A letter from The Age, 24/7, in response to a spate of teenage suicides at a Melbourne school, on why peer groups are particularly unhealthy for teenagers, without older adults around to moderate any dysfunctional behaviors. I remember as a teenager I sometimes preferred the company of older adults, who seemed less threatening than those my age.
Peer groups destructive
It is futile to think the anguish being caused by cyber-bullying can be prevented by concentrating on the “cyber” aspect. Despite all the hoo-hah we have heard about bullying, and the many vows to stamp it out, it has become more prevalent because so many of our young people either suffer it or inflict it on those around them, or both.
The same basic cause lies behind binge-drinking and other drug abuse, hoon driving, purposeless vandalism, and most violence. What is that underlying cause? It is anxiety. Like their elders, young people can be anxious about many things but the most difficult is anxiety about themselves: are they worthy of being liked, respected and loved?
Not so many years ago most individuals found their feet as self-controlling adults by mixing with older adults. Now our national obsession with education commits most to not growing up in an adult work environment but spending most of this time from 15 to 25 surrounded by others of the same age. Large peer groups are destructive places because unless you already have confidence in yourself as you are, others will try to put you down so they can climb higher.
We shall do little for the victims of bullying if we do nothing about the anxiety of bullies.
– David G. McKechnie, Horsham
This reminded me of an article I came across in 2006, “Why Nerds are Unpopular”, a thought-provoking essay by Paul Graham. Why smart kids are badly treated in American schools (which seem to have a particularly vicious caste system). Also, musings on why teenagers in modern society generally seem to be so troubled:
Life in this twisted world is stressful for the kids. And not just for the nerds. Like any war, it’s damaging even to the winners.
Adults can’t avoid seeing that teenage kids are tormented. So why don’t they do something about it? Because they blame it on puberty. The reason kids are so unhappy, adults tell themselves, is that monstrous new chemicals, hormones, are now coursing through their bloodstream and messing up everything. There’s nothing wrong with the system; it’s just inevitable that kids will be miserable at that age.
This idea is so pervasive that even the kids believe it, which probably doesn’t help. Someone who thinks his feet naturally hurt is not going to stop to consider the possibility that he is wearing the wrong size shoes.
I’m suspicious of this theory that thirteen-year-old kids are intrinsically messed up. If it’s physiological, it should be universal. Are Mongol nomads all nihilists at thirteen? I’ve read a lot of history, and I have not seen a single reference to this supposedly universal fact before the twentieth century. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance seem to have been cheerful and eager. They got in fights and played tricks on one another of course (Michelangelo had his nose broken by a bully), but they weren’t crazy.
As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager is coeval with suburbia. I don’t think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life they’re made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere.
[…]
Teenage kids used to have a more active role in society. In pre-industrial times, they were all apprentices of one sort or another, whether in shops or on farms or even on warships. They weren’t left to create their own societies. They were junior members of adult societies.
Teenagers seem to have respected adults more then, because the adults were the visible experts in the skills they were trying to learn. Now most kids have little idea what their parents do in their distant offices, and see no connection (indeed, there is precious little) between schoolwork and the work they’ll do as adults.
And if teenagers respected adults more, adults also had more use for teenagers. After a couple years’ training, an apprentice could be a real help. Even the newest apprentice could be made to carry messages or sweep the workshop.
Now adults have no immediate use for teenagers. They would be in the way in an office. So they drop them off at school on their way to work, much as they might drop the dog off at a kennel if they were going away for the weekend.
What happened? We’re up against a hard one here. The cause of this problem is the same as the cause of so many present ills: specialization. As jobs become more specialized, we have to train longer for them. Kids in pre-industrial times started working at about 14 at the latest; kids on farms, where most people lived, began far earlier. Now kids who go to college don’t start working full-time till 21 or 22. With some degrees, like MDs and PhDs, you may not finish your training till 30.
Teenagers now are useless, except as cheap labor in industries like fast food, which evolved to exploit precisely this fact. In almost any other kind of work, they’d be a net loss. But they’re also too young to be left unsupervised. Someone has to watch over them, and the most efficient way to do this is to collect them together in one place. Then a few adults can watch all of them.
The Large Hadron Collider, which was powered up to much fanfare (and fearful hysteria) last year before being shut down for repairs due to a helium leak, is still no closer to starting up due to two vacuum leaks being found. Now the start-up is set for mid-November. *Sigh* I want to see black holes!
The official site for Avatar is online (only a front page as of yet). There was a screening of movie footage at Comic-Con, so there are lots of reports coming out, mostly positive. There will be a free 15-minute preview screening at various cinemas worldwide on 21 August. I might try to see the preview if it is in a conveniently-located cinema (and at a suitable time).
I have to admit I feel a certain cynicism about the romance element, though; this theme of Avatar seems to pander to certain male fantasies, and the quote below from a James Cameron interview had me rolling my eyes a bit:
I mean, really, it was a fine line to walk between making them too alien. I think in some earlier images, when they started to leak and even with the banners some of the fans were saying, “Gee, I thought they’d look more alien, if you’re going to go to all this trouble with CG and everything.” But if it wasn’t a love story, if it was more of a film about first contact with an alien race I think it would be. But this is really a story about assimilation and Jake becoming one of them and starting to see through the eyes of people who are culturally different. It’s a love story, too. So the physiological differences, the more alien we made them in the early design phase we just kept asking ourselves, basically the crude version is, “Would you want to do her?” And our all male crew of artists were basically like, “No, take the gills out.”
There is a page for it at the TV Tropes site: Green Skinned Space Babe! (Blue-skinned, in Avatar’s case.)
I would, however, like to see the genders of the main characters reversed (female human, male alien) just for a change! I suspect this would attract a larger female audience ;-).
I also did a quick colored pencil concept sketch of a Na’vi – male, of course – wonder how close or not it will resemble official images when released? I did not add bioluminescent dots as this proved too fiddly with a mouse.
