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This chapter examines changes in the conception of the child as the bearer of the future in England during the 1890s. This development was highlighted in Alexander Chamberlain's The Child: A Study in the Evolution of Man. This novel portrayed the child as the embodiment both of all past history and an expression of future possibility and the child becomes the key to self-understanding, to a realm of a lost past, and also the guarantee of a more positive future. Similar sentiments can also be found in Stanley Hall's Adolescence.

This chapter asks whether the increase in adolescent mental health problems has been accompanied by an increase in stress. Commentators have tended to use the evidence of rising levels of anxiety and depression as evidence that stress has risen, but this confuses mental health and stress and creates a tautology. This chapter unpicks some of the conceptual and research challenges in this area, and concludes that stress is a particularly salient construct in adolescence that is clearly related to mental health outcomes. However, despite widespread assumptions, there are no good, repeated surveys of adolescent stressors in the UK over the last three decades, and much of the material on stress simply buys into the zeitgeist rather than challenging it. Implications for further research are provided.

This chapter addresses Bowen’s obnoxious adolescents, arguing that she brings together the operations of language and the critical function of affect in questions of meaning and being, and connects what she sees as the figure of the queer adolescent in Bowen (for example, Theodora Thirdman in Friends and Relations) with the equally queer or innovative operations of her writing, with her novels as aesthetic events. It thus posits adolescence as a particular structure of feeling that, in the assemblage of (Bowen’s) novelistic writing, at once mobilizes the stylistic operations of her prose, and that determines the singularity of her writing and its aesthetic effects.

The introduction argues that ideas about both childhood and adolescence were transformed in English and Welsh schools after WWII. Covering the period 1918 to 1979, this book will show that by putting childhood at the centre of the history of education, we can challenge the stories we tell about how and why schooling itself changed. It has been suggested that the dominance of ‘progressive’ education after 1945 led to a backlash against permissive attitudes to pupils in both Western Europe and the United States. But British child-centred education, in alliance with developmental psychology, actually shaped a more restrictive and pessimistic image of childhood. By considering the faultlines within the movement that has been called ‘progressive’ or ‘child-centred’ education, we can more clearly assess its impact on concepts of childhood and youth.

Teachers rarely grasped the full complexities of the psychological theories that they encountered. However, the ways they used psychology and how it influenced their concepts of childhood were not solely reliant on a misunderstood and confused version of the arguments of key theorists. Rather than being an empty atheoretical vessel into which psychological knowledge was poured, the teaching profession had its own model of craft knowledge that both resisted and adapted the novel theories with which it was presented. This chapter focuses on teachers’ resistance to the child-centred educational methods that emerged from the findings of developmental psychologists. Teachers often felt they had to pay ‘lip-service’ to child-centred methods even if they were not convinced by them, intensifying the influence of simplistic and limiting concepts of childhood and youth. Even when they self-defined as ‘progressive’, they were liable to believe that this mindset tended to introduce too many changes too quickly, so teachers could not keep up with changing ‘trends’ in child-centred practice.

This chapter considers the implementation of non-utopian progressivism in English and Welsh primary and secondary modern schools since 1918, contending that it was precisely because child-centred practice was only ever half-implemented in primary and secondary modern schools in England and Wales that it transformed teachers’ concepts of childhood so profoundly. This chapter considers how teacher trainers, inspectors, headteachers and teachers shaped both theory and policy at the local level, using four case studies of LEAs: Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Sheffield and Monmouthshire. It suggests that non-utopian progressive education posed a threat to teachers’ notions of expertise, shaping a limited concept of the pupil that nevertheless served a practical purpose in the classroom, especially given large class sizes, poor buildings and scant apparatus.

Using a case study of the secondary modern school in the 1950s and 1960s, this chapter explores why media depictions of the ‘sec. mod.’ or ‘modern school’ were so fraught with violence and conflict during this period. Class is a key variable; the 1944 Education Act had brought a new influx of working-class children within the ambit of state education at the same time as the teaching profession, especially at secondary level, was attracting more middle-class recruits. However, teachers from working-class backgrounds also had a vested interest in maintaining a ‘cultural gap’ between themselves and their pupils. The anxieties engendered by progressive teaching methods, I suggest, increasingly defined the interests of the child and teacher not as a unity, but in opposition to each other. Non-utopian progressive education contributed to this shift by emphasising the gulf between the abilities of children and of adults, reconfiguring childhood and youth as negatively defined by what subjects were unable to do before they reached adulthood. Both children and adolescents were characterised by their essential egotism, their orientation towards practical and concrete experience that directly related to their own lives, and their lack of capacity for abstract reasoning.

The conclusion argues that the failure to connect the histories of education and the histories of childhood and youth, especially in work on twentieth-century Britain, has led to significant problems for both sets of historiography. Most importantly, thinking about both these things together indicates that there was a fundamental shift in concepts of childhood and adolescence at mid-century, and problematises the idea of a ‘permissive society’ emerging from the 1960s onwards. Teachers’ discourses assumed disproportionate significance in post-war Britain as central funding for schools increased, and the education system attracted more public attention. Finally, it is contended that more work needs to be done on adulthood as a constructed category in its own right in order to fully understand its relational counterparts, childhood and youth.

