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1 New Kids on the Block School Reform, the Juvenile Court, and Demographic Change at the Turn of the Century The Hero of the Twentieth Century Given the commanding presence of the adolescent in all aspects of contemporary Western culture, it is hard to imagine a time when such a concept and its representative demographic did not exist, but most scholars are in agreement that one need glance back only a hundred years or so to find evidence of such a reality. In his frequently cited 1960 study of the evolution of childhood and the family, Centuries of Childhood:A Social History of Family Life, Philippe Ariès surveys a wide scope of Western literary and cultural texts and doesn’t see anything that resembles our contemporary concept of adolescence until the late nineteenth century. Historically, in Western culture, Ariès tells us, the adolescent has been subsumed by the much more common category of the child.For example,“[i]n school Latin the word puer and the word adolescens were used indiscriminately. Preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale are the catalogues of the Jesuit College at Caen, a list of the pupils’ names accompanied by comments. A boy of fifteen is described in these catalogues as bonus puer, while his young schoolmate of thirteen is called optimus adolescens.”1 According to Ariès, the lack of distinction between the puer and the adolescens is indicative of a society that made no distinction between the two as demographic entities and a culture in which individuals passed from childhood to adulthood with no pronounced and extended transition period. In a detailed study of the European school system, for example, Ariès concludes that “[i]n the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, children of ten and boys of fifteen were mixed up with adults; in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, children and adolescents continued to study together 22 Chapter 1 but were separated from adults.” And even though there was a “recognition of adolescence” in the seventeenth century with the appearance of the academy, the physical separation of children and adolescents did not begin until the latter part of the eighteenth century, when an “increasingly close correspondence between age and class” and a new interest in the officer and the soldier began to carve out a space between the child and the adult: “The medieval school made no distinction between the child and the adult.The college at the beginning of modern times had merged adolescence and childhood in the same scholastic system. In the eighteenth century, the officer and the soldier were to introduce into sensibility the new notion of adolescence.”This new notion became more commonplace, according to Ariès, throughout the nineteenth century, as age segregation in the schools became more pronounced. With as much fanfare as is deserved by what Ariès deems the “privileged age” of the twentieth century , the adolescent had arrived: “The first typical adolescent of modern times was Wagner’s Siegfried: the music of Siegfried expressed for the first time that combination of (provisional) purity, physical strength, naturism, spontaneity and joie de vivre which was to make the adolescent the hero of our twentieth century, the century of adolescence.”2 Ariès’s conclusions are not without controversy, however. Often in direct rebuttal to his work, scholars have identified “adolescentlike” spaces in the “chusing time” of colonial New England, London apprentices during the seventeenth century, apprentices in Bristol during the sixteenth century, sixteenth-century youth abbeys in France, and confraternities in Florence during the fifteenth century, among other places.3 The problem, of course, is one of definition. If adolescence is defined as an identifiable stage between—and distinctly different from—childhood and adulthood , then it is not difficult to find evidence of its existence in texts from a wide variety of cultures and time periods. But, as John Gillis has demonstrated , the parameters of such a stage, which was commonly known as “youth” in preindustrial society, were much less precise than is the case with our contemporary conception of adolescence.“What they commonly called ‘youth,’” he tells us, “was a very long transition period, lasting from the point that the very young child first became somewhat independent of its family, usually about seven or eight, to the point of complete independence at marriage, ordinarily in the mid- or late twenties.”4 Gillis goes on to argue that the term adolescence—and the more precise age group and stage of development it represents—did not...

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