Interview with Mike Males

Introduction
Welcome Mike. You’ve been deeply involved with helping, counseling and teaching young people for nearly thirty years now, so I suspect it’s safe to say that it’s something you really like. Why kids? What is it that you like so much about helping young people?

Mike Males
I’ve never thought of it as helping them. I’m a selfish, rotten, immature American Baby Boomer (redundant, I know), and I spent a lot of time working with younger people in families and wilderness programs because I enjoyed it and learned a lot of things I needed to know. If a teenager got helped along the way, I regard it as a happy coincidence. I’m continually shocked to see yet another author/commentator/professional celebrated for self-flattery about how heroically he/she "rescues" today’s apocalyptically troubled kids. I can't understand why anyone would buy into such transparent boasting of personal and generational superiority. My experience has been that teenagers and adults face much the same issues permutated over time, and if our experience informs them, their familiarity with this era and our mistakes can help us a lot in turn. This is a new age of rapid technological and demographic change, and younger generations are adapting to it as they’re supposed to. Meanwhile, just as old generals refight the last war, our aging thinking is still mired in refighting and re-re-fighting the battles of 30 years ago. That’s why every time I finally figure out how to pose a question the right way to younger people--maybe my only skill--I get answers I didn’t expect.

Richard Farson
Mike, I'd love to know what a couple of your questions to adolescents might sound like. Is there a design principle in the way you formulate them? What do they elicit that surprises you?

Kip Winsett
I want to second that question, Mike. And I'd like to hear a few examples of the answers you've gotten that you didn't expect.

Mike Males
Let me start with one (of many) questions in which I was seeking a typical answer. I surveyed 700 of my UC Santa Cruz students in 2001-06 about their cigarette smoking. I expected that in a fairly affluent, Bay Area, educated, health conscious population, I’d get very low rates, contributing to my belief that yet another consequence of poverty is higher smoking rates. I was shocked when initial surveys showed 60% of my students had smoked cigarettes within the previous year, much above the national average for 18-21 year-olds. I had seen little smoking on campus, even at breaks for 3-hour classes. So, I redesigned the survey to ask about smoking frequency and whether they smoked the whole cigarette. I found that only 3% to 4% of students smoked a half-pack per day or more; nearly all were "social smokers" who lit up only on weekends, or finals week, or a couple of times per year. When I asked about the smoking setting, students told me that instead of smoking the whole cigarette, social smokers tended to pass cigarettes around a group like joints. Not only did they smoke rarely, but each smoking occasion entailed less smoking per smoker. Even social smokers in their late 20s had not progressed to daily smokers--unlike their parents by the same age--in fact, four-fifths of social smokers said they smoked less today than in the past. Upshot: Instead of the conventional finding I expected (rich kids don’t smoke), I found a potentially crucial nuance: my students appeared to be evolving a new form of tobacco use that is not addictive and much less health threatening, which fits with epidemiological immunization theory.

This was a total surprise. In other cases, I have either reversed the assumption or surveyed youths about my own contrary research findings. In a 1987 article, after a popular junior high cheerleader committed suicide, I interviewed students as to why teenagers as a rule have much LOWER suicide rates than adults do. I interviewed Orange County teens in drug rehab about why no teenagers had died from drug overdoses (confirmed with the coroner) in a county of 2.5 million in the past three years, and they set out a logical series of ways to examine and explain such an unexpected reality. Recently, I’ve interviewed local teens (in my critical thinking class) on the large decline in rape among young people, or reasons why California’s teen driving law backfired--these are based on my research findings. Of course, the first question is whether "the numbers" are wrong or inadequate to measure real problems. In virtually all cases, students describe much more sophisticated, complex factors simplistic "expert" reports don’t go near.

In another logic task, I’ve asked them whether the county does (as incessantly proclaimed) really have a "teenage drinking" problem. I present this question as exemplifying the difference between a "puzzle" (a yes-no question to which someone has the answer, and the task is to find that person and ask, the way news reporters approach the issue) and a "mystery" (a question involving a range of answers involving information which is obvious but un-analyzed). If approached as a "puzzle," of course, EVERYWHERE suffers a teenage drinking crisis--everyone says so! If approached as a mystery, the question then becomes: what would life in this county be like if there was a major teen drinking crisis? Weekend DWI crashes and injuries/deaths, alcohol overdoses, drunk students, massive violence, etc.--which is simply not occurring. The question then becomes: what is a "problem"? How are teens managing what all agree is widespread drinking without suffering mass harm?

I find teenagers as a rule have very flexible minds, like new mysteries to solve, and especially like logical dilemmas. They are dependent on information from adults, which produces the peculiar paradox that their own experiences and observations do not confirm the dire images of their generation in the expert and popular media. They assume "other kids" must be having terrible problems because they can’t bring themselves to believe adults would lie about them so brazenly. Again and again, intriguing new developments pop up. One of my students had her paper on violence prevention programs "ruined" because 85% of the Santa Cruz students she surveyed had never been in a fistfight in their lives (only 3% had been in more than one fight). (What? Growing up in Oklahoma in the 1950s, I never imagined such a thing as a childhood without fights.) There is new information all over the place begging new attention--yet fear-driven, frozen-brained grownup authorities can’t deal with it and simply ignore it.

