Posts tagged Town Dwellers

A little more than a century ago, adolescence was unrecognised, undiscovered, unknown and organized. Most young people between the ages of twelve and eighteen worked on family arms, engaged in wage labour, and grew up in the company of adults. A handful of relatively high born young people went on to college. Graduation from high school was a privilege of relatively prosperous town dwellers (Tim and Frank, 2001). Strictly speaking, there were no adolescents one hundred years ago. Adolescence is a historically grounded social invention, the product of concerted attempts of socially and morally anxious nineteenth and twentieth-century developmental psychologists, moral reformer, sociologists, medical specialists, and other emerging professionals to control the socialization of increasing number of detached youth. The new invention marked the recognition of youth as a life stage; a period of time between irresponsible childhood and married adulthood. In order to better socialize the youth, some constrains and regulations were imposed on youth, such as education which regulated the lives of the young and reside authority over their development in carefully organized institutions of formal education. The education was mainly affected by the belief that… More >>