proportion of body fat to attain menarche.[22] Consequently, girls who have a high-fat diet and who are not physically active begin menstruating earlier, on average, than girls whose diet contains less fat and whose activities involve fat reducing exercise (e.g. ballet and gymnastics).[22][23] Girls who experience malnutrition or are in societies in which children are expected to perform physical labor also begin menstruating at later ages.[22]

The timing of puberty can have important psychological and social consequences. Early maturing boys are usually taller and stronger than their friends.[36] They have the advantage in capturing the attention of potential partners and in becoming hand-picked for sports. Pubescent boys often tend to have a good body image, are more confident, secure, and more independent.[37] Late maturing boys can be less confident because of poor body image when comparing themselves to already developed friends and peers. However, early puberty is not always positive for boys; early sexual maturation in boys can be accompanied by increased aggressiveness due to the surge of hormones that affect them.[37] Because they appear older than their peers, pubescent boys may face increased social pressure to conform to adult norms; society may view them as more emotionally advanced, despite the fact that their cognitive and social development may lag behind their appearance.[37] Studies have shown that early maturing boys are more likely to be sexually active and are more likely to participate in risky behaviors.[38]

For girls, early maturation can sometimes lead to increased self-consciousness, though a typical aspect in maturing females.[39] Because of their bodies' developing in advance, pubescent girls can become more insecure.[39] Consequently, girls that reach sexual maturation early are more likely than their peers to develop eating disorders. Nearly half of all American high school girls' diet to lose weight.[39] In addition, girls may have to deal with sexual advances from older boys before they are emotionally and mentally mature.[40] In addition to having earlier sexual experiences and more unwanted pregnancies than late maturing girls, early maturing girls are more exposed to alcohol and drug abuse.[41] Those who have had such experiences tend to perform less well in school than their "inexperienced" age peers.[42]

Girls have usually reached full physical development by ages 15–17,[3][21][43] while boys usually complete puberty by ages 16–17.[21][43][44] Any increase in height beyond the post-pubertal age is uncommon. Girls attain reproductive maturity about 4 years after the first physical changes of puberty appear.[3] In contrast, boys accelerate more slowly but continue to grow for about 6 years after the first visible pubertal changes.[37][44]

Growth spurt

The adolescent growth spurt is a rapid increase in the individual's height and weight during puberty resulting from the simultaneous release of growth hormones, thyroid hormones, and androgens.[45] Males experience their growth spurt about two years later, on average, than females. During their peak height velocity (the time of most rapid growth), adolescents grow at a growth rate nearly identical to that of a toddler—about 4 inches (10.3 cm) a year for males and 3.5 inches (9 cm) for females.[46] In addition to changes in height, adolescents also experience a significant increase in weight (Marshall, 1978). The weight gained during adolescence constitutes nearly half of one's adult body weight.[46] Teenage and early adult males may continue to gain natural muscle growth even after puberty.[37]

The accelerated growth in different body parts happens at different times, but for all adolescents it has a fairly regular sequence. The first places to grow are the extremities—the head, hands and feet—followed by the arms and legs, then the torso and shoulders.[47] This non-uniform growth is one reason why an adolescent body may seem out of proportion.

During puberty, bones become harder and more brittle. At the conclusion of puberty, the ends of the long bones close during the process called epiphysis. There can be ethnic differences in these skeletal changes. For example, in the United States of America, bone density increases significantly more among black than white adolescents, which might account for decreased likelihood of black women developing osteoporosis and having fewer bone fractures there.[48]

Another set of significant physical changes during puberty happen in bodily distribution of fat and muscle. This process is different for females and males. Before puberty, there are nearly no sex differences in fat and muscle distribution; during puberty, boys grow muscle much faster than girls, although both sexes experience rapid muscle development. In contrast, though both sexes experience an increase in body fat, the increase much more significant for girls. Frequently, the increase in fat for girls happens in their years just before puberty. The ratio between muscle and fat among post-pubertal boys is around three to one, while for girls it is about five to four. This may help explain sex differences in athletic performance.[49]

Pubertal development also affects circulatory and respiratory systems as an adolescents' heart and lungs increase in both size and capacity. These changes lead to increased strength and tolerance for exercise. Sex differences are apparent as males tend to develop "larger hearts and lungs, higher systolic blood pressure, a lower resting heart rate, a greater capacity for carrying oxygen to the blood, a greater power for neutralizing the chemical products of muscular exercise, higher blood hemoglobin and more red blood cells".[50]

Despite some genetic sex differences, environmental factors play a large role in biological changes during adolescence. For example, girls tend to reduce their physical activity in preadolescence[51][52] and may receive inadequate nutrition from diets that often lack important nutrients, such as iron.[53] These environmental influences in turn affect female physical development.