Richard Farson
Fascinating material, Mike. Why do you think adults hold such low opinions of youth? And, like your questions above, is that question framed properly? Is it fair to lump all adults that way?

Kip Winsett
Are the changes you've noted (fewer rapes, fights, etc.) primarily in relatively affluent communities (Orange County, Santa Cruz, etc.) or are they occuring in disadvantaged rural areas, inner cities, etc.?

Isn't the media, in general, creating an atmosphere of fear in adults about pretty much everything?

Mike Males
Surveys such as Public Agenda’s indicate that two-thirds to 80% of adults hold blanket, negative opinions of youth and want to impose severe restrictions on them, starting with curfews and mass banishment from public space. That’s pretty extreme--no other adults on earth, even in military dictatorships or fundamentalist cultures, give adults freedoms while repressing their youths the way we do. While I’m surprised that there remain one-third to one-fifth of adults who don’t go along--I’d like to see a demographic breakdown of who they are--I believe a solid majority of Baby Boomers would abandon the next generation entirely (our own families excepted--most of the time) if we can figure out a way that doesn’t harm us elders in the process. I’ve been deeply puzzled by the singularly extreme degree to which Americans are fearful and hostile toward their own youth--you don’t see these attitudes in Latin America, Canada, or Europe, though ephebiphobic glimmerings are afoot in the U.K. I spent a month in Medellin, Colombia, the most violent city on earth over the last 15 years (100,000-plus murders--1 in 20 men in the city) due to rampant drug and political wars. Even there, the public, officials, and mass media are uniformly sympathetic toward young people and view the horrific violence as stemming directly from poverty and external pressures (not the least being the US’s cocaine habit). Then I come back to the US to news reports of suburban adults whining for curfews because someone heard a bad word and they’re scared of (whisper this word: "black") kids hanging around their latte shops.

I puzzled for years over why we older US adults cut our own misbehaviors infinite slack but are such intolerant cowards toward the young. People asked why, and I had no good answer. As many of you know, I found the biggest clue in Margaret Mead’s cogent little 1970 book, Culture and Commitment. The sum of her argument (scholars, set me straight if I get anything wrong) was that we adults adapted for millennia to traditional, unchanging "post-figurative" cultures comfortably controlled by elder knowledge. Suddenly, in the space of a couple of generations, once-stable cultures have been rocked by global migration and technological advances, yielding constantly shifting "co--figurative" (peer dominated) and "pre--figurative" (youth dominated) subcultures to which youth were better adapted than their elders. Mead predicted adults weren’t going to take their demotion to obsolescence very well. She feared that in the near future, adults would come to fear the unfamiliar new attitudes and behaviors of modern, diverse youth "like an invading army," institute often "bizarre" repressions aimed at forcibly restoring the imagined stability of the past, and, at worst, abandon the young altogether. James Baldwin, writing from his deeply pessimistic angle (see No Name in the Street, 1972), also got it: social and racial change are heralding dynamic new challenges speeding up time itself in ways even the kindliest old can’t fathom.

Here’s our uniquely American crisis: we’re the only wealthy culture combining the co--figurative (racial diversity fueled by global immigration) and pre--figurative (social change). Western Europe and Japan are certainly experiencing social change (but are racially uniform, for now), Latin America is more racially diverse than we are (but poor)--but the US is undergoing the double whammy of racial transition and rapid social change, all at once. This is more than "Future Shock." Older Americans not only are jolted by disturbingly rapid social change, we tie it to what we see as unwanted racial diversification all wrapped up in this baffling, frightening new whirlwind of multiculturalism and technology that makes us yearn for those imagined tree-lined, suburban (whisper the word: "white") streets of our halcyon Fifties yore. It’s no wonder that California and New York City, the leading edge of multicultural change, are among the most repressive places, with the most policing and largest prisons. California youth are now 65% nonwhite and becoming darker by the day--a fearsome sight for an over-45 ruling class that remains 60% white. Even Minneapolis youth no longer have a white majority! Europe, learn from us--if Minnesota can go multiracial, your monoculture enclaves are on the clock as well. All-white (and all-Japanese) states are unviable; their mammoth aging populations require importation of poorer guest workers to support, and California is the demographic model of states to come.

Mead and Baldwin figured out 35 years ago why American adults would come to hate young people so poisonously. Mead was optimistic; give us a generation or two, we’ll adapt to change just as we once did to tradition; Baldwin feared we’d just come apart and put his money on young African Americans as the best hope for the future. By her 1978 update, Mead was becoming gloomier: the young Baby Boomers she’d hoped for were souring, their parents were not adapting, and only a conscious effort would prevent "runaway feedbacks" that would jeopardize the whole planet. From the advantaged vantage of 2007, I’d say Mead’s worst fears turned out to be spectacularly right, which no doubt would have dismayed her. I suspect Baldwin would also be deeply disappointed in how 1960s black youth aged. Baby Boomers, black and white, are a terrible generation, a betrayal of America worse than anyone could have predicted.

