The Evolutionary Potential of Adolescence
By David Marshak, an excerpt from Evolutionary Parenting, (Fairhaven Spiral Press, Bellingham WA). Copyright 2016: All rights reserved.
(image) When we consider adolescence in the context of evolution, we know first that our sub-species, Homo sapiens sapiens, evolved from archaic Homo sapiens about 200,000 years ago; the oldest fossil record of anatomically modern humans are the Omo remains that date to 195,000 years ago. We reached full “behavioral modernity” around 50,000 years ago. However, adolescence as we know it today was first conceptualized only a little more than 100 years ago. For almost all of our tens of thousands of years as a sub-species, humans became adults once they reached puberty. Teenagers lived as adults, worked as adults, had children, and took on all of the responsibilities of adults.
G. Stanley Hall was the first to name adolescence—from the Latin adolescere, meaning “to grow up”—in his 1904 book, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education. Yet the first significant adolescent population did not appear in the United States until the post-World War II baby boomers began to enter their teens in the late 1950s. In 1900 barely 10 percent of the 14-17 year olds were enrolled in school, the key social marker of a time-out between childhood and adulthood. During the next five decades school enrollment in this age group exploded from the atypical to the norm: to 31 percent in the 1920, 50 percent in 1930, 73 percent in 1940, 76 percent in 1950, and 87 percent in 1960. During these decades adolescence evolved from an uncommon experience available mainly to children of the wealthy to the normative cultural experience for teens in the United States. Other industrial, modernist nations have followed a similar trajectory of change.
The key insight in this data is this: within our long history as a sub-species, adolescence is a startlingly new phenomenon—and it’s not surprising at all that we don’t know that much about its potentials.
What the common vision tells us is that adolescence is likely the key to the next steps in human evolution.
(image) Students working in a classroomWhat did adults do with these tens of millions of adolescents when they first appeared without warning? They sentenced them to 30+ hours each week in secondary schools plus more hours for homework, even though the paradigm of the academic high school had been created for a very different purpose and a much smaller fraction of the population. Adults excluded teens from most of adult life and, instead, dumped them into the age ghetto that quickly became youth culture.
It’s not at all surprising that our initial social and cultural responses to the sudden appearance of tens of millions of adolescents were so misguided. The manifestation of adolescence on a mass scale was a radically new evolutionary step for homo sapiens. For the first time in our existence as a species, we had an opportunity for tens of millions of individual humans to explore and develop their human potential, to find their gifts and their callings, and to evolve into a much more complex and articulated consciousness. Right on schedule, the human potential movement—part psychology, part spirituality—emerged in the 1960’s culture and began developing tools for this evolutionary step upward. At the very same time, spiritual teachers from Asia came to North America and western Europe in some numbers and began to teach the tools for evolving consciousness that are embedded in most Asian spiritual traditions.
But the men with power—and they were almost all men—in our industrial society had no insight into either evolution or human development. They feared the human potential movement and ridiculed Asian spiritual traditions, and they fought to delegitimize these insights and destroy this initial evolutionary flowering. They worked hard in this campaign—and they are still working harder than ever—to keep adolescents in conventional, industrial paradigm schools, youth culture ghettos, which block both the development and maturation of individuals and the evolution of the species. Every political and educational leader who wants every teen to learn the same material at the same time as every other teen is an obstacle to the evolution of our species that our times demand.
So here we are now, three generations into adolescence, and as a culture we are ignoring or repressing this profound evolutionary possibility.
Margaret Mead explained one aspect of where we need to go with adolescence in terms of cultural evolution in her book, Culture and Commitment.1 Mead describes three cultural paradigms in terms of their teaching/learning relationships between the young and the old:
- postfigurative, in which children learn primarily from their parents and other adults
- cofigurative, in which both children and adults learn primarily from their peers, and
- prefigurative, in which children learn from their parents, other adults, and each other, and adults learn from their children and other members of their children’s generation.