Reproduction-related changes

Primary sex characteristics are those directly related to the sex organs. In males, the first stages of puberty involve growth of the testes and scrotum, followed by growth of the penis.[54] At the time that the penis develops, the seminal vesicles, the prostate, and the bulbourethral gland also enlarge and develop. The first ejaculation of seminal fluid generally occurs about one year after the beginning of accelerated penis growth, although this is often determined culturally rather than biologically, since for many boys first ejaculation occurs as a result of masturbation.[47] Boys are generally fertile before they have an adult appearance.[45]

In females, changes in the primary sex characteristics involve growth of the uterus, vagina, and other aspects of the reproductive system. Menarche, the beginning of menstruation, is a relatively late development which follows a long series of hormonal changes.[55] Generally, a girl is not fully fertile until several years after menarche, as regular ovulation follows menarche by about two years.[56] Unlike males, therefore, females usually appear physically mature before they are capable of becoming pregnant.

Changes in secondary sex characteristics include every change that is not directly related to sexual reproduction. In males, these changes involve appearance of pubic, facial, and body hair, deepening of the voice, roughening of the skin around the upper arms and thighs, and increased development of the sweat glands. In females, secondary sex changes involve elevation of the breasts, widening of the hips, development of pubic and underarm hair, widening of the areolae, and elevation of the nipples.[57] The changes in secondary sex characteristics that take place during puberty are often referred to in terms of five Tanner stages,[58] named after the British pediatrician who devised the categorization system.

Changes in the brain

The human brain is not fully developed by the time a person reaches puberty. Between the ages of 10 and 25, the brain undergoes changes that have important implications for behavior (see Cognitive development below). The brain reaches 90% of its adult size by the time a person is six years of age.[59] Thus, the brain does not grow in size much during adolescence. However, the creases in the brain continue to become more complex until the late teens. The biggest changes in the folds of the brain during this time occur in the parts of the cortex that process cognitive and emotional information.[59]

Over the course of adolescence, the amount of white matter in the brain increases linearly, while the amount of grey matter in the brain follows an inverted-U pattern. Through a process called synaptic pruning, unnecessary neuronal connections in the brain are eliminated and the amount of grey matter is pared down. However, this does not mean that the brain loses functionality; rather, it becomes more efficient due to increased myelination (insulation of axons) and the reduction of unused pathways.[60]

The first areas of the brain to be pruned are those involving primary functions, such as motor and sensory areas. The areas of the brain involved in more complex processes lose matter later in development. These include the lateral and prefrontal cortices, among other regions.[61] Some of the most developmentally significant changes in the brain occur in the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in decision making and cognitive control, as well as other higher cognitive functions. During adolescence, myelination and synaptic pruning in the prefrontal cortex increases, improving the efficiency of information processing, and neural connections between the prefrontal cortex and other regions of the brain are strengthened.[62] This leads to better evaluation of risks and rewards, as well as improved control over impulses. Specifically, developments in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex are important for controlling impulses and planning ahead, while development in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is important for decision making. Changes in the orbitofrontal cortex are important for evaluating rewards and risks.

Two neurotransmitters that play important roles in adolescent brain development are glutamate and dopamine. Glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter. During the synaptic pruning that occurs during adolescence, most of the neural connections that are pruned contain receptors for glutamate or other excitatory neurotransmitters.[63] Because of this, by early adulthood the synaptic balance in the brain is more inhibitory than excitatory.

Dopamine is associated with pleasure and attuning to the environment during decision-making. During adolescence, dopamine levels in the limbic system increase and input of dopamine to the prefrontal cortex increases.[64] The balance of excitatory to inhibitory neurotransmitters and increased dopamine activity in adolescence may have implications for adolescent risk-taking and vulnerability to boredom (see Cognitive development below). Development in the limbic system plays an important role in determining rewards and punishments and processing emotional experience and social information. Changes in the levels of the neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin in the limbic system make adolescents more emotional and more responsive to rewards and stress. The corresponding increase in emotional variability also can increase adolescents' vulnerability.

Cognitive development

Adolescence is also a time for rapid cognitive development.[65] Piaget describes adolescence as the stage of life in which the individual's thoughts start taking more of an abstract form and the egocentric thoughts decrease. This allows the individual to think and reason in a wider perspective.[66] A combination of behavioural and fMRI studies have demonstrated development of executive functions, that is, cognitive skills that enable the control and coordination of thoughts and behaviour, which are generally associated with the prefrontal cortex.[67] The thoughts, ideas and concepts developed at this period of life greatly influence one's future life, playing a major role in character and personality formation.[68]

Biological changes in brain structure and connectivity within the brain interact with increased experience, knowledge, and changing social demands to produce rapid cognitive growth (see Changes in the brain above). The age at which particular changes take place varies between individuals, but the changes discussed below generally begin at puberty or shortly thereafter and some skills continue to develop as the adolescent ages.

Theoretical perspectives

There are two perspectives on adolescent thinking. One is the constructivist view of cognitive development. Based on the work of Piaget, it takes a quantitative, state-theory approach, hypothesizing that adolescents' cognitive improvement is relatively sudden and drastic. The second is the information-processing perspective, which derives from the study of artificial intelligence and attempts to explain cognitive development in terms of the growth of specific components of the thinking process.