Sorry Richard--you addressed an expansive question to a former journalist (paid by the word) turned academic, which means no short answers! Let me take a breath and get to Kip’s question, the short answer to which is: dramatic younger-generation improvements are evident among poorer as well as richer youth, and media-created fear is very selective: it is bounded by the need to resonate with elder fears.

Richard Farson
Mike, I love your long answers, even though I know the medium is supposed to require short ones. In the seventies I shared your enthusiasm over Margaret Mead's ideas about the reverse transmission of culture, and have been dismayed that it hasn't worked out quite the positive way she thought it would. Maybe we can get her daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, one of our Fellows, to comment on it. I think it is the best answer to my question.

I look forward to your response to Kip because your short answer is quite provocative.

Mary Boone
Mike, this is a fascinating discussion. Thank you for sharing some really illuminating information.

I wanted to focus on two things: First, the suicide issue. I know you mentioned that suicide rates for teens are much lower than for adults, but is it true that the rates of teen suicides have risen in recent years and if so, how much and why.

Second, my friend Don Tapscott did some very interesting research several years ago about how teens would be driving innovation on the Internet. Most of his books are best-sellers (he's got one now on the best-seller list - Wikinomics) but that particular book about the Net Generation didn't sell as well as almost all of his others. Now it seems quite clear why: adults didn't want to hear the message that teens and young people would be coaching and counseling us on how to stay in the game with regard to technology.

Mike Males
Richard, Kip, Mary-- thanks for your great discussion starters on media fear, race/class, suicide, and "pre--figurative" developments, and I’ll rely on you to tell me how clear the answers are, since I’m still trying to organize many of these ideas. There is another development blocking rational adult responses to young people (as I write, the local news is blaring: "Do you know what your teen is doing? A disturbing new report details risky behaviors by area teens"). The extension of Mead’s argument that aging adults are more at home in static societies while young people are naturally better adapted to changing ones is that we would expect rising troubles among grownups. Indeed, that is the case. In the last 30-40 years, we have seen record explosions in rates of middle-aged drug abuse deaths, serious crime, arrest, imprisonment, HIV/AIDS cases, family instability, and other signs of disarray. Examples: for age 40-59, there were:

--1,671 deaths from overdoses of illicit drugs in 1980, rocketing to 14,420 in 2004; --177,000 arrests for felony violent, property, and drug offenses in 1980, versus (are you ready?) 744,000 in 2005; --a 700% per-capita increase in imprisonment, so that persons over age 35 now comprise a rising majority of new prison admissions.

Now, there was a 78% increase in the 40-59 population during the last 25 years--but you can see 850% increase in illegal-drug deaths, 420% increase in serious crime; and 7-fold rise in incarceration (we spend tens of billions of dollars every year to lock up people over 35) dwarfs the population increase. Mine is a seriously messed-up pack of middle-agers.

Put aside complex explanations for now (Baby Boomers have some good reasons to be screwy, including maladaptation to raging change)--the even bigger question furrowing brows should be: WHY HAVEN’T WE HEARD ANYTHING ABOUT THIS CRISIS? Sure, a squib here or there, but if the major media were out to scare us with any panic they could dredge up, nothing beats an erupting drug, crime, and lunacy crisis among the very midlife age group whose stability traditionally has anchored society. Yet--not just silence, but solemn affirmations from august "experts" that people over age 30 are mature, wise, brain-developed, and just don’t cause problems with drugs and crime.

This is not an "information" problem. You can send the terrifying Boomer stats to news reporters, agencies, academics, right to leftwing commentators, etc., and they won’t deny them. They’re just adamantly unwilling to touch them. I sense a visceral resistance. That’s why I’ve turned away from standard left-wing arguments that elitist mass media brainwashing is the simple culprit warping us and toward larger systemic, evolutionary forces of the kind Margaret Mead delineated. Even if the major media did run Boomer crisis reports, I believe the public would tune them out.

What kind of media panics do sell? The craziest are the endless barrage of terror over teens and MySpace, cell phones, internet perils, cyberpredators, you name it, absent a shred of evidence that the true dangers are anything but minimal. And the gut-level fear of girls--the "girl violence," "hooking up," and other supposed rising teenage female epidemics are complete hoaxes, no worse and in most cases not nearly as bad as occurred in past generations. I’ve repeatedly queried the panic mongers about how many teens have actually been killed, injured, raped, or in any way harmed, by some stranger they met online--all to no avail. I wrote a solidly documented little piece that teens are far more in danger of being gunned down or molested in church than they are by someone they meet (or some peer deranged) via unsupervised use of the Internet. You can see why the MySpace/predator panic is so senseless and virulent--it marries elders’ dual fears of the younger generation and new technologies.

