uggest LESSON VII LATER ADOLESCENCE We have agreed to regard the seventeenth birthday as the begin ning, and the twenty-first as the end of later adolescence. These boundaries are by no means exact. There are no rules by which the passage from early to later adolescence may be precisely defined. Yet in every life there is a more or less definite turning point around sixteen to eighteen. It may be some moral or emotional crisis; it may be conversion. Or it is the beginning work to support one's self, or leaving home to go to college. It may be nothing more than the attainment of full growth in height. To know, in any particular case, just what the turning point has been, is essential to any real understanding of the succeeding years. We have seen, too, that adolescence ends more often at twenty-four or twenty-five than at twenty-one. Yet here practical considerations impel the Sunday school to regard the age of legal majority as the end of youth. 1. The development of individuality is the fundamental charac teristic of this period. It has been well called a time of selection and concentration. Early adolescence was a time of expansion. It presented a wealth of possibilities. It spread the world before youth's eager vision. Its instincts pulled a hundred ways. Later adolescence begins to select from among life's possibilities and to concentrate its energies. Life begins to narrow, but to become deeper. The time of mere vision is over; choice must be made. And with choice comes individuality. Lives diverge. Each must have its own work; and each its own quality 2. The difference between individuals is thus the great fact of which we must take account in this period. At no time, of course, > are pupils to be treated in the bunch. The individuality of the tiniest and most uninteresting must be respected. But now, of all times, individual interests are primary. Each pupil presents a separate problem in himself. Many factors enter into the determination of individuality. There are differences of heredity and of home environment. There is the natural inborn variation of capacity and temperament. God makes no one of His creatures or of His children exactly like any other. It is the provision by which His wisdom insures progress in the world. All these differences show themselves with especial definiteness in later adolescence. And they do so because they are called out by differ. ences in external conditions. We do not all have the same oppor tunities. We cannot all get the same education, or do the same work. There we come to the bottom of the matter-it is because the lives of your pupils are now getting set toward work, and toward different lines of work, that you must deal with each in its own way. Recent studies show that not more than half the children who enter our city schools finish the work of the grades, and that only one-tenth of them continue to the final year of the high school.* It has been estimated, again, that only ten per cent of those who take a high school course go to college or to a professional school. Consider what differences, simply from this standpoint, later adolescence pre sents. Our pupils divide themselves into at least three great classes: (1) Those who have gotten only an elementary education, or a part of one, and have gone to work at an early age. They are more mature than others in some ways, for they have had to face life's seri. ous business. In other respects they are more immature. Their lives are circumscribed; their interests narrow. They cannot appreciate things that appeal strongly to those of more culture. (2) Those who are now finishing high school, and entering upon work-a-day life. (3) Those who are entering college or professional school. For these the period of adolescence will be prolonged. They will broaden and mature intellectually, yet lack development into manhood and womanhood until they finally face the world to make a living. 3. All three classes are experiencing in this period a contact with reality more direct and definite than at any former time of life. The first two are wage-earners; the former with a little experience, the latter just beginning. They face the realities of business life, with its routine, its competition and its uncompromising standards of efficiency. The college students are leaving home for the first time to enter upon a new life. Protected from economic necessity as it is, college life yet has its realities. It is a world to itself, but within it the student stands upon his own feet. He must make good in life with his fellows as well as in the eyes of the faculty. We shall here consider later adolescence from the standpoint simply of the first two classes. Very few of you have to deal with college Ayres: "Laggards in Our Schools," p. 65. students. The problems of the student, moreover, are peculiarly his own, and must be solved by college men. 4. For most of our pupils, then, later adolescence marks a new stage in life because it brings their first wages. It is the time of transition from economic dependence to self-support and independence. At some time or other within these years, life's real responsibilities begin. Nature has made ready for the transition. The youth of this age possesses a splendid equipment for work-a high degree of physical energy, strength and comparative maturity of intellect and vigor of will. The physical energy, that before was needed for growth, can now be turned into activity and the development of strength. This is the age when athletes develop-great baseball and football players, boxers and runners. They reach their best in the middle twenties. The baseball player of thirty is a "veteran," and we wonder whether he can stand the pace for another season. The runner has usually had to stop racing before that age. He no longer possesses the endurance that he had in the years just before and after twenty-one. The intellectual energy of the period is just as great. Reason and will are maturing, and the mind is restlessly active. Much of the world's best work has been done by young men. The list of its great youths reaches