Improvements in cognitive ability

By the time individuals have reached age 15 or so, their basic thinking abilities are comparable to those of adults. These improvements occur in five areas during adolescence:

1.     Attention. Improvements are seen in selective attention, the process by which one focuses on one stimulus while tuning out another. Divided attention, the ability to pay attention to two or more stimuli at the same time, also improves.[69][70]

2.     Memory. Improvements are seen in both working memory and long-term memory.[71]

3.     Processing speed. Adolescents think more quickly than children. Processing speed improves sharply between age five and middle adolescence; it then begins to level off at age 15 and does not appear to change between late adolescence and adulthood.[72]

4.     Organization. Adolescents are more aware of their own thought processes and can use mnemonic devices and other strategies to think more efficiently.[73]

5.     Metacognition.

Hypothetical and abstract thinking

Adolescents' thinking is less bound to concrete events than that of children: they can contemplate possibilities outside the realm of what currently exists. One manifestation of the adolescent's increased facility with thinking about possibilities is the improvement of skill in deductive reasoning, which leads to the development of hypothetical thinking. This provides the ability to plan ahead, see the future consequences of an action and to provide alternative explanations of events. It also makes adolescents more skilled debaters, as they can reason against a friend's or parent's assumptions. Adolescents also develop a more sophisticated understanding of probability.

The appearance of more systematic, abstract thinking is another notable aspect of cognitive development during adolescence. For example, adolescents find it easier than children to comprehend the sorts of higher-order abstract logic inherent in puns, proverbs, metaphors, and analogies. Their increased facility permits them to appreciate the ways in which language can be used to convey multiple messages, such as satire, metaphor, and sarcasm. (Children younger than age nine often cannot comprehend sarcasm at all.)[74] This also permits the application of advanced reasoning and logical processes to social and ideological matters such as interpersonal relationships, politics, philosophy, religion, morality, friendship, faith, democracy, fairness, and honesty.

Metacognition

A third gain in cognitive ability involves thinking about thinking itself, a process referred to as metacognition. It often involves monitoring one's own cognitive activity during the thinking process. Adolescents' improvements in knowledge of their own thinking patterns lead to better self-control and more effective studying. It is also relevant in social cognition, resulting in increased introspection, self-consciousness, and intellectualization (in the sense of thought about one's own thoughts, rather than the Freudian definition as a defense mechanism). Adolescents are much better able than children to understand that people do not have complete control over their mental activity. Being able to introspect may lead to two forms of adolescent egocentrism, which results in two distinct problems in thinking: the imaginary audience and the personal fable. These likely peak at age fifteen, along with self-consciousness in general.[75]

Related to metacognition and abstract thought, perspective-taking involves a more sophisticated theory of mind.[76] Adolescents reach a stage of social perspective-taking in which they can understand how the thoughts or actions of one person can influence those of another person, even if they personally are not involved.[77]

Relativistic thinking

Compared to children, adolescents are more likely to question others' assertions, and less likely to accept facts as absolute truths. Through experience outside the family circle, they learn that rules they were taught as absolute are in fact relativistic. They begin to differentiate between rules instituted out of common sense—not touching a hot stove—and those that are based on culturally-relative standards (codes of etiquette, not dating until a certain age), a delineation that younger children do not make. This can lead to a period of questioning authority in all domains.[78]

Wisdom

Wisdom, or the capacity for insight and judgment that is developed through experience,[79] increases between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five, then levels off. Thus, it is during the adolescence-adulthood transition that individuals acquire the type of wisdom that is associated with age. Wisdom is not the same as intelligence: adolescents do not improve substantially on IQ tests since their scores are relative to others in their same age group, and relative standing usually does not change—everyone matures at approximately the same rate in this way.

Risk-taking

In light of the fact that most injuries sustained by adolescents are related to risky behavior (car crashes, alcohol, unprotected sex), much research has been done on adolescent risk-taking, particularly on whether and why adolescents are more likely to take risks than adults. The behavioral decision-making theory proposes that adolescents and adults both weigh the potential rewards and consequences of an action. However, research has shown that adolescents seem to give more weight to rewards, particularly social rewards, than do adults.[80]

During adolescence, there is an extremely high emphasis on approval of peers as a reward due to adolescents' increased self-consciousness. There may be evolutionary benefits to an increased propensity for risk-taking in adolescence—without risk-taking, teenagers would not have the motivation or confidence necessary to make the change in society from childhood to adulthood. It may also have reproductive advantages: adolescents have a newfound priority in sexual attraction and dating, and risk-taking is required to impress potential mates. Research also indicates that baseline sensation seeking may affect risk-taking behavior throughout the lifespan.[81][82]

Given the potential consequences, engaging in sexual behavior is considerably risky, particularly for adolescents. Be that as it may, some teens do engage in sexual activity in a variety of ways. Having unprotected sex, using poor birth control methods (e.g. withdrawal), having multiple sexual partners, and poor communication are some aspects of sexual behavior that make it risky. Some qualities of adolescents' lives that are often correlated with risky sexual behavior include higher rates of experienced abuse, lower rates of parental support and monitoring.[83] Adolescence is also commonly a time of questioning sexuality and gender. This may involve intimate experimentation with people identifying as the same gender as well as with people of differing genders.