So, you bet, any hint that teens are leaders in managing new communcations technologies is more likely to be greeted with fear and demands for greater adult control and suppression of online peer cultures--as Mead said, adults acting to stop teens from moving too far into a future the grownups can’t grasp--than with relaxed invitations for the young to educate and include us old technogeezers in the new world, which they would happily do. It’s a crazy and destructive attitude on our part, the legacy of our ancient fears of what we don’t understand. By the way, aging adults are perfectly capable of handling new technologies and living in the present and future--our limitations are self imposed, a fallout from pointless insistence that we must affirm our traditional moral superiority rather than embrace the new.

Teen suicide is another example of a modern panic fostered to confirm adult fears. By all evidence, never have teens been less self-destructive then they are today. Prior to the 1970s, most areas of the U.S. (particularly rural areas and the South) ruled tens of thousands of self-inflicted firearms, poisoning, even hanging deaths among teens as "accidents" or "undetermined" rather than as suicides for lack of investigation, religious, insurance, or personal (solace to the family) reasons. As coroners have become more professional, the same deaths once ruled accidental are now ruled suicides, so you see a highly-publicized increase in teen suicides from 1950 to around 1987 or so--along with a huge, never-mentioned "decline" in self-inflicted teen "accidents." For example, back in 1965, 1,089 teens ages 10-19 died from self-inflicted gunshots--402 were ruled accidents, 687 as "accidents". In 2004 (in a larger teen population), 989 died from guns--846 were ruled suicides, just 143 as accidents. The "increase" in teen suicide results from changes in death classification, not more deaths.

In California, which has employed professional coroners with investigative authority for 40 years, the trend is clear--both teen suicides and suicide-indicated "accidents" have plummeted since 1970 to record lows today. A particularly fascinating development is the convergence of suicide by race. Whites have higher suicide rates than nonwhites, but in recent years in California, white teen suicide has plunged to levels very close to those of nonwhite teens--even as crime, including murder, among nonwhite teens has fallen to low levels approaching those of whites. (I don’t mean to imply rates are now equal, but they’re much closer than in the past.) This convergence in a multiculture--California is the only state with large representations from all four inhabited continents--is intriguing, one I want to study more.

Richard Farson
Mind blowing statistics, Mike. From today's NY Times: "....three weeks ago a U. N. agency ranked Britain 18th out of 18 rich countries in a study of children's well being. (The United States was 17th.)"

What do you make of that, Mike?

Raymond Alden
Mike: I've a statistical problem -- no, make that a simple arithmetical problem:

The people who are now in that troubled 40-59 age group are the same people who, 25 years ago, were troubled teenagers.

Why is it surprising that they are still troubled?

Mike Males
Richard, Raymond, and others-- let’s tie these two good questions together. First, why does the Western world’s richest nation by far (USA, per-capita GDP $42,000 in 2005, 30% above the second richest country), and the third richest (UK, per-capita GDP $31,000), rank 20th and 21st, respectively among Western nations in child well-being according to UNICEF’s report card? Second, why--given 30 to 40 years’ warning of severe behavior problems among Baby Boomers, beginning with drug abuse and crime explosions among 1970s teens and young adults--has the USA stood aside and let their problems balloon into an intractable middle-aged crisis costing tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars annually today?

If I believed in capital punishment, this situation would justify hanging every politician with the guts of every institutional expert and social scientist. In many respects, the USA has not advanced one inch since 1880. The USA’s unique racial diversity (a good thing) has enabled unscrupulous politicians served by craven "scientists" to avoid making the tough decisions underlying the liberal public service, health care, and social policies less diverse Western nations have. Instead, American authorities repeatedly have cast about for demographic scapegoats to blame for social and health problems--note our "wars on drugs" aimed at the Chinese and opium, black men and cocaine, Mexicans and marijuana, and now teenagers, all to avoid confronting very real drug crises centered in middle-American, older white populations. In the 1980s, we saw a wild-eyed, Salem-style hysteria visited on crack cocaine, demonizing black and Latino inner-city young (the homicide problem was real, but the drug problem was vastly exaggerated)-- amid the silence surrounding a much larger, unmentioned drug crisis of powder cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and prescription drugs killing many more white middle-agers.

The USA’s disgraceful substitution of easy scapegoating of feared racial (and now young age) groups for social problems, and evasion of the nuts and bolts of sound social and health policy, has repeatedly prevented this country from developing the kinds of government responses that prevented crises from erupting in other nations. As a result, Americans live in the most dangerous Western country (worse even than many developing nations), with staggering levels of murder, gun violence, serious crime, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, unplanned pregnancy, HIV, concentrated poverty, urban decay, homelessness, imprisonment, infant mortality, obesity, and just about every other problem you can name. And in 2007, our top political, institutional, scientific, and media authorities act just like their bigoted counterparts of 100 years ago--except today’s proliferation of good information documenting our real crises rules out ignorance as any kind of excuse. Nothing we do works, and we don’t care.

