Adolescence: A History of Control

Although you wouldn't know it from cable news and talk shows, scholars of children's culture have long laid to rest the idea that kids these days are worse than those of the past. In the last fifteen years, Mike Males has demonstrated that the bad rap laid on adolescents and teens is exaggerated at best, and James R. Kincaid has showed how popular conceptions of youth are in effect a tool for gratifying adults. Kent Baxter's The Modern Age is a logical and important next step in this conversation. He asks in his introduction, "If there are consistently negative beliefs about teens being recirculated in American society, whom do they benefit and why does our culture sustain them?" (2). Over six chapters, Baxter goes back to what he proposes as the beginning of intense discourse about adolescence to find that these negative beliefs about young people benefit a wide but specific set of adults with a great deal invested in the power structure of America. He also finds that the reason for the persistence of these beliefs is that they assuage anxieties about race, history, and change. The sum is a convincing analysis of the scapegoating of adolescence whose roots may go deeper than we thought.

Baxter's approach is rigorously historical, as demonstrated by an outline of his chapters. The introduction makes a compelling case—one that anticipates resistance from a field that has often thought of J. D. Salinger and S. E. Hinton as the first major figures in literature for adolescents—for looking back to the nineteenth century for the origins of adolescence. The first chapter focuses on "the two most profound changes in American culture at the turn of the century in regard to individuals in their teen years": namely, "educational reform and the development of the juvenile court system" (24). The former, Baxter argues, "segregated" children of a certain age from children of other ages, thereby creating a class of child that could be called "adolescent." The effect of this change can be seen in the creation of the juvenile court system; because the members of this new class of children were both clearly visible and required to forego work in favor of education, they very quickly came to be defined as people who were outside the usual obligations of life and therefore needed to be controlled. Thus, Baxter shows, the origins of constructions of adolescence lie in efforts to make children visible and then to control them.

"Such a sentiment," as Baxter says in the opening lines of his second chapter, "blossomed and reached its full form in the earliest theoretical treatments of this new developmental stage" (44). The two chief models of adolescence were drawn from theories that were fundamentally biological, in the case of G. Stanley Hall, and cultural, in that of Margaret Mead. Baxter makes plain the differences between the two, but he usefully articulates their fundamental similarities: both "are predicated upon the notion that adolescence is a 'problem,'" and both "provided the theoretical justification for new social programs aimed at this (seemingly) new population of individuals in their teens" (46). In a move typical of Baxter's thoughtful structure, this second chapter borrows a point from the first to explain how the unfolding history of adolescence continued in a spirit of adult distrust of a classification of children that was largely manufactured by adults in the first place.

Prominent among the biological theories constructing adolescence, Baxter demonstrates, was the theory of recapitulation, which proposed that the biological development of an individual reflects the (supposed) evolutionary path of the species. This point pays off in the third chapter, where Baxter turns to the Indian boarding schools of Richard Henry Pratt and the Carlisle model. Although a great deal has been said about Pratt and his schools, Baxter makes a useful intervention in the discourse by thinking about Pratt in the context of the educational reforms of his first chapter and the evolutionary models...