Psychological development

The formal study of adolescent psychology began with the publication of G. Stanley Hall's "Adolescence in 1904." Hall, who was the first president of the American Psychological Association, viewed adolescence primarily as a time of internal turmoil and upheaval (sturm und drang). This understanding of adolescence was based on two then new ways of understanding human behavior: Darwin's evolutionary theory and Freud's psychodynamic theory. He believed that adolescence was a representation of our human ancestors' phylogenetic shift from being primitive to being civilized. Hall's assertions stood relatively uncontested until the 1950s, when psychologists such as Erik Erikson and Anna Freud started to formulate their own theories about adolescence. Freud believed that the psychological disturbances associated with adolescence were biologically based and culturally universal, while Erikson focused on the dichotomy between identity formation and role fulfillment.[84] Even with their different theories, these three psychologists agreed that adolescence was inherently a time of disturbance and psychological confusion. The less turbulent aspects of adolescence, such as peer relations and cultural influence, were left largely ignored until the 1980s. From the '50s until the '80s, the focus of the field was mainly on describing patterns of behavior as opposed to explaining them.[84]

Jean Macfarlane founded the University of California, Berkeley's Institute of Human Development, originally called the Institute of Child Welfare, in 1927.[85] The Institute was instrumental in initiating studies of normal development, in contrast to previous work that had been dominated by theories based on pathological personalities.[85] The studies looked at human development during the Great Depression and World War II, unique historical circumstances under which a generation of children grew up. The Oakland Growth Study, initiated by Harold Jones and Herbert Stolz in 1931, aimed to study the physical, intellectual, and social development of children in the Oakland area. Data collection began in 1932 and continued until 1981, allowing the researchers to gather longitudinal data on the individuals that extended past adolescence into adulthood. Jean Macfarlane launched the Berkeley Guidance Study, which examined the development of children in terms of their socioeconomic and family backgrounds.[86] These studies provided the background for Glen Elder in the 1960s, to propose a life-course perspective of adolescent development. Elder formulated several descriptive principles of adolescent development. The principle of historical time and place states that an individual's development is shaped by the time period and location in which they grow up. The principle of the importance of timing in one's life refers to the different impact that life events have on development based on when in one's life they occur. The idea of linked lives states that one's development is shaped by the interconnected network of relationships of which one is a part; and the principle of human agency asserts that one's life course is constructed via the choices and actions of an individual within the context of their historical time period and social network.[87]

In 1984, the Society for Research on Adolescence (SRA) became the first official organization dedicated to the study of adolescent psychology. Some of the issues first addressed by this group include: the nature versus nurture debate as it pertains to adolescence; understanding the interactions between adolescents and their environment; and considering culture, social groups, and historical context when interpreting adolescent behavior.[84]

Evolutionary biologists like Jeremy Griffith have drawn parallels between adolescent psychology and the developmental evolution of modern humans from hominid ancestors as a manifestation of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny.[88]

Social development

Identity development

A common belief about adolescence is that it is the time when teenagers form personal identities. Egocentrism in adolescents forms a self-conscious desire to feel important in their peer groups and enjoy social acceptance.[89] Empirical studies suggest that this process might be more accurately described as identity development, rather than formation, but confirms a normative process of change in both content and structure of one's thoughts about the self.[90] Since choices made during adolescent years can influence later life, high levels of self-awareness and self-control during mid-adolescence will lead to better decisions during the transition to adulthood.[citation needed] Researchers have used three general approaches to understanding identity development: self-concept, sense of identity, and self-esteem. The years of adolescence create a more conscientious group of young adults. Adolescents pay close attention and give more time and effort to their appearance as their body goes through changes. Unlike children, teens put forth an effort to look presentable (1991).[4] The environment in which an adolescent grows up also plays an important role in their identity development. Studies done by the American Psychological Association have shown that adolescents with a less privileged upbringing have a more difficult time developing their identity.[91]

Self-concept

See also: Self-concept

Early in adolescence, cognitive developments result in greater self-awareness, greater awareness of others and their thoughts and judgments, the ability to think about abstract, future possibilities, and the ability to consider multiple possibilities at once. As a result, adolescents experience a significant shift from the simple, concrete, and global self-descriptions typical of young children; as children, they defined themselves with physical traits whereas as adolescents, they define themselves based on their values, thoughts and opinions.[92]

Adolescents can conceptualize multiple "possible selves" they could become[93] and long-term possibilities and consequences of their choices.[94] Exploring these possibilities may result in abrupt changes in self-presentation as the adolescent chooses or rejects qualities and behaviors, trying to guide the actual self toward the ideal self (who the adolescent wishes to be) and away from the feared self (who the adolescent does not want to be). For many, these distinctions are uncomfortable, but they also appear to motivate achievement through behavior consistent with the ideal and distinct from the feared possible selves.[93][95]

Further distinctions in self-concept, called "differentiation," occur as the adolescent recognizes the contextual influences on their own behavior and the perceptions of others, and begin to qualify their traits when asked to describe themselves.[96] Differentiation appears fully developed by mid-adolescence.[97] Peaking in the 7th-9th grades, the personality traits adolescents use to describe themselves refer to specific contexts, and therefore may contradict one another. The recognition of inconsistent content in the self-concept is a common source of distress in these years (see Cognitive dissonance),[98] but this distress may benefit adolescents by encouraging structural development.