There was abundant evidence back in 1975 that the postwar generation had developed real problems in the USA, as in other Western countries. But, where The Netherlands, Australia, Canada, Germany, and other cohesive countries innovated strong, tax-funded social and health policies to counter these obvious problems, the USA beginning with Nixon and accelerating with Reagan, the Bushes, and Clinton, dismantled the welfare measures our peer nations retained. All presidents beginning with Reagan have relentlessly (and, in the case of Clinton, viciously) scapegoated the young and poor for deficient morals they blamed for every social problem, serving as excuses to ignore poverty, cut programs, and slash taxes. The USA treated Vietnam veterans, shown by the CDC for 30 years to have widespread difficulties, so shabbily that they constitute by credible estimates some one-third of today’s homeless. Boomers, in bitter irony, are suffering the worst for our anti-government, moral mantras--even though we’ve tried our best to make our kids suffer more. The best working explanation I have for improved youth behaviors today is that teens had to become more stable and assume more responsibility to compensate for their parent generation’s chaos.

Another big mystery to me--and it distresses the Londoners I met even more--is why such a huge chunk of the UK and its leadership wants to ape the USA. Many there trace their social problems to Thatcherism, but it’s much worse than that. I started reading the London newspapers when I was there during the invasion of Iraq because their reporting was so much better than ours. I still get these UK papers online, and it is the leftist ones--led by The Independent--that are disastrous, racist, anti-youth fear-mongers, slavishly helping the police hype every blip in crime that can be blamed on (black) teenagers in South London. Terror-articles mushroom a couple of gun crimes (the UK, by the way, reports BB and pellet gunshots as "gun crimes") into armies of uzi-wielding black kids marauding the city--then, down at the bottom of the article, mention that the British Crime Survey actually shows crime is down and real gun offenses rare. The morality-weeping in the leftist UK press over their worst ranking in child well-being the UNICEF report was so phony and sickening I thought I was reading our papers. Suffice it to say that like us, the UK intends to do nothing about the report except to use it to proclaim older generations’ superiority and enrich a few pet interests designed to control the young and lecture them about morality.

So, yes, I think it is shocking that the USA has done nothing in 40 years about obvious, rising Boomer crises other than throwing more of us in prison while publicly blaming drugs and crime on the young. And, as appalled as I am at the USA’s callousness, what’s going to happen to European countries as their minority populations increase? Only 3% of the UK’s citizens are nonwhite, and even less of other European countries--and they’re already electing right-wing governments to protect their majorities from the African and Middle Eastern immigrants. (Joke: What do you call an ethnically diverse European country? "The former..."). That’s why I argue it is crucial that these countries study the USA and the abysmal result of demographic scapegoating and generational abandonment which constitutes elders’ counter-reaction against co--figurative and pre--figurative cultures among the young. Massive social crises and poor conditions for children are the direct result not of diversity, but of runaway fear of diversity.

Richard Farson
Interesting that you fault Clinton for being the most vicious presidential scapegoater of young because Hillary, when she was in law school in 1973, wrote a remarkably prescient article for her law review calling for children's rights. Maybe Bill wasn't paying attention.

Mike I find the case you make about our unwillingness to embrace diversity applying equally to the young to be quite compelling.

As a long time educational reformer, I sometimes think that if we could demonstrate that none of our students learn anything that is in the curriculum (not far from the actual fact) that adults would still not make a move to alter the system because they are satisfied with it as a babysitting device, and as a place for their children to learn the disciplines of sitting still, waiting in line, taking turns, raising your hand, etc. Even if it is totally ineffective in a curricular sense, it's where we want our children to be, no matter how tedius, humiliating and mind rotting it is.

Mike, how might you explain our neglect of the necessary educational reforms? Is it again a matter of our unwillingness to cope with diversity?

Kip Winsett
Mike, in cases such as these where there is obvious malfeasance an obvious question is cui bono? Who benefits from this situation?

Mike Males
Let me also combine these questions. I’m not an authority on education reform, but it seems to me that yeasty idealism of the 1950s radicals (Richard, you knew good old Edgar Friedenburg, I liked reading George Leonard, and even our own pre-Berkeley Clark Kerr) is gone. The original mission of the alternative schools and UC Santa Cruz of that era--to harness the talented misfits (yes, in a meritocracy to beat the Russkies)--has degenerated into a skeletal alternative school network today largely intended to warehouse outcasts and a UCSC as interchangeable with business techs. Charter schools, intended to lure the middle class, wind up further excluding poorer ones and function mainly to justify the drive for vouchers. The insistence on heavy, expulsion-happy discipline (interestingly, not driven by classroom teachers so much as by politicians and pundits), medicated uniformity, and standardized tests are further efforts to forcibly restore an imagined past and its "immutable" body of truths "ALL children MUST learn."

