Thomas Hine and Patricia Hersch Present Us

Thomas Hine and Patricia Hersch present us with two views of the contemporary American teenager -- one based in an historical analysis of the creation of the teenager and the other based in an ethnographic account of contemporary teenage life. The perspective that results from these two views is a more complex one that the usual, uncomplimentary stereotype of the adolescent as moody, disrespectful, and oversexed. This paper examines the ways in which both of these authors present views of American adolescence.

Hine's view of modern teenager is grounded in an historical analysis, arguing in The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager that while the life of teenagers a hundred years ago was certainly quite different from the life led by adolescents today, there are important similarities. The generation of teenagers today uses the years between childhood and adulthood as a time in which to gain the skills needed to become a fully functional adult -- a status that tends to come later now than it did several generations ago. But while teenagers can in some ways be seen as adults in training, they should also -- Hine argues -- be taken seriously as cultural, economic and political agents. Teenagers today -- as was true in 1953 or 1903 or 1853 -- are capable of accomplishing more than adults tend to give them credit for, he argues:

Yet each of these different modes of youth shaped the world we live in today. And young people's success in adapting to so many roles suggest that they may have greater abilities than we give them credit for (Hine 6).

Hine describes the daily routine of teenagers over the past century as being rooted in many of the same routines and rituals as are the lives of teenagers today. Certainly there are differences: Teenagers a hundred years ago would have walked to their schools, which were in general much smaller and much more rural than are schools of today. Because the nation's smaller population was far more widely dispersed, schools were often much farther away from homes and many teenagers would have had to walk some considerable distance -- although not necessarily in the snow with packs of wolves after them, as the stories that today's teenagers have to hear suggest.

Today's teenagers are more likely to drive than to walk to schools, and those schools themselves might be as large as a thousand times as many students as the rural one-room schoolhouses of the lat 19th century, which might have had only a few dozen students. The subjects that teenagers have studied have also changed: Gone from all but the curriculum of a very few private schools is the Latin that many students would have studied, and subjects such as rhetoric have been set aside entirely. Students are more likely to study science now -- few high school students a century ago would have studied physics. And none of them would have been able to study about DNA and modern evolutionary theory because DNA had not yet been discovered.

But while the subjects themselves have changed, the basic purpose of the education of high school students remains the same as it has been for generations: To prepare them either to enter the workforce or to go on to future education. Far more high school students now enter college than did a century ago or even a few generations ago. This is in part because jobs now often require the kinds of skills taught in schools (this would not have been true for a teenager who would after high school work on the same family farm that he or she had been working since early childhood) and in part simply because there is a general social expectation today that good workers have at least some college experience.

One thing that has changed is the attitude of teenagers toward work: As is clear from Hersch's discussions with a small group of teenagers, those teens do not see their work as fundamentally important to their family's economic status. And for the teens that she has talked to this seems to be true: Any money that they earn tends to go to pay for clothes, CDs, gas, make-up, and entertainment rather than for food for the table. Teenagers -- both Hine's historical perspective and Hersch's contemporary one make clear -- are no longer considered to be economic agents for the family. (Of course, for many poor and especially immigrant families this is not the case: Children of farmworkers, for example, often work in the fields beside their parents and siblings so that their families will themselves be able to afford food.)

This freeing of teenagers from the constraints of productive labor may sound as if it were a good thing, but it is in fact a mixed blessing. Hine reminds us that "For most of our history, child labor was not a social horror but simply a fat of life" (Hine 58) and that -- furthermore -- "The labor of teenagers -- and pre-teenagers as well -- has played a very large role in the development of North America" (Hine 57). The fact that teenagers no longer (with rare exceptions) contribute in a meaningful way to either their household or the national economy is a drain on both family and country. It is also in many ways bad for the teenagers themselves, who tend to drift into meaningless minimum-wage jobs. While an earlier generation of teens would have worked on farms or in factories -- even in schools teaching younger children -- today's teenagers are serving up fries are learning few skills that will serve them in the long run.

Their economic marginalization seems to affect the teenagers that Hersch has interviewed. They seem in many ways to be waiting for their lives to start, something that Hine suggests is far more common now than it would have been a century ago. Hine helps us to understand that the world of today's teenager is specific to the experience of adolescents in contemporary Western industrialized nations in which there is a long period of time between puberty and adult rights and responsibilities. In many (probably most) traditional agricultural societies, a relatively short period of time elapses between physical maturity and the taking on of adult responsibilities, whether in the form of marriage, planting one's own fields, beginning to hunt or fish independently, or apprenticing for a job. Hine makes it clear that in many ways the kind of teenager that Hersch profiles is the product of the late-industrial West and many of the problematic behaviors of adolescence in Western societies stem from this extended period of time in which young people are for the most part physically and emotionally prepared for adulthood but do not have any of the prerogatives of the state.