Sense of identity

Unlike the conflicting aspects of self-concept, identity represents a coherent sense of self stable across circumstances and including past experiences and future goals. Everyone has a self-concept, whereas Erik Erikson argued that not everyone fully achieves identity. Erikson's theory of stages of development includes the identity crisis in which adolescents must explore different possibilities and integrate different parts of themselves before committing to their beliefs. He described the resolution of this process as a stage of "identity achievement" but also stressed that the identity challenge "is never fully resolved once and for all at one point in time".[99] Adolescents begin by defining themselves based on their crowd membership. "Clothes help teens explore new identities, separate from parents, and bond with peers." Fashion has played a major role when it comes to teenagers "finding their selves"; Fashion is always evolving, which corresponds with the evolution of change in the personality of teenagers.[100] Just as fashion is evolving to influence adolescents so is the media. "Modern life takes place amidst a never-ending barrage of flesh on screens, pages, and billboards."[101] This barrage consciously or subconsciously registers into the mind causing issues with self-image a factor that contributes to an adolescence sense of identity. Researcher James Marcia developed the current method for testing an individual's progress along these stages.[102][103] His questions are divided into three categories: occupation, ideology, and interpersonal relationships. Answers are scored based on extent to which the individual has explored and the degree to which he has made commitments. The result is classification of the individual into a) identity diffusion in which all children begin, b) Identity Foreclosure in which commitments are made without the exploration of alternatives, c) Moratorium, or the process of exploration, or d) Identity Achievement in which Moratorium has occurred and resulted in commitments.[104]

Research since reveals self-examination beginning early in adolescence, but identity achievement rarely occurring before age 18.[105] The freshman year of college influences identity development significantly, but may actually prolong psychosocial moratorium by encouraging reexamination of previous commitments and further exploration of alternate possibilities without encouraging resolution.[106] For the most part, evidence has supported Erikson's stages: each correlates with the personality traits he originally predicted.[104] Studies also confirm the impermanence of the stages; there is no final endpoint in identity development.[107]

Environment and identity

An adolescent's environment plays a huge role in their identity development.[91] While most adolescent studies are conducted on white, middle class children, studies show that the more privileged upbringing people have, the more successfully they develop their identity.[91] The forming of an adolescent's identity is a crucial time in their life. It has been recently found that demographic patterns suggest that the transition to adulthood is now occurring over a longer span of years than was the case during the middle of the 20th century. Accordingly, youth, a period that spans late adolescence and early adulthood, has become a more prominent stage of the life course. This therefore has caused various factors to become important during this development.[108] So many factors contribute to the developing social identity of an adolescent from commitment, to coping devices,[109] to social media. All of these factors are affected by the environment an adolescent grows up in. A child from a more privileged upbringing is exposed to more opportunities and better situations in general. An adolescent from an inner city or a crime-driven neighborhood is more likely to be exposed to an environment that can be detrimental to their development. Adolescence is a sensitive period in the development process, and exposure to the wrong things at that time can have a major affect on future decisions. While children that grow up in nice suburban communities are not exposed to bad environments they are more likely to participate in activities that can benefit their identity and contribute to a more successful identity development.[91]

Sexual orientation and identity

Sexual orientation has been defined as "an erotic inclination toward people of one or more genders, most often described as sexual or erotic attractions".[110] In recent years, psychologists have sought to understand how sexual orientation develops during adolescence. Some theorists believe that there are many different possible developmental paths one could take, and that the specific path an individual follows may be determined by their sex, orientation, and when they reached the onset of puberty.[110]

In 1989, Troiden proposed a four-stage model for the development of homosexual sexual identity.[111] The first stage, known as sensitization, usually starts in childhood, and is marked by the child's becoming aware of same-sex attractions. The second stage, identity confusion, tends to occur a few years later. In this stage, the youth is overwhelmed by feelings of inner turmoil regarding their sexual orientation, and begins to engage sexual experiences with same-sex partners. In the third stage of identity assumption, which usually takes place a few years after the adolescent has left home, adolescents begin to come out to their family and close friends, and assumes a self-definition as gay, lesbian, or bisexual.[112] In the final stage, known as commitment, the young adult adopts their sexual identity as a lifestyle. Therefore, this model estimates that the process of coming out begins in childhood, and continues through the early to mid 20s. This model has been contested, and alternate ideas have been explored in recent years.