into every sphere. Napoleon was a lieutenant at fifteen, and by study made himself the master that he was of the science of war. He was but twenty-four when he astonished the world at the siege of Toulon. Lafayette sailed to the help of the American colonies at nineteen. Byron published his first volume at seventeen; Bryant wrote "Thanatopsis" at the same age. Shelley had published romances and poems before he was eighteen, and at that age was expelled from Oxford for publishing a tract on "The Necessity of Atheism." Pascal discovered geometry for himself at twelve, and at sixteen wrote a treatise on conic sections. Savonarola passed his later youth in meditation upon the evils of his day; and at twenty-two decided the work of his life. At seventeen Leibniz wrote a thesis containing the germ of his philosophy, and at twenty was ready for a doctorate of laws. Descartes doubted all knowledge save mathematics while yet a stripling, and at twenty-three passed through the crisis which determined his whole future life and philosophy. At nineteen Schelling was writing upon the philosophy of Kant and Fichte, at twenty-two published his first great book, and at twenty-three was himself professor of philosophy at Jena. Michael Angelo was at work in the palace of the Medici at sixteen. Peter Cooper vowed at eighteen that he would some day build a Cooper Institute. At the same age Spurgeon began his remarkable work as a preacher. 5. Yet later adolescence is not all success and happiness. It contains its disappointments. It has new forces to tear life down as well as to build it up. It is almost inevitably a time of some disillusionment. The hopes of early youth were too extravagant, its ideals loved with a passion that did not see how plodding is the path to realization. The first contact with reality brings something of a shock, a sense of loss. The world is not nearly so responsive as the boy had dreamed, and ideals are not so easy of accomplishment. This making a living seems, after all, a sordid business, which knows no law save the survival of the fittest. He feels himself to be a mere cog in a vast industrial machinery, and the dull routine of it all oppresses him. "Forenoon, and afternoon, and night;-forenoon, And afternoon, and night;-forenoon, and-what? Added to this is the fact that starting to work means generally a breaking of old ties. Even if the boy stays at home and boards with his parents, the home ties are no longer the same. He has acquired a new independence now that he, too, is a bread-winner. The old restraints are loosed; his status even in the home comes to be one of contract. The break is most complete, of course, in case of the youth who goes to a new community to make his living among strangers. The freedom, the new temptations, the loneliness of being without friends and with no acquaintances save fellow-workmen-no wonder that the boy in a new town often goes wrong. Jane Addams has given us an interpretation of the spirit of youth that is almost prophetic in its insight. There is not a page in her book that one can afford to lose; but we must be content here with two brief passages: "Many boys in the years immediately following school find no restraint either in tradition or character. They drop learning as a childish thing and look upon school as a tiresome task that is finished. They demand pleasure as the right of one who earns his own living. They have developed no capacity for recreation demanding mental effort or even muscular skill, and are obliged to seek only that depending upon sight, sound and taste. Many of them begin to pay board to their mothers, and make the best bargain they can, that more money may be left to spend in the evening. They even bait the excitement of 'losing a job,' and often provoke a foreman if only to see 'how much he will stand.' They are constitutionally unable to enjoy things continuously and follow their vagrant wills unhindered. Unfortunately the city lends itself to this distraction. At the best, it is difficult to know what to select and what to eliminate as objects of attention among its thronged streets, its glittering shops, its gaudy advertisements of shows and amusements." "One of the most pathetic sights in the public dance halls of Chicago is the number of young men, obviously honest young fellows from the country, who stand about vainly hoping to make the acquaintance of some 'nice girl.' They look eagerly up and down the rows of girls, many of whom are drawn to the hall by the same keen desire for pleasure and social intercourse which the lonely young men themselves feel. One Sunday night at twelve o'clock I had occasion to go into a large public dance hall. As I was standing by the rail looking for the girl I had come to find, a young man approached me and quite simply asked me to introduce him to some 'nice girl,' saying that he did not know anyone there. On my replying that a public dance hall was not the best place in which to look for a nice girl, he said, ‘But I don't know any other place where there is a chance to meet any kind of a girl. I'm awfully lonesome since I came to Chicago.' And then he added, rather defiantly, 'Some nice girls do come here! It is one of the best halls in town.' He was voicing the 'bitter loneliness' that many city men remember to have experienced during the first years after they had 'come up to town.'"'* Later adolescence is often called the "wild oats" period. It is true, indeed, that most boys now have their fling. It is true, too, that from these years on through the twenties more crimes are committed than at any other time of life. But the wild doings of youth are not usually caused by purposed badness of character. They are often enough a natural result of the conditions of which we have just been thinking 6. In later adolescence religion may easily be lost, either through disuse or through doubt. (1) Religion may simply die out of the youth's life. The new freedom permits him to stay away from church, and it gets easy to stay * Addams: "The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets," pp. II, 54. |