It seems to me our zeal for standardized testing stems not from a somewhat reasonable consensus on what constitutes core skills youth of any era would need, but is now the sum total and sole measure of academic ability suitable for advancement summarized in a few numbers (I realize there are countertrends to this rigidity). As the variety of talents and skills needed in a rarifying society broadens, we insist on narrower measures of competence. This, again, evidences the forced reinstatement of post-figurative ideals--eternal wisdoms of our forefathers, a singular set of credentials, reinstatement of the primacy of social class--in an era in which few of our students will have "careers" in any sense our fathers understood them. And we are fully prepared to expel and banish--to where?--those young who can’t or won’t conform (unless they have rich parents). It seems to me, with 170,000 qualified (poorer) students who are waiting for space to open up in UC and CSU, we’re coming closer to reneging on the entire idea of universal education.

You remember the crazed national worship of that crude "Top School Problems" hoax back in the 1990s, comparing the supposedly placid schools of 1940 where gum-chewing and getting out of line were the "top problems" with today’s mean hallways, where murder, suicide, rape, and drugs predominate? This transparent idiocy, concocted by a deranged fundamentalist, was wildly hyped not just by conservatives, but by eminent liberals and scholars who never even questioned where it came from! They wanted so BADLY to believe it!

Who benefits? Lots of interests have discovered to profit simply by servicing this kind of mindless anger and fear. Perhaps in most areas, but especially in those that affect youth, the USA’s social (including health and education) policy is thoroughly privatized. It is driven not by scientific inquiry into what problems most menace, and what strategies most benefit, young people, but by the needs of interest groups granted "ownership" of the field.

No major player today would see its individual interests advanced by proposing strong measures to reduce youth poverty, promote universal education, reverse the severe problems of drug abuse, crime, and family/community disarray afflicting parent-aged adults, or grant young people genuinely shared power in negotiating a present and future of diversity and change. And so, these crucial goals are simply taken off the table. Instead, we see perpetuation of emotionally satisfying, elder-affirming, but useless (or largely useless) anachronisms like popular "culture wars," behavior education versus abstinence, forcibly delaying precocity, censorship of communication and information technologies, enforcing of winner-loser academic "standards," regulation or banishment of youth peer groups, barring youth from public space, surveilling youth through constant supervision and monitoring, declaring the "adolescent brain" (like the black, Asian, Native, and female brains before it) as generically deficient, and other century-old squabbles that elders frightened of changing society simply can’t get beyond.

The fundamental rules of youth-issue debate governing right, left, center, political, institutional, professional, and media positions today are simple: youth must be denigrated as bad and getting worse due to their own flaws and the corrupting culture they choose. Improvement may be acknowledged only when interests are positioned to grab credit for it. And older adults must be incessantly affirmed as mature, moral, wise, healthy, and caring (the only permissible flaws are neglect due to working too hard or being unforgivably trusting toward scheming teens). If you examine institutional reports, news stories, and interest group statements on young people today, I think you’ll see that 99% follow the above formula rigidly. Wallowing in the same self-gratifying debate over and over, decade after decade, in increasing irrelevance is the way elders maladapted to co--figurative and pre--figurative changes retreat into an imagined past they find comfortable. "The adult imagination, left to itself, remains fettered to the past," if you’ll let me quote Mead’s astonishing prescience of today’s developments one more time.

Popular culture is feared partly because some of its elements are truly objectionable (yes, I am a Boomer!) and because it presents that very diversity of images and possibilities for youth adults find most disturbing. A late 1990s poll of middle/upper class parents found that what they were most upset about boiled down to this: the number of uncontrolled "options" their children had to access information. Now, if you had to "test" for the single most important skill defining a scholar today, I think it would be the ability to find and engage useful information. Memorizing testable procedures speeds up the process of getting information, true, and there is always skill involved in evaluating and intepreting--and extending--information. But... here we go again, the most important talent a child can acquire to advance and to improve the world, the ability to find and use information independently, is exactly what parents and adults most want to clamp down on.

Fortunately, I don’t think adults can do much to bar the young from information (and thank goodness the censors are relying on technofossils like Dr. Phil and his net nannies, who couldn’t rein in a net-savvy 8-year-old). Online youth and youth-adult media has burgeoned beyond all control, to the point that major media outlets face extinction. This is not to say youth will save the world, like Ninja Turtles. I prefer the model of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or The O.C.: there are skills adults possess that remain highly useful, there is a dynamic immediacy and comfort in the present that youth provide, and the biggest challenge society faces is how to bring those skills together. What enlivens me is that there are so many unexpected trends emerging today that require massive alterations in the old wisdoms--including presumably solid social science and psychology theories. The notion that education in a changing society is a much more cooperative, inter-generational venture (what we talked about in the ‘60s but never implemented) strikes me as the first basis of reform.

