How Has The Definition Of Art Changed Over Time
The teenager is 1 of the more than unusual inventions of the 20th century. Humans have been turning 13 for tens of thousands of years, only merely recently did information technology occur to anybody that this was a special thing, or that the span between childhood and adulthood deserved its ain proper name. The term teen-ager dates dorsum to the early 1900s, but the word didn't stick. Fifty-fifty until World War 2, there are inappreciably whatsoever instances of teenagers in the pop press.
In 1953, J. Edgar Hoover warned of "an appalling increment in the number of crimes that volition be committed by teenagers in the years ahead."
In the last few decades, however, the national media has nurtured a growing obsession with teenagers, in the sort of way that is neither lewd nor, maybe, fully healthy. The press exhaustively tracks the apps young people use, the music they listen to, and the brands they follow. In the last few years, the fastest-growing large companies have been software and engineering firms whose get-go adopters are often young people who know their manner around a computer, smartphone, or virtual reality app. If most ancient cultures were gerontocratic, ruled past the old, mod civilization is fully teenocratic, governed by the tastes of young people, with old fogies forever playing grab-up.
The teenager emerged in the heart of the 20th century thanks to the confluence of three trends in pedagogy, economic science, and technology. Loftier schools gave young people a place to build a separate culture outside the watchful middle of family. Rapid growth gave them income, either earned or taken from their parents. Cars (and, afterwards, some other mobile engineering)
gave them independence.
1. The rise of compulsory education
As the U.S. economy shifted from a more localized agrarian society to a mass-production machine, families relocated closer to cities, and — at to the lowest degree initially — many sent their children to work in the factories. This triggered a countermovement to prevent kids from beingness forced to toil in mills.
The solution: compulsory public education for kids. Betwixt 1920 and 1936, the share of teenagers in high school more than doubled, from near thirty pct to more than 60 percent. As immature people spent more time in school, they developed their ain customs in an environment away from piece of work and family, where they could enforce their own social rules. Information technology is incommunicable to imagine American teenage culture in a world where every sixteen-twelvemonth-old male child is working jowl-to-jowl with his father on an assembly line.
2. The postwar economical boom
A serious commercial interest in teenagers didn't begin in earnest until later on World War 2. To entice marketers, teenagers needed money, and that money would come from two principal sources: the labor force and parents. The 1950s saw one of the great periods of economic expansion in American history. With total employment came ascent wages for unionized adults and older teenage workers.
Modern culture is fully teenocratic, governed past the tastes of immature people, with old fogies forever playing catch-up.
Meanwhile, parents gradually had fewer children and spent more per kid, as befits whatsoever scarce and valuable investment. Nascence rates declined beyond the advanced globe in the 2nd half of the 20th century due to both the rise of female education and the legalization of the pill. Since the 1970s, the richest twenty percent of U.S. households have more than doubled their spending on childhood "enrichment," such as summer camps, sports, and tutors. As the modern marriage has come to circumduct effectually children, young people emerged as the chief financial officers of family spending.
3. The invention of the auto
It might be a horrifying consideration for today's singles, but a get-go appointment once meant an introductory conversation in the living room with a girl's parents. This might have been followed by a deliciously bad-mannered family dinner.
Simply cars emancipated romance from the stilted small talk of the family parlor. Simply most everything a modern unmarried person considers to be a "date" was fabricated possible, or permissible, by the invention and normalization of car-driven romance. The fearfulness that young men and fast cars were upending romantic norms was widespread. The chorus of the 1909 Irving Berlin song "Proceed Away from the Young man Who Owns an Automobile" is instructive:
Keep away from the swain who owns an automobile
He'll take you far in his motor car
Too darn far from your Pa and Ma
If his 40 horsepower goes threescore miles an hour say
Farewell forever, goodbye forever
If you think Tinder and dating apps are destroying romance today, you would have hated cars in the 1900s. Cars didn't just hasten a historical shift from teenage codependence to independence. They fed the growth of a loftier school subculture. When buses could drive students further from their homes, ane-room schoolhouses gave manner to big buildings filled with teeming hordes of adolescents and their hormones.
