Word: sociologists
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...interesting, informed and even intellectual when barely out of childhood, young kids all over the U.S. are pulling down the entry age to teendom. Even as they do, the affluent society is pushing up the average age of school leaving. The lengthened span of teen-agery-what Johns Hopkins Sociologist James Coleman calls "the coming earlier to social maturity while having to spend a considerably longer period in a dependent role"-is further fattened by a growth rate of teen-age population that is four times as high as the U.S. average. The country now has 24 million people aged...
...calls "parental imperatives." Some of the slackening has been as silly as the diffident dad in Max Schulman's I Was a Teen-Age Dwarf, who takes his son on "palship walks." But much of the diminishing tension results from parental intent as well as parental abdication. Harvard Sociologist Talcott Parsons finds many young parents "committed to a policy of training serious independence in youth," to which children respond with seriousness-and an occasional wistful regret. "I don't get authority at home," sighs Dana Nye, 17, a student at Pacific Palisades High School in Los Angeles...
...word invented in the U.S. and popularized scarcely 25 years ago to supplant such earlier images as the carefree Huck Finn type, the early-to-work Horatio Alger model and the heavily psychological "adolescent" of three decades back. It was the culmination of the process by which, as Sociologist Denney points out, the U.S. became the first nation to transform children from "a family asset as labor to a family liability as student-consumer." That liability is one that the U.S. seems willing to afford; it has created a flourishing subculture whose goals, heroes, styles and customs...
...somehow better than one who says 'I know for sure.' " Inevitably many adolescents are left with few guidelines. "Their difficulty," says Harvard Historian Laurence Wylie, "lies not in living up to expectations, but in discovering what they really are." The result, according to University of California Sociologist Edgar Z. Friedenberg, is "the vanishing adolescent"-made to mature earlier, yet in many ways still engagingly immature. And since "part of the American dream is to live long and die young," many adults ambivalently relish and resent the teen-ager's freedom and spontaneity. "Our whole culture believes less...
Armstead and Harris are college-bound, but they are the exceptions. For most slum kids, says Hunter College Sociologist Ernest Smith, "the American dream is not the American fact. These children cannot respond to what is being taught, and most educators resist changing the curriculums to aid these children." Kenneth B. Clark, New York psychologist and civil rights leader, holds that "the Negro kid who drops out of school is probably doing so to protect himself from a system designed to throw him on the dung heap of our society...