Richard Farson
Sunday's NY Times carries an article by lawyer, actor, economist, humorist Ben Stein calling attention to the whining response of investors to the recent drop in the stock market, referring to it as adolescent: "...adolescents, with their short attention spans, their demand for a painless life, their need to blame everyone else for their problems, and their perpetual sense of victimization despite having just been given new Beemers, are the model for the whole society right now."

Well, at least he knows he's describing the Boomers.

Reading your material, Mike, I come away with a renewed feeling that bridging this intergenerational gap is perhaps the central issue in making our society work. Everywhere I look, the professions and other institutions that comprise our infrastructure are close to not working at all. Maybe you and Margaret have always had the right idea.

You and I study and write and talk about this, but do you see a scenario unfolding or a critical incident happening that could redirect American society along these lines?

I'm afraid a terrorist attack would make things even more authoritarian and repressive. I know of no political leader prepared to make the case you outline. Lowering the voting age seems still to be fairly remote. Can we count on the Internet for the necessary developments?

Mike Males
Last year, I taught a first-year core class at UCSC on racism. Even among the core faculty who fancied themselves the cutting edge of "critical race" egalitarianism, the need to INCESSANTLY proclaim their superiority to "today’s students," from the first minute, long before they got to know them, was stifling. The authors of the anti-racist readings we assigned indulged the same egotism, to the point that I finally asked my classes to forget about specific cases of racism for a moment and list the larger principles of prejudice: deindividualization in favor of mass description ("them"); generalizations of rare negative cases, anecdotes, an characteristics to the entire group; ascription of innate, biological flaws; a constant tone of hostility, superiority, distance, and condescension; etc. We then analyzed statements in the readings about young people for those qualities, and... bingo. I then invited them to describe their own Bay Area generation, and they were not self-serving; they delineated good and bad in ways we Boomers don't seem capable of.

Tonight’s national news programs carried a segment exactly the same as Stein’s tantrum, with references to the "typical teenager" whose emotional eruptions torture "all" parents and who will be happy to discover "science" has "discovered" adolescents are biologically afflicted with "raging hormones," giving teenagers what "they" ALL want: to make excuses for their terrible behaviors. Of course, these "discoveries" bore a striking resemblance to earlier "scientific" claims about the biologically-based, hormone-driven emotionality, instability, and irresponsibility of women. As my students pointed out, bigotry is rarely original--it just shifts targets.

I would issue this challenge to all reading this exchange, as I have to others: what is a "typical teenager"? Can you name the prototype teenager who defines all 30 million Americans ages 12-19? May I interview this specimen? I've never met a typical teenager. It’s a question too stupid to even contemplate--and, yet, 99% of our popular media discussion of adolescents is premised in the claim that ALL teenagers are horrible mistakes of nature.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to counter curfews, censorship, harsh policing, and (especially) the "new" (actually, ancient) "science" that claims adolescent cerebral cortexes (like women’s and blacks’ before them) are undeveloped seats of irrationality and animal impulse. If we look at our brains as biologically limited, then the aging adult cerebrum, with its phsyical loss of memory and learning genes becoming serious by age 40, is far more debilitating than anything afflicting adolescents. Fortunately, neither teens nor elders are confined to small-minded biological limits. We are wonderfully adaptable.

I tutor teenagers now who are more mature than I am--in fact, than most middle-agers I know. It doesn’t bother me to admit that, because I (me, me, me) benefit more from exchanges with them than I would calling them stupid and lecturing them on my age- and generation-based superiority, let alone trying to forcibly suppress their views. I want to know why teenagers today have such low rates of rape, property crime, suicide, and drunken driving, not whether they will admit Boomers are godlike and their younger generations just (as one commentator put it) "demographic junk."

I believe the odds are that we will see some modest increases in crime by youths in the near future--nothing approaching the 30-year explosion among Baby Boomers--that will be seized on hysterically to impose massively harsher restrictions on youth. We’ve done little to alleviate the poverty and adult disarray that puts the most stress on youths, and recent declines in youth crime can’t continue forever. Witness the terror campaign against "rising youth violence" fueled by 2005 and 2006 crime stats (very small and inconsistent changes, even if accepted uncritically). Add another school shooting (predicable in a society in which mass shootings occur everywhere else), aging Boomers moving into more positions of power, black/Latino youth presence becoming more obvious to the white elderocracy, and continuance of the current agency-expert-institution-media tide of panic, and you get all the elements of unreasoning crackdowns. Unless younger generations become dramatically more assertive, we will see even harsher repressions against the young (and, sorry Democrats, I think anti-youth repression will advance even faster with a Hillary, Obama, or Joe Biden in the White House, if only because Republicans have lots of other groups to attack).

You can pick your scenario, but I think the trends toward banning youth from public spaces, preventing peer contact, and forcing them into seamless regimes of 24-hour parent-school-program supervision will become more frantic. The good result is that if repression increases, more youth are simply going to drop out, as they are now doing, and there is little adults can do to prevent them from dropping out. Too many young people are now too technologically adept to control in an online world, and, in massive expansion of the zine cultures of 1990s, large numbers won’t put up with forced monitoring and supervision. However, for all the revolutionary appeal of youth forging their own way, I don’t think it is the ideal. It wastes a lot of time and knowledge.