All human societies prior to the 20th century were postfigurative. Pre-agricultural societies, in which humans lived for 80%-95% of our species life, changed little if any. Agricultural societies, beginning about 10.000 years ago, did change but slowly enough not to alter the dynamics of cultural transmission. In contrast industrial societies have experienced continually accelerating change for about 250 years, a moment in the history of the species.
What our societal leaders unknowingly did in the 1950s in the United States, Canada, and western Europe was to create a cofigurative culture. Adolescents were sentenced to years of schooling, even though formal schooling is unengaging and unproductive for most of them. They were excluded from meaningful roles in the adult world, and teens’ capacity for perceiving the present in a quickly changing society more acutely than their parents was ignored or ridiculed. Adolescents responded to this exclusion by creating their own youth culture, which both in its 60s counter-culture form and its later rap/hip-hop form included considerable hostility to and contempt for adults. Adults responded by viewing teens as dangerous: the putative gangs in the 1950s, the counter-culture in the 1960s, the supposed “super predators” of the 1980s, and so on.
In our cofigurative culture, many adolescents feel sentenced to years of high school, which offers them a repressive, alienating, and largely meaningless experience. So they look to each other for engagement and meaning. Yet adolescents are not mature human beings, so the culture they create is also adolescent, immature, and often unnecessarily egocentric.
(image) What we need to create, Mead argues, is a prefigurative culture, in which the capacity of adolescents to see the world anew—with idealism and creative vision as well as with sometimes unbalanced judgment and critique—and make novel sense of it is valued by adults. In such a culture, teens would be welcomed into adult society as contributors with different strengths and limitations, and teens who were engaged in this way would value the experience and wisdom of adults. Forty years ago Mead saw the destructive divisions and the denial of wisdom that a cofigurative society engenders and argued that we need to move beyond this dead end.
What kinds of experiences and social structures would we offer teens if we understood adolescence rightfully to be a new stage of human development that can allow a more complete unfolding of each human’s potential? This is the creative challenge we need to answer today.
Howard Thurman wrote, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” The evolutionary potential of adolescence as a stage in human development is that for the first time in our species history, we have created societies in which individual human beings can discover what it is that makes them come alive—their gifts, their passions, their callings—and can begin to “go do it.” Not later on. Not when they’re older. Now, today.
This is exactly what our species needs, to unleash our most profound creativity and capacity, if we intend to evolve through the crises and challenges we have created for ourselves in this century.
Notes
- Margaret Mead (1970, 1978). Culture and Commitment: The New Relationships between the Generations in the 1970s. New York: Columbia University Press.
Excerpt from Evolutionary Parenting, by David Marshak (Fairhaven Spiral Press, Bellingham WA). Copyright 2016: All rights reserved.
(image) About the Author
David Marshak is the author of Evolutionary Parenting and The Common Vision: Parenting and Educating for Wholeness. Both books describe the common evolutionary insights of Sri Aurobindo Ghose, Rudolf Steiner, and Hazrat Inayat Khan as these relate to the unfoldment of human potential in our children and teens.
David is the founding president of the SelfDesign Graduate Institute, a low-residency, online learning program which invites adults to author their own learning and lives within a community of colleagues and mentors.
Beautifully done, David!
It seems to me, for teens to be accepted into fellowship of adults, first the adults must complete their own individuation and fully inhabit the adult stage. Then there will be an authentic capacity to hold the teen while they move through these tumultuous years of experimentation and exploration. In effect, the mature adults are providing a sustained initiation process into the next stage of development, not leaving the job to the teens to initiate themselves.
I was born in 1940. My first day in school was the first day my wild, exciting imagination became slowly but surely straitjacketed into standing in line, suffering through some crazy teachers and having to conform to the “curriculum” and become smaller, quieter, and fearful of having the “wrong” answer. Reading your excerpt, I can only wish that post war North America knew and practiced the wisdom of which you speak. But those times were different: people’s minds were on a different track. However, I survived. And through music, art and my own deep spirituality I have evolved into the alive and fully human I am now. From all that has hypnotized me, I have awakened. Thanks again!