Abstract
I began Paul Howe’s Teen Spirit: How Adolescence Transformed the Adult World with some reservations. I often recoil in the face of broad claims about a singular group, adolescents especially, since they are easy fodder for our adult anxieties about untold numbers of things. But in reading, I came to see this as a big idea book, reporting on broad and curious trends—”seismic shifts”“driven by steady generational change” (p. 63)—and it is cleverly pieced together.
The argument goes like this. Adult society looks a lot like adolescent society. Howe observes a discernable shift in adult society having something to do with an ascendant adolescent mentality. Adolescent tastes and dispositions have crept into adult society over a span of a hundred years, with far-reaching implications. Adults now are more likely to demonstrate a whole series of antisocial behaviors. “Brash and bold,” Howe quips, adults are more likely to act with a disregard for consequences than generations past. Howe provides various examples of this manifestation and its consequences for politics, civility, democracy, and even economic innovation. It’s not all gloomy news. Our greater openness, creativity, and acceptance of difference are also spillover effects of the adolescent mindset.
Teen Spirit is organized into nine chapters and an introduction. Early chapters document the structure of the argument, with a chapter on adolescent character, another on its transformations over the course of a century, and a third focused on problems arising from it. Later chapters close in on specific areas of consideration: voter abandonment and political indifference, populism and loss of social trust, people’s penchant to tune out news, preferring the “frivolous and mundane” (p. 116).
Core to Howe’s argument is an engagement with the body of research focused on the Big Five personality traits: extroversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness, neuroticism. Over the last century, Howe argues, we have become more neurotic, open, and extroverted and less conscientious and agreeable. Howe extends the argument made by personality researchers that personality traits are shaped by historical moments, arguing persuasively that features of those moments also have consequences, by extension, for personality formation.
Howe traces this new generational mindset to a singular shift: the expansion of secondary schooling. In the past, for the majority of the U.S population, the end of primary school was usually the end of school. This changed in the 1920s. Howe builds on James Coleman’s point in The Adolescent Society that mass schooling is responsible for the formation of adolescence as a bounded enclave. Howe suggests this led to “fundamental change in the general architecture of networks” (p. 68) for adolescents. With the rise of secondary schooling, adolescents stay with peers longer. The result: views and dispositions formed during that period are more deeply etched. Howe concedes that character traits most common in adolescents precede the expansion of secondary school, but that these dispositions were once fleeting as adolescents quickly transitioned to adult society before mass secondary schooling. Dispositions entertained in adolescence were discarded for adult dispositions. We linger longer in adolescence and with adolescents than we once did.
The book is rich with case examples. Howe spends time working through debates around cohort effects and age-based effects and offers an enlivened examination of historical change with some interesting upsets. World War I and its aftermath—not World War II—are the more important period of change (p. 94). Howe’s is essentially a values argument, and he uses the World Values Survey to build it. Values are the drivers of change. An alternate view treats values as expressions of change, such that the embrace of values associated with adolescence could be explained by other forces. To his credit, Howe allows that, committing Chapter Eight to an examination of liberalism and capitalism as a prominent backdrop.
In the end, the explanatory power of an adolescent mindset as the driver of cultural change is simply less persuasive than the fraying social ties explained by new patterns in work. Take Howe’s point that our penchant for empty entertainment is evidence of an adolescent mindset. An alternate thesis for our search for fluff might be that capitalism and its ravages have left us exhausted and cognitively drained. The winnowing of discussion networks, cited by Howe and others, means that our reliance on a special few to resolve crises concentrates emotional demands onto a small number instead of many. The result is fatigue and a sense of drowning in the heavy weight of others’ suffering. One could understand the pivot to frivolous fun or embrace of lightness we associate with youth as the strategy to resolve these dilemmas.
Howe dedicates a final chapter to the curious case of millennials, who buck the trend. Millennials, who are conscientious and agreeable, represent a retreat from the adolescent mindset. Is this a reversal of the trend or a bend in the argument scaffold, since millennials spend longer periods in age-segregated educational enclaves? I’m agnostic.
Even if at the end I am unswayed by the totality of evidence, I appreciate this novel argument. I hope others will, too.