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Learning and Youth Alienation
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13943 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1988 |
4,636 Words |
| Author
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Edward A. Wynne
Edward A. Wynne is professor of education at the University of
Illinois at Chicago and editor of Character II, a newsletter
on youth issues. |
What Do Our Seventeen-Year Olds Know? has been faulted because it lacks a baseline: Thanks to the study, we have a good idea of what today's seventeen-year-olds know about history and literature. It does not tell us what earlier generations of teenagers knew twenty, forty, or one hundred years ago. And so, it is said, we do not know whether things are getting better or worse or staying the same. We actually do know a fair amount about previous levels of youth learning, however, and we know even more about trends in youth behavior that affect the level of youth knowledge about history and literature.
Youth behavior
Current data shows a substantial long-term increase in disorderly conduct by young Americans. Some of these trends are presented in the accompanying graph. Essentially, the graph shows notable increases in the rates of adolescent death by homicide and suicide, and of out-of-wedlock births. The data is based on the white, more advantaged population to emphasize that such shifts are unrelated to racial discrimination or more extreme forms of poverty.
The graph shows that out-of-wedlock births have steadily increased since the first national statistics in 1940. Death rates for males by suicide and homicide also show remarkable patterns of increase, although they have moderated in the recent past. To summarize, between the early 1940s and 1984, rates of white male adolescent death by homicide and suicide increased, respectively, 441 and 479 percent. Between 1940 and 1985, the rates of white adolescent out-of-wedlock births increased 621 percent. At different points in the last decade, all of these rates attained the highest points
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