In terms of sexual identity, adolescence is when most gay/lesbian and transgender adolescents begin to recognize and make sense of their feelings. Many adolescents may choose to come out during this period of their life once an identity has been formed; many others may go through a period of questioning or denial, which can include experimentation with both homosexual and heterosexual experiences.[113] A study of 194 lesbian, gay, and bisexual youths under the age of 21 found that having an awareness of one's sexual orientation occurred, on average, around age 10, but the process of coming out to peers and adults occurred around age 16 and 17, respectively.[114] Coming to terms with and creating a positive LGBT identity can be difficult for some youth for a variety of reasons. Peer pressure is a large factor when youth who are questioning their sexuality or gender identity are surrounded by heteronormative peers and can cause great distress due to a feeling of being different from everyone else. While coming out can also foster better psychological adjustment, the risks associated are real. Indeed, coming out in the midst of a heteronormative peer environment often comes with the risk of ostracism, hurtful jokes, and even violence.[113] Because of this, statistically the suicide rate amongst LGBT adolescents is up to four times higher than that of their heterosexual peers due to bullying and rejection from peers or family members.[115]

Self-esteem

The final major aspect of identity formation is self-esteem, one's thoughts and feelings about one's self-concept and identity. Contrary to popular belief, there is no empirical evidence for a significant drop in self-esteem over the course of adolescence.[116] "Barometric self-esteem" fluctuates rapidly and can cause severe distress and anxiety, but baseline self-esteem remains highly stable across adolescence.[117] The validity of global self-esteem scales has been questioned, and many suggest that more specific scales might reveal more about the adolescent experience.[118] Girls are most likely to enjoy high self-esteem when engaged in supportive relationships with friends, the most important function of friendship to them is having someone who can provide social and moral support. When they fail to win friends' approval or couldn't find someone with whom to share common activities and common interests, in these cases, girls suffer from low self-esteem. In contrast, boys are more concerned with establishing and asserting their independence and defining their relation to authority.[119]As such, they are more likely to derive high self-esteem from their ability to successfully influence their friends; on the other hand, the lack of romantic competence, for example, failure to win or maintain the affection of the opposite or same-sex (depending on sexual orientation), is the major contributor to low self-esteem in adolescent boys. Due to the fact that both men and women happen to have a low self-esteem after ending a romantic relationship, they are prone to other symptoms that is caused by this state. Depression and hopelessness are only two of the various symptoms and it is said that women are twice as likely to experience depression and men are three to four times more likely to commit suicide (Mearns, 1991; Ustun & Sartorius, 1995).[120]

Relationships

In general

The relationships adolescents have with their peers, family, and members of their social sphere play a vital role in the social development of an adolescent. As an adolescent's social sphere develops rapidly as they distinguish the differences between friends and acquaintances, they often become heavily emotionally invested in friends.[121] This is not harmful; however, if these friends expose an individual to potentially harmful situations, this is an aspect of peer pressure. Adolescence is a vital period in social development because adolescents can be easily influenced by the people they develop close relationships with. This is the first time individuals can truly make their own decisions, which also makes this a sensitive period. Relationships are vital in the social development of an adolescent due to the extreme influence peers can have over an individual. These relationships become vital because they begin to help the adolescent understand the concept of personalities, how they form and why a person has that specific type of personality. "The use of psychological comparisons could serve both as an index of the growth of an implicit personality theory and as a component process accounting for its creation. In other words, by comparing one person's personality characteristics to another's, we would be setting up the framework for creating a general theory of personality (and, ... such a theory would serve as a useful framework for coming to understand specific persons)."[122] Research shows that relationships have the largest affect over the social development of an individual.

Family

Adolescence marks a rapid change in one's role within a family. Young children tend to assert themselves forcefully, but are unable to demonstrate much influence over family decisions until early adolescence,[123] when they are increasingly viewed by parents as equals. When children go through puberty, there is often a significant increase in parent-child conflict and a less cohesive familial bond. Arguments often concern minor issues of control, such as curfew, acceptable clothing, and the adolescent's right to privacy,[124][125] which adolescents may have previously viewed as issues over which their parents had complete authority.[126] Parent-adolescent disagreement also increases as friends demonstrate a greater impact on one another, new influences on the adolescent that may be in opposition to parents' values. Social media has also played an increasing role in adolescent and parent disagreements.[127] While parents never had to worry about the threats of social media in the past, it has become a dangerous place for children. While adolescents strive for their freedoms, the unknowns to parents of what their child is doing on social media sites is a challenging subject, due to the increasing amount of predators on social media sites. Many parents have very little knowledge of social networking sites in the first place and this further increases their mistrust. Although conflicts between children and parents increase during adolescence, these are just relatively minor issues. Regarding their important life issues, most adolescents still share the same attitudes and values as their parents.[128]

During childhood, siblings are a source of conflict and frustration as well as a support system.[129] Adolescence may affect this relationship differently, depending on sibling gender. In same-sex sibling pairs, intimacy increases during early adolescence, then remains stable. Mixed-sex siblings pairs act differently; siblings drift apart during early adolescent years, but experience an increase in intimacy starting at middle adolescence.[130] Sibling interactions are children's first relational experiences, the ones that shape their social and self-understanding for life.[131] Sustaining positive sibling relations can assist adolescents in a number of ways. Siblings are able to act as peers, and may increase one another's sociability and feelings of self-worth. Older siblings can give guidance to younger siblings, although the impact of this can be either positive or negative depending on the activity of the older sibling.

