Abby Sunderland: Is she an adult or is she a child?
There has been a lot of coverage and argument around Abby Sunderland’s attempted voyage around the world in a sailboat. All the 'reality show' questions aside, the societal debate seems stuck on whether or not a teenager should be allowed to sail a dangerous voyage. What if, instead of using age as a qualifier, we evaluated Sunderland’s competence as an adult?
Dr. Robert Epstein has developed a test of adultness, and has found that many young people demonstrate more adult attributes that those two or three times their age. He argues that the whole notion of ‘adolescence’ is out of touch with human nature, and instead an over-restrictive institution created by the convergence of labor laws, compulsory schooling, and a risk-avoidance culture.
We forget sometimes how many extraordinary people—from Bach to Michelangelo, from Napoleon to Franklin, and many more others less famous—began doing extraordinary things long before they were “adults.”
In our world today this spirit still shows itself: Teenagers are the adults in many families. Teenagers start companies. Teenagers play professional sports and fight in wars. And often they do it well. We could be getting a lot more from our young people, if we only treated them as adults.
The capacity of young people to do great things is a major source of potential growth for this country’s education system. To what extent does traditional school restrict, delay, or squander their capacity and motivation to achieve?
Image: Los Angeles Times
June 21, 2010 - 12:39pm
This is so consistent with my experience of my own children as teens and some (but not all) of their peers. Keeping responsible children from participating in real life (life outside of school) only inhibits their growth and development.
In my 35+ years of working with parents and very young children in preschools and day care centers, I found young children are so willing to learn to be responsible and engage in doing meaningful activities. Education, from K through 12, seems to be about teaching about tools needed for accomplishing great things - tools such as math, writing, designing, speaking, etc. with no meaningful opportunity to use them. In my view, this is like spending an hour day in learning about a hammer, another hour a day about a drill, then about a screw driver etc. every day for 12+ years and never have the opportunity to build anything. That would be a really stupid way to teach home building skills, not to mention a huge waste of human energy, creativity, and commitment. But aren't virtually all school subjects really tools for accomplishing something? What might be accomplished if young people could use the tools our schools want to teach and accomplish something important to them? They would all demand to be in school every day, wouldn't they?
July 12, 2010 - 9:26am
Historically, it seems that too many theories of human development have undergone an unfortunate transformation from useful constructs for understanding generally how children grow to hard-and-fast "rules" about what they should or should not do at various ages. I can't imagine, for example, that Piaget or Kohlberg meant for their theories to become commandments about all young people's capabilities and certainly not about what an individual teenager (like Sunderland) might accomplish. My years of teaching students from grade 6 through 12 provide evidence (albeit anecdotal) that any sort of developmental stage approach must be viewed fluidly when applied to individuals. I am daily astonished by the potential for abstract thinking, moral agency, responsibility, and empathy displayed among students in my 8th grade English class.
That being said, I still think that, although teenagers can function quite a bit more responsibly than our society imagines, this capacity is by no means universal or automatic. As with Math, Science, and History, mature thinking and responsible behavior can be taught, learned, assessed, and built upon--and the degree of mastery over time will naturally vary from person to person. I would be very interested in research and other educators' experiences about how this might be done.
All in all, I find the current questioning of the nature of adolescence very refreshing, but I would encourage nuanced discussion and caution those involved in the discourse from allowing oversimplification to some sort of soundbite. I'd hate to see this promising line of inquiry devolve into something along the lines of "just treat teenagers just like adults."
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