The fall of the farming economy and the rise of mandatory education combined to create a teenage culture that Americans viewed with deep anxiety. Fears of "juvenile delinquency" were bicoastal, inspiring Hollywood films, such as Rebel without a Cause and Blackboard Jungle, and galvanizing Washington subcommittees on the terrible problem of teens.
These forces conspired to unleash an abundance of leisure time, a temporal vacuum that teenagers filled with experimentation. "The abolitionism of kid labor and the lengthening span of formal education have given us a huge leisure class of the immature, with animal energies never absorbed past tasks of production," wrote one New York Times critic in 1957. Even in the early on years of their classification, teenagers were regarded as cultural nomads. Rather than settle into the established rituals of American society, they were roving vagabonds seeking out new frontiers of tastes and behavior.
Kids These Days!
Hand-wringing about American youth is nothing new.
The problem with teens is that, well, they're just a pain in the y'all-know-what and e'er have been. With all those wild hormones surging, and little of the self-control that a mature person naturally possesses, they're bound to crusade trouble, equally these 20th-century excerpts from our pages reveal.
We Made It Besides Like shooting fish in a barrel for Them
What could accept happened 40 years ago that took the stamina out of the men and women who were to become the parents of these amorphous youths whose accent of conscious superiority indicates then conspicuously immature minds? We ourselves had lived equally pioneers, abstemiously, obediently, with few pleasures, and nether hardships that produced force of grapheme. The idea was to give our children more happiness and a better adventure. We accept made it so easy for them that as well many of them have go unfilial and egotistical.
Simply these young people are of the same stock that wrought a civilisation out of a wilderness. The contempo panic sent some of them to piece of work, and what sends all of them to earning their staff of life will not be a panic — however it looks on the ticker — but a national blessing.
—"Parents and Children, Yesterday and Today" by Corra Harris, May 28, 1932
Lost Generation
The 5 1000000 kids who were between 10 and thirteen years old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor six years ago are a lost generation and are rapidly condign America's major sociological problem. Everywhere on applications the classification "Check here if a veteran" haunts them.
Because they were built-in too belatedly to fight, the feeling of not belonging has created a serious morale problem for the lost generation. Accustomed during the war to his own spending coin and a feeling of social independence, the young nonveteran today finds himself literally an outcast.
The need for some kind of firsthand activeness is pressing. The lost generation asks only for the take a chance to belong.
—"Our 'Lost Generation' Wants to Vest" by Arnold L. Horelick, August 2, 1947
Blitz to Judgment
"Boys volition exist boys," we used say, when the neighborhood kids jumped on the back terminate of the streetcar and pulled the trolley off its overhead wire. We said information technology again when they bankrupt out with a black eye after a fight behind the barn. Now all the neighborhood kids are juvenile delinquents, whether they belong to the switchblade set under the Brooklyn Bridge or to the baseball squad that plays in the Smiths' empty lot at the corner of Elm and Pine. … Granted, juvenile malversation — particularly in our cities — is a serious trouble, but why continually drag in that dispiriting phrase every fourth dimension a teenage action is mentioned?
—"You'd Call back It Was Unconstitutional to Be a Teenager" by Carol Spicer, September twenty, 1958
Teen Spirit
"Our youths now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authorization, boldness for older people. Children nowadays are tyrants. They no longer rise when their elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble their nutrient, and tyrannize their teachers."
This remark sounds like the beginning of a letter of the alphabet to a metropolitan newspaper or the lament of an one-time-fashioned parent of the 20th century. In fact, it was made by Socrates in the 5th century B.C.
Are these comments whatever more valid now than they were in Socrates' time? I am inclined to call up not. What the young person of today needs above all else is peace — peace with himself. Almost of them, left alone, come to some sort of armistice with themselves sooner or later, but one is never sure that hostilities are over. This sort of peace involves recognition; and information technology is our job equally teachers and parents to see that this recognition comes in a mode which volition lead to happiness in the future.