A potential important influence on adolescence is change of the family dynamic, specifically divorce. With the divorce rate up to about 50%,[132] divorce is common and adds to the already great amount of change in adolescence. Custody disputes soon after a divorce often reflect a playing out of control battles and ambivalence between parents. In extreme cases of instability and abuse in homes, divorce can have a positive effect on families due to less conflict in the home. However, most research suggests a negative effect on adolescence as well as later development. A recent study found that, compared with peers who grow up in stable post-divorce families, children of divorce who experience additional family transitions during late adolescence, make less progress in their math and social studies performance over time.[133] Another recent study put forth a new theory entitled the adolescent epistemological trauma theory,[134] which posited that traumatic life events such as parental divorce during the formative period of late adolescence portend lifelong effects on adult conflict behavior that can be mitigated by effective behavioral assessment and training.[135] A parental divorce during childhood or adolescence continues to have a negative effect when a person is in his or her twenties and early thirties. These negative effects include romantic relationships and conflict style, meaning as adults, they are more likely to use the styles of avoidance and competing in conflict management.[136]

Despite changing family roles during adolescence, the home environment and parents are still important for the behaviors and choices of adolescents.[137] Adolescents who have a good relationship with their parents are less likely to engage in various risk behaviors, such as smoking, drinking, fighting, and/or unprotected sexual intercourse.[137] In addition, parents influence the education of adolescence. A study conducted by Adalbjarnardottir and Blondal (2009) showed that adolescents at the age of 14 who identify their parents as authoritative figures are more likely to complete secondary education by the age of 22—as support and encouragement from an authoritative parent motivates the adolescence to complete schooling to avoid disappointing that parent.[138]

Peers

Peer groups are essential to social and general development. High quality friendships may enhance children's development regardless of the characteristics of those friends. As children begin to gain bonds with various people and create friendships with them, it later helps them when they are adolescent. This sets up the framework for adolescence and peer groups.[139] Peer groups are especially important during adolescence, a period of development characterized by a dramatic increase in time spent with peers[140] and a decrease in adult supervision.[141] Adolescents also associate with friends of the opposite sex much more than in childhood[142] and tend to identify with larger groups of peers based on shared characteristics.[143] It is also common for adolescents to use friends as coping devices in different situations.[144] A three factor structure of dealing with friends including avoidance, mastery, and nonchalance has shown that adolescent's use friends as coping devices with social stresses.

Peer groups offer members the opportunity to develop social skills such as empathy, sharing, and leadership. Peer groups can have positive influences on an individual, such as on academic motivation and performance. But they can also have negative influences, like encouraging experimentation with drugs, drinking, vandalism, and stealing through peer pressure.[145] Susceptibility to peer pressure increases during early adolescence, peaks around age 14, and declines thereafter.[146]

During early adolescence, adolescents often associate in cliques, exclusive, single-sex groups of peers with whom they are particularly close. Despite the common notion that cliques are an inherently negative influence, they may help adolescents become socially acclimated and form a stronger sense of identity. Within a clique of highly athletic male-peers, for example, the clique may create a stronger sense of fidelity and competition. Cliques also have become somewhat as a "collective parent," i.e. telling the adolescents what to do and not to do.[147] Towards late adolescence, cliques often merge into mixed-sex groups as teenagers begin romantically engaging with one another.[148] These small friend groups break down even further as socialization becomes more couple-oriented.

While peers may facilitate social development for one another, they may also hinder it. In Spanish teenagers, emotional (rather than solution-based) reaction to problems and emotional instability have been linked with physical aggression against peers.[149] Both physical and relational aggression are linked to a vast number of enduring psychological difficulties, especially depression, as is social rejection.[150] Because of this, bullied adolescents often develop problems that lead to further victimization.[151] Bullied adolescents are both more likely to continued to be bullied and more likely to bully others in the future.[152] However, this relationship is less stable in cases of cyberbullying, a relatively new issue among adolescents.

