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Re: Origin of adolescence

Posted by kratt on Tuesday, October 28 2014 at 11:42:57PM
In reply to Re: Origin of adolescence posted by Dante on Tuesday, October 28 2014 at 8:06:46PM

"If this trend continues, we will not just be hearing a neologism to describe the post-adolescent dependent "children" created by the ever-expanding colleges"

But my point is that in 1920s USA secondary school teenagers stopped being children.

Which the minority that attended secondary school had been throughout 19th century. Compare the just quoted 1956 schoolgirls with 1836 schoolboys:

"Indeed the great majority of the members of the services here seem perfectly willing to pass their lives in India; and those who go home talk with very little pleasure of the prospect before them. This is not strange. For they generally come out at eighteen or nineteen. Their banishment is their emancipation. The separation from home is no doubt at first disagreeable to them. But the pain is compensated to a great extent by the pleasure of independence, --of finding themselves men, --and, if they are in the Civil Service, of finding themselves rich. A lad who six months before was under strict discipline, who could indulge in few pleasures for want of money, and who could not indulge in any excess without being soundly scolded by his father and his pedagogue, finds himself able to feast on snipes and drink as much champagne as he likes, to entertain guests, to buy horses, to keep a mistress or two, to maintain fifteen or twenty servants who bow to the ground every time that they meet him, and suffer him to kick and abuve them to his heart's content. He is surrounded by money-lenders who are more desirous to supply him with funds than he is himself to procure them. Accordingly the coming out to India is quite as often an agreeable as a disagreeable event to a young fellow. "

Secondary school students had been extended childhood for a century until 1910. Sometime soon after, in northern USA, they became something else.





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