—"Why Do They Misbehave?" past Edward T. Hall, September 10, 1960
In 1953, J. Edgar Hoover published an FBI report warning that "the nation tin can await an appalling increase in the number of crimes that will be committed past teenagers in the years ahead." The message reverberated in Congress, where President Dwight Eisenhower used his 1955 Land of the Spousal relationship to telephone call for a federal legislation to "assist the states in dealing with this nationwide trouble." Fredric Wertham's international bestseller Seduction of the Innocent relied on sketchy forensics and hysterical prissiness to argue that comic books were a cause of juvenile delinquency. On the ane paw, Wertham's consideration for art's influence on young people is noble in the abstract. But his specific recommendations were priggish in the extreme; he complained, for example, that Superman was a fascist and Wonder Adult female turned women into lesbians. He called comic books "short courses in murder, mayhem, robbery, rape, cannibalism, carnage, necrophilia, sex, sadism, masochism, and near every other course of crime, degeneracy, bestiality, and horror."
As soon every bit teenagers were invented, they were feared. Many social critics made no distinction between the young auto-jacking thieves and the comic readers. To an former worrywart, they were all feral gypsy sprites.
The last 60 years have made teenagers separate. But are they really so different? Or are teens but like adults — but with less coin, fewer responsibilities, and no mortgage?
In that location is some bear witness that, every bit many parents quietly suspect, teenagers are chemically singled-out from the rest of humanity. They suffer uniquely from loosely connected frontal lobes, the decision center of the encephalon, and an enlarged nucleus accumbens, the pleasure center. And so where adults tend to see the downsides of risky behavior in high definition, teenagers see the potential rewards as if projected onto an IMAX screen with surround sound. The issue is sadly predictable: Teens have more risks and suffer more accidents. Americans between 15 and 19 have a mortality rate that'southward well-nigh three times college than those ages 5 to 14.
For Laurence Steinberg, a career investigating the teenage mind started with a common observation that is self-evident to parents, teachers, or anybody with fifty-fifty the faintest memories of loftier school: Teenagers ofttimes act dumber around other teenagers. Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple Academy, put people of various ages in a faux driving game with streets and stoplights. Adults drove the same, whether or not they had an audience. Merely teenagers took twice as many "chances" — similar running a yellowish light — when their friends were watching. Teenagers are exquisitely sensitive to the influence of their peers. The precise definition of coolness may change over time, from cigarettes to Snaps, only the deep, animal need to possess information technology does not.
Simply what is coolness, anyhow? In sociology, it is sometimes defined as a positive rebellion. Information technology means breaking away from an illegitimate mainstream in a legitimate way. That might sound like a fussy definition. Just it has its uses. My high school had a dress code, and when y'all're 14 years old, violating a repressive clothing government is a beautifully obvious way to signal to other kids that you're noncompliant. But not always. What about sagging your slacks at a schoolhouse memorial for war heroes? Or proudly untucking your shirt at a funeral for the school's favorite teacher? The same group of people tin consider an outfit cool or deeply disrespectful, depending on how legitimate people view the norm that it'south violating.
At the end of the 20th century, many teens gravitated to logos. The long economic expansion from the 1980s and the 1990s gave them the means to spend lavishly on wear emblems. A style striking like Ralph Lauren was based not only on the quality of the garment, merely as well on the logo's talismanic ability in loftier school hallways.
In recent years, the smartphone screen displaced the embroidered logo equally the focal indicate of teen identity. It was once sufficient to look good in a high school hallway, but today, Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram are all high schoolhouse hallways, where young people perform and see performances, approximate and are judged. Many decades subsequently another mobile device, the car, helped to invent the teenager, the iPhone and its ilk offered new, nimble instruments of self-expression, symbols of independence, and better ways to hook upwardly.
And then, in half a century, teenagers went from beingness a newfangled nomenclature of bad-mannered youth to an existential threat to American security to a valuable consumer demographic and a worthy topic of research. Teenagers are the market's neophiles, the group nigh likely to accept a new musical sound, a new clothing fashion, or a new technology trend. For adults, peculiarly those with power and coin, the rules are what keep you lot rubber. When you're young, every rule is illegitimate until proven otherwise. Information technology is precisely because they have and so trivial to lose from the mode things are that immature people will continue to be the inexhaustible motor of culture.
From Hit Makers by Derek Thompson, published past Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a sectionalization of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright 2017 past Derek Thompson.
Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine, where he writes nearly economics and the media and is a regular correspondent to NPR's Hither and Now.
This article is featured in the Jan/February 2018 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more fine art, inspiring stories, fiction, sense of humor, and features from our athenaeum.
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Source: https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2018/02/brief-history-teenagers/
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