School as a social unit

Let us then look briefly at only a few of the things that schools are doing spottily here and there and might be doing more widely if we gave them adequate backing. Let us look first at the school as a social unit, like a small town.

Ideally this is a town that should be serving as a testing ground in social living. It should be giving opportunities aplenty for trying oneself out, for finding one's place in a city of peers.

It should offer ample and multiple chances for working side by side, for playing together, for enjoying communication and contact. Above all, it should offer opportunity for group support.

This last is imperative for several reasons.

As we know, one of the basic wants of human beings is to feel a sense of belonging.

In the adolescent, however, this sense has often grown somewhat shaky. If he is to mature, he must move out from the belonging that small children have in the family circle. Eventually, if all goes well, he will find another close family unit to give him this needed and nourishing sense. Right now, though, he feels that he has thrust one foot over the threshold of his home but has not yet found a firm spot outside onto which he can set it. He feels somewhat unsteadily balanced on shifting ground. Groups of his own age can and should give him the support he needs during the stretch of these inbetween years.

He wants to be liked. Because of his inner revolt from his family and because of his sexual stirrings, he imagines often that they do not like him. Having a group to make him feel liked helps him to like himself better while he weathers the inner doubts and wonderings that go along with growing up.

He no longer wants to live by the prohibitions he learned as a small child. Nor should he. If he does he will never mature.

A child of four may not touch the ornaments on the table in the living room. His conscience, such as it is, tells him he must obey this rule of conduct even though his parents are not around. But if at fourteen he is still so concerned with these old rules that he must still obey them, his life obviously will remain too restricted. And yet there are many adolescents whose conscience still dictates the old rules they learned long ago.

New codes and more appropriate restrictions must be acquired. A new conscience, more appropriate to a grown-up body, must grow and develop.

To cite just one more example: The childhood conscience said, "Don't approach any person sexually!" The adult conscience must take exception to this or marriage cannot result.

The teenager's peer group can help him acquire the new standards of conduct and control that he seeks and must have. It can bring him the safeguards and prohibitions, the rules and regulations that the youngster, in his own littleness, pushed by the bigness of his newly heightened adolescent impulses, craves and must have.

When he doesn't find a "good" group, he is apt to scout around and get himself into a "bad" one. For even in a "bad" group he may get what he is after: not only companionship to bolster his limited strength but also rules of conduct. In one gang, for example, there are very rigid rules which demand that every boy must remain unbathed for ten days at a time, that he must cohabit with at least one new girl every week, that he must make a certain razor mark on his chest. Absurd or immoral as they are, these rules give him a sense of adherence to codes of conduct which help him to feel more alike and liked. Therefore, if no other peer groups welcome him, he may rush into a gang that gives him such hurtful rather than helpful support. Or he may join a cliquish secret society that puts on false airs and makes him feel big by virtue of snobbishly making others feel small.

In the junior high or high school typical of our metropolitan areas, the student body may be so large that a child gets lost in it. To offset this we may ask:

Are there chances in your school for your boy or girl to belong to smaller, more cohesive groups?

Interest groups--as drama or Spanish or debate club and so on? Hobby groups that range from TV to chess? Social groups for dances, hikes and other get-togethers? And does your school encourage boys and girls to get into High Y's, 4-H, Camp Fire groups, Scouts and the like?

Are there numerous enough and varied enough groups to provide belongingness to youngsters of all sorts?

Writes one shy adolescent:

Teen agers should get together and have parties and form clubs and have fun. In gym we should be allowed to get the boys and girls together to dance at least one day a week. That would do a lot for us.

We would be able to dance better . . .

Obviously. But more importantly:

We would get better acquainted with boys and girls we would like to meet . . .

And still more importantly:

We could learn to talk better, too, with each other. This brings us to another facet of the peer-group matter.

Boy-girl contacts are, as we know, one of the essentials during these years. The adolescent must gradually come to form relationships that lead to knowledge of the opposite sex both as good companions and as potential good mates.

In working together in classrooms there can be exchange between the sexes which is wholesome and sound. Too often, however, this is stifled by the air of dead seriousness that pervades the scene with the little god of study set in a more important niche than companionship, which furthers the great need to grow up.

In classrooms there can be mutual projects. Honest laughter. The small whispered exchange of comments that build intimacy and a sense of getting to know one another.

Boys and girls can sit next to each other, too.

These things do not retard intellectual learning. They enhance it.

And so, here again are points to check:

In your school, has the custom of seating boys on one side of the aisle, girls on the other, been abandoned? Or when they sit in a circle for less formal discussion has the neat division been discarded in which one side of the circle is all skirts, the other all pants?

As you enter the classroom are you chilled by the still lifelessness of decorum, or are you greeted by the busy hum of healthy exchange?--A boy, for instance, leaning over a girl's desk showing her how to solve an algebra problem. Two boys and two girls around a table trying to figure out the difference on two maps of Europe drawn at two different dates.

Comes another point also in the business of peer-group relations: the matter of leadership at this age and stage.

These youngsters are turning away from the childhood years in which they have followed their parents and have been dependent on them. They now need opportunities to experience and envision themselves in more adult roles.

As the adolescent in his imagination identifies himself with his like-sexed parent, this brings with it the impetus to grow up. However, if he approaches such a role in his home, the result for him may be fraught with danger. At least in his mind.

For here once again old fantasies enter. If the boy imagines being Father or the girl imagines being Mother, the whole triangle of the earlier love-rivalry period may be brought back into play. The adolescent is then confronted once more with the earlier imagined temptation and danger of wanting to shove the like-sexed parent out. He may as a result of these fantasies grow frightened, if for no other reason than that he still needs this parent realistically as a parent, and knows that he cannot actually shoulder the responsibilities of taking his place.

This is one of the reasons why at home the teen-ager often remains more babyish, more retiring and less efficient than he needs to. He shows less independence and leadership. Or he covers up fear of being the boss by denying the fear through going to the opposite extreme and overdoing the bossing act.

In school, however, he can have opportunities for taking bigger and more important roles realistically with less imagined danger.

Here, for example, is Bart, who has demonstrated no leadership whatsoever. He is timid and lacking in confidence and is poor in his studies. In woodshop he does his best work. This fact is brought out in a "guidance conference," where his various teachers meet to discuss his needs with the school psychologist.

As a result, his program is rearranged so that he goes into a second and less advanced shop group to assist the teacher. Here Bart helps one boy learn to run the lathe and another to square off measurements. In so doing he can identify himself in fantasy with someone bigger and more capable like the big father he admired when he was small and like his teacher now. He can be a kind of father here without the fantasied danger of losing his father by shoving him out.

To the uninitiated this might seem, for instance, that Bart is being given false hopes of getting a foreman's job when he goes out of school into industry, even though he does not seem to have foreman capabilities. This is not the important thing. Bart is learning more than anything else to be a family man, to approach adulthood feeling that he is capable of doing things for others and of taking a big man's role. He has something to give and he is getting a chance to give it. By virtue of this he is also given a chance to feel the warm LIKING FOR OTHERS which comes with giving and which forms the basis of adult and parental love.