21st Century Adolescent Culture

The American sociologist James Coleman was the first to realize, in the 1950s, the emergence of adolescence as a new cultural group situated between childhood and the adult world. While adolescents had always existed, adolescent culture was a new phenomenon. Its appearance had been facilitated by the universalization of education and the subsequent transfer of responsibility from families to schools. This had been conceived as the great lever of social change, because it would allow offering a similar basis to all youth and thus overcome the cultural limits of families. However, Coleman noted that adolescents were more interested in their popularity than in their intellectual formation.

School was born to facilitate the transition from the condition of child to that of citizen, but schoolchildren lived immersed in a culture partially closed in on itself that was reticent to adult models, while uncritically accepting their generational models. The new "society of adolescents" was culturally independent. It possessed its own language, fashion, music, media, and behavior models, which were often defined in opposition to those of their parents. And all of this was reinforced by advertising, because adolescent culture was giving rise to a new market with great consumer potential.

THIRTY-YEAR-OLD ADOLESCENTS. "We live," Coleman wrote in 1959, "a peculiar paradox: in our complex industrial society there are more and more things to learn, and formal education is increasingly important for opening up life opportunities; but what we have done is create a great adolescent culture that shows little interest in education while feeling subjugated by things that have little to do with school." It is obvious that Coleman did not have the last word on adolescence. Today we are witnessing an expansion of its borders. From below, it seems to have engulfed puberty and, from above, we have all seen (let's be charitable) thirty-year-old adolescents. Ten-year-old girls want sexy clothes and thirty-year-old young people want adolescent clothes. Children want to anticipate their adolescence and adolescents want to postpone their adult life. 25% of viewers of children's channels in the United States are adults.

Today, those teenagers seem quite naive to us. 70% did not smoke, 80% did not consume alcohol. It did not occur to Coleman to ask if they used drugs or practiced safe sex. According to a study by the Public Health Agency of Barcelona, around 47% of girls and 43% of boys aged sixteen admit to having gotten drunk at least once in the last year. The onset of alcohol consumption is at 13.7 years. An average teenager today handles twice as much money (in real terms) as one from Coleman's time. There are girls who, upon reaching puberty, begin to dream of cosmetic surgery operations.

As society has become more complex, the distance between the spontaneous interests of the child and the demands of knowledge of the adult world has widened, but, as at the same time, we increasingly praise spontaneity, we begin to fear that the adolescent will become the model of behavior for our societies. Is it not true that psychological traits that were considered characteristic of adolescence, such as confusion, constant hesitation, unpredictable mood swings, discomfort with one's own image, etcetera, have ceased to be specifically adolescent?

NOT FACING THE FUTURE. Our adolescents live in a world where the sense of possibility continuously grows at the expense of the sense of reality. It cannot be otherwise because they pull in opposite directions. The phrase "Be realistic, ask for the impossible" has ceased to be a slogan to become a prejudice. If in the past adolescents were made to live certain rites of passage to enter adult life, now it is not very clear that we have a well-defined adult life to offer them. In fact, what we are constantly advising them is not to conform, to be adaptable. In schools, they are told that knowing things is less important than knowing how to operate on things. If traditionally knowledge was the intellectual form of caring for the soul due to its capacity to provide it with experiences of order, today we encourage living with the disorder of the ephemeral.

Our advice to teenagers is: "Be water, my friend", be amorphous, do not live constrained by limits, be adaptable

The first person to say this was a labor educator, Peter Mauger, in 1966, that is, 51 years ago. "Tomorrow's adults," he asserted, "will face problems whose nature we cannot even imagine today. They will have to deal with jobs that have not yet been invented." The idea was picked up by Bill Clinton, in 1996, and his Secretary of Education, Richard Riley, in 2004: "The most in-demand jobs in 2010 do not yet exist. Workers of the immediate future will use technologies that have not yet been invented to solve problems that we do not even suspect today will be problems tomorrow." I could show hundreds of similar statements made in the most serious environments by supposedly competent people. I will only add the warning from last year's World Economic Forum in Davos, which in its report The Future of Jobs insisted that "65% of children entering primary school today will end up working in entirely new types of jobs that do not yet exist."

In short, our advice to teenagers is: "Be water, my friend," be amorphous, do not live constrained by limits, be adaptable. But the adults Mauger, Clinton, and Riley were referring to are us, and some of us have even retired. So if we want to know what the skills of the future will be, let's learn from the most competent of the present, those who are already successfully facing new problems with new tools. We will discover the following characteristics in them: 1. Mastery of attention, which may possibly be the new IQ. 2. Consistent training that allows them to be skilled. 3. Ability to generate trust and remain faithful to their word. 4. Ability to introduce a time for reflection between the appearance of a desire and the response, in order to organize the action. This is what we call "strategic thinking." I usually defend the child's right to be frustrated, thinking of the right a pastry chef has not to eat the ingredients while making a cake. 5. Willingness not to be merely modern, that is, to have a broad perspective on the present that goes beyond the immediate. Without realizing it, we have witnessed a profound mutation in the meaning of what is modern. What is current no longer refers to a chronological situation on the timeline, but to a position on the scale of values. The modern has been axiologically charged, to the point that no one gets angry if you tell them they are wrong, but it is advisable not to tell them they are outdated. The modern person does not feel part of a tradition, but lives in the fascination of the continuous imminence of the new, convinced that to be is to be improvable. Today, what increases someone's value is their acquisition of the latest anthropological prosthesis (the latest technological device) that increases their awareness of what is possible.

"JUST GOOGLE IT." What is known as "21^st century skills" is a mirage. Neither knowledge, nor memory, nor old intellectual virtues have lost value. What has been devalued is raw information, but rigorously filtered information has been revalued. That "Just Google It" is a fallacy, as is fostering creativity without knowledge. To solve a problem creatively, the first thing needed is to know the problem well. Precisely because the new keeps growing, it is essential to have a good knowledge base to be able to integrate novelty into a narrative. I don't know anyone who wouldn't want to have more memory than they have, nor anyone well-informed about the importance of long-term memory who trivializes forgetfulness. Were creativity, innovation, critical thinking irrelevant in the past? Isn't it ridiculous to pretend to learn rigorously without putting in the effort? Can one think well without intellectual discipline? Perhaps one of the best-kept secrets of the adult world is that, in reality, there are few adults even though many pretend to be. But we cannot abandon adolescents to their fate by telling them that at their age we did the same as them, because we are not here to offer them models of adolescent life, but of adult life, which is the life that each of us has to build for ourselves.