On a larger scale, adolescents often associate with crowds, groups of individuals who share a common interest or activity. Often, crowd identities may be the basis for stereotyping young people, such as jocks or nerds. In large, multi-ethnic high schools, there are often ethnically-determined crowds as well.[153] While crowds are very influential during early and middle adolescence, they lose salience during high school as students identify more individually.[154]

Romance and sexual activity

Main article: Adolescent sexuality

See also: Adolescent sexuality in the United States

Romantic relationships tend to increase in prevalence throughout adolescence. By age 15, 53% of adolescents have had a romantic relationship that lasted at least one month over the course of the previous 18 months.[155] In a 2008 study conducted by YouGov for Channel 4, 20% of 14−17-year-olds surveyed revealed that they had their first sexual experience at 13 or under in the United Kingdom.[156] A 2002 American study found that those aged 15–44 reported that the average age of first sexual intercourse was 17.0 for males and 17.3 for females.[157] The typical duration of relationships increases throughout the teenage years as well. This constant increase in the likelihood of a long-term relationship can be explained by sexual maturation and the development of cognitive skills necessary to maintain a romantic bond (e.g. caregiving, appropriate attachment), although these skills are not strongly developed until late adolescence.[158] Long-term relationships allow adolescents to gain the skills necessary for high-quality relationships later in life[159] and develop feelings of self-worth. Overall, positive romantic relationships among adolescents can result in long-term benefits. High-quality romantic relationships are associated with higher commitment in early adulthood[160] and are positively associated with self-esteem, self-confidence, and social competence.[161][162] Adolescents often date within their demographic in regards to race, ethnicity, popularity, and physical attractiveness.[163] However, there are traits in which certain individuals, particularly adolescent girls, seek diversity. While most adolescents date people approximately their own age, boys typically date partners the same age or younger; girls typically date partners the same age or older.[155]

Some researchers are now focusing on learning about how adolescents view their own relationships and sexuality; they want to move away from a research point of view that focuses on the problems associated with adolescent sexuality. Lucia O'Sullivan and her colleagues found that there weren't any significant gender differences in the relationship events adolescent boys and girls from grades 7-12 reported.[164] Most teens said they had kissed their partners, held hands with them, thought of themselves as being a couple and told people they were in a relationship. This means that private thoughts about the relationship as well as public recognition of the relationship were both important to the adolescents in the sample. Sexual events (such as sexual touching, sexual intercourse) were less common than romantic events (holding hands) and social events (being with one's partner in a group setting). The researchers state that these results mean that researchers should focus more on the positive aspects of adolescents and their social and romantic interactions rather than put most of their focus on sexual behavior and its consequences.[164]

Adolescence marks a time of sexual maturation, which manifests in social interactions as well. While adolescents may engage in casual sexual encounters (often referred to as hookups), most sexual experience during this period of development takes place within romantic relationships.[165] Kissing, hand holding, and hugging signify satisfaction and commitment. Among young adolescents, "heavy" sexual activity, marked by genital stimulation, is often associated with violence, depression, and poor relationship quality.[166][167] This effect does not hold true for sexual activity in late adolescence that takes place within a romantic relationship.[168] Some research suggest that there are genetic causes of early sexual activity that are also risk factors for delinquency, suggesting that there is a group who are at risk for both early sexual activity and emotional distress. For old adolescents, though, sexual activity the context of romantic relationships was actually correlated with lower levels of deviant behavior after controlling for genetic risks, as opposed to sex outside of a relationship (hook-ups)[169]

Dating violence is fairly prevalent within adolescent relationships. When surveyed, 10-45% of adolescents reported having experienced physical violence in the context of a relationship while a quarter to a third of adolescents reported having experiencing psychological aggression. This reported aggression includes hitting, throwing things, or slaps, although most of this physical aggression does not result in a medical visit. Physical aggression in relationships tends to decline from high school through college and young adulthood.[148] In heterosexual couples, there is no significant difference between the rates of male and female aggressors, unlike in adult relationships.[170][171][172]

In contemporary society, adolescents also face some risks as their sexuality begins to transform. While some of these, such as emotional distress (fear of abuse or exploitation) and sexually transmitted infections/diseases (STIs/STDs), including HIV/AIDS, are not necessarily inherent to adolescence, others such as teenage pregnancy (through non-use or failure of contraceptives) are seen as social problems in most western societies. One in four sexually active teenagers will contract a STI.[173] Adolescents in the United States often chose "anything but intercourse" for sexual activity because they mistakenly believe it reduces the risk of STIs. Across the country, clinicians report rising diagnoses of herpes and human papillomavirus (HPV), which can cause genital warts, and is now thought to affect 15 percent of the teen population. Girls 15 to 19 have higher rates of gonorrhea than any other age group. One-quarter of all new HIV cases occur in those under the age of 21.[173] Multrine also states in her article that according to a March survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, eighty-one percent of parents want schools to discuss the use of condoms and contraception with their children. They also believe students should be able to be tested for STIs. Furthermore, teachers want to address such topics with their students. But, although 9 in 10 sex education instructors across the country believe that students should be taught about contraceptives in school, over one quarter report receiving explicit instructions from school boards and administrators not to do so. According to anthropologist Margaret Mead, the turmoil found in adolescence in Western society has a cultural rather than a physical cause; they reported that societies where young women engaged in free sexual activity had no such adolescent turmoil.

 

 

 

 

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