Clearly the majority of people who use marijuana do not develop schizophrenia. Yet, the human literature suggests that there is a modest association between cannabis exposure (particularly in adolescence) and later development of schizophrenia--whether or not this association is causal is hotly debated. This chapter reviews some of the evidence for and against such a causal relationship. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that individuals with a family history of schizophrenia, with prodromal symptoms, or who have experienced discreet episodes of psychosis related to cannabis use, may be best served not using THC-predominant marijuana.

This essay begins fittingly with the line “If there’s one thing you can depend upon during the zombie apocalypse, it’s that you won’t have to face it alone.” In this essay, Levey and Harper examine the importance of group dynamics in contemporary teen novels that concentrate on surviving zombie invasions. Focusing on two recently published horror novels popular among teens, Charlie Higson’s The Enemy and Michael Grant’s Gone, Levey and Harper examine the “considerations of group consciousness and democratic dynamics” in the texts, noting that such attention to the group is a departure from previous teen novels that had focused more on negotiations of individual identity (this also marks a difference from the novels McCort examines, suggesting the different approach toward identity taken by those writing for older adolescents). For Levey and Harper, the importance of these particular novels and their treatment of the individual in relation to the group is twofold: they ask the characters therein to work through personal issues that are detrimental to the survival of the group and they call for social re-evaluation. In the worlds of The Enemy and Gone, young adult readers experience a close encounter with monstrous humanity, one that allows them to vicariously experience how others deal with threats external to their circles, as well as the threats that lie within themselves and their own peer groups.

Where we introduced this book with Angel’s and Benny’s narratives, we complete the adolescent journey for these teens and others in chapter seven. In this chapter, we examine the different ways that youth prepared for young adulthood. Considering that several teens in this study grew up with chaotic circumstances -- some facing homelessness, multiple foster home placements, and incarceration as teens -- we look at whether supportive and capable adults can intervene in teens’ lives to help them as they prepare for adulthood. Just as gender shaped girls’ and boys’ childhood and teen experiences, transitions out of adolescence differed by gender as the pressures, constraints, and opportunities ranged for girls and boys.

Written in 1989, Suzy McKee Charnas’s short story ‘Boobs’ presents adolescent Kelsey, who develops breasts and starts her periods before anyone else in her class. As she struggles to deal with the adult world of sexual violence, disease and pregnancy that her maturation seems to entail, she finds herself transforming nightly into a werewolf. This is not a straightforward paralleling of puberty with lycanthropy; the story rather explores the complexities of young adult identity formation. This chapter begins with an analysis of Charnas’s text, and explores a number of young adult paranormal romance novels that have been published in subsequent years. The chapter argues that, in the worlds of these fantasy novels, flux, mutability and change are presented as necessary for identity formation and development. As a counterpoint to this transformative model of identity construction stands Leah Clearwater, the sole female werewolf in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series. The chapter concludes by arguing that to ‘be’ a teen werewolf is not necessarily a liberating state in YA fiction; rather, it is the state of ‘becoming-werewolf’, with the concomitant choice, will and self-expression, which is to be desired.

This chapter examines the only Bildungsroman written by Aldous Huxley, one of foremost modernist advocates of Bildung, and one of its most intimately linked with contemporary biology. Reviewers and critics have long struggled to make sense of the disorienting and seemingly unmotivated use of anachrony in Eyeless in Gaza, which I attribute to Huxley’s careful study of biological studies by his brother Julian (among others) on the embryology, endocrinology, and evolutionary biology of frogs and salamanders. Central to Huxley’s search for full, harmonious development is the phenomenon of neoteny (the retention of juvenile characteristics into sexual maturity); once interpreted as a pathological failure of development, neoteny was by the 1920s heralded as the biological key to human evolutionary and social success.

Krzystof Kieslowski’s A Short Film deals with the sixth commandment, yet the film seems to be about voyeurism not adultery. The connection is made in Matthew 5.27-8, where Christ broadens the notion of adultery to include looking at a woman with lust. In the course of A Short Film, Tomek’s adolescent, lustful, and masturbatory looking at Magda is transmuted into interpersonal love, so that the look of love—how love looks to people and at them—becomes the film’s subject. The power of love to transform is real, but so too are the personal and social obstacles to transformation. People are caught in circles of repetition and convention, yet by understanding the role that choice, necessity, and luck play in them, they can sometimes make them serve life.

As reformers and lawmakers raised the age of consent to marriage and made it more difficult for minors to become husbands and wives, young people reacted by marrying extralegally. From the late nineteenth century through the first three decades of the twentieth, the rates of minor marriage increased, in part, this chapter argues, because marriage became one way of legaly claiming freedom and independence from parents. Marriage emancipated children, it let them escape from abusive homes, keep their wages or inheritances, and have sex without being prosecuted under newly passed statutory rape laws. It allowed them to contest their status as children, itself newly enshrined in the law in a whole host of Progressive Era reforms targeting childhod and adolescence. At the same time the legal device of marriage could also trap girls in abusive and exploitative relationships where they had little recourse to legal protection.