William Golding got it right--the boys rampaging on the island weren’t acting any worse than the adults cruising in their warship... but they weren’t acting any better. Franklin Roosevelt got it right: rigid adult defense of "the staid old world of our fathers" and denigration of the young severs intergenerational ties, which is "why the world gets better so slowly." Mead got it right: the exhilarating challenge for modern adults is not the same-old post-figurative tedium of instructing youth in "what to think," but the pre--figurative dynamic of "how to think" in a new global multiculture whose survival depends on embracing the children of others as much as tribes once embraced only their own. James Baldwin got it right: the radical speeding-up of time renders the old bewildered and "America’s streets...one vast, unprecedented, howling orphanage." We do not have a "race problem," Baldwin announced to what must have been shocked readers of his rage at white America; we have a problem of how to treat "our children... of the great Western house."

How could these folks have figured out so much decades ago? And how have we Aquarians basking in the Age of Information gotten so much dumber since?

Richard Farson
These answers of yours (really more like magazine articles) are so rich and provocative.

One of the lessons I learned in social psychology many years ago is that stereotypes are immoral not because they are inaccurate, but because they are unfair, leading to discrimination against those who don't fit the stereotype. That is, we use stereotyping constantly to find our way through life, well beyond racial or age stereotypes. But when we see a specific group targeted so negatively, as we have with so many of our recent efforts at liberation--women, gays, blacks, etc. it may be difficult to stay with that theory. I can't include children in that list as having been liberated because while I thought children's liberation would happen as a result of the other civil rights movements, what happened was that we became more protective of children, which of course is just the opposite of liberation in its effect. So, Mike, I take it that you would disagree with those social psychologists of years ago, that stereotypes are inaccurate and therefore the stereotypical teenager is very much in the minority.

Mike Males
Thanks. I’m still trying to sort ideas out, and had this interview occurred a few months from now, you might see some different answers. The starkest reality is that humans spent several hundred thousand years in societies in which instant, life-or-death judgments about strangers they encountered--usually "death" ones--promoted personal and tribal survival. Suddenly, in the last century, these same judgments have provoked disastrous mass wars and now threaten our extinction.

The term "stereotype" or "generalization" literally means a best-guess judgment about another person based on group characteristics that are true most of the time. These terms are misnomers when applied to youth, since most youth do not in any way fit the Ben-Stein and similar stereotypes applied to teenagers (or fit them no more than adults would). They are hostile bigotries, not stereotypes. They are efforts to extend old racist and sexist prejudices into a modern age by switching them to "youth."

"Youth violence" means "black violence." "Teenage pregnancy" means "blacks and Latinos having too many babies." I realize there are under-funded storefront programs that are genuinely trying to improve health among young people by providing them with good information and services, and I wouldn’t tar them with the following brush: "teenage pregnancy," when described as a "social problem" or the babies of teenage mothers stigmatizes as "social costs," is an ugly, racist throwback to eugenics thinking. Poor people have babies at younger ages for rational personal and political reasons, and the fearful specter of "inferior stock breeding" that drove the liberal-conservative eugenics movement of a century ago is the same one driving the liberal-conservative "teen pregnancy prevention" movements of today. Right down to the bigotries of impulsivity, hypersexuality, immorality, stupidity, and incompetence inflicted on teenage mothers that were once used to deride black and poorer mothers in general.

Of course we would not "liberate children"--even older adolescents--under current circumstances. We need them too badly to replace the stigmatized races of the past. American politics and social policy desperately depend on scapegoating. As the roster of powerless populations easy to blame for problems has declined as these groups have acquired power, young people have become crucial targets for the mass of demagogic interest groups. We are less likely to extend genuine rights and power to the young today than adults of the 1970s, 1950s, or before. The one ray of hope is to convince the backwards, corrupt, ever-self-destructive Democratic Party that they would vastly benefit from lowering the voting age to 16 (in fact, it is their only hope of breaking the conservative legislative logjam in California), which would give high-schoolers a route to build power and prevent teens’ easy stigmatization.

In coastal California, as in many other urbanized areas, youths today are not able to escape interracial mixing. They are also not able to indulge killing other races on sight, the way we did 50,000 years ago. It’s no surprise to see that whites and Asians, along with middle-class Latinos and a few middle-class blacks, integrate quite well and joke about "rice rockets" and "wiggers" and how to deal with frightened first-generation parents. The level of relaxed racial comfort and humor among my Santa Cruz students, with frank expectations of interracial dating, would have been difficult if not impossible in my generation or earlier. More difficult encounters are raised by the many California public schools which contain "uphill" and "downhill" populations mixing poorer and richer students. Just as in S.E. Hinton’s class-conflict novels of Oklahoma schools of my growing up, there remain outsiders defined more by class than by race. That will remain a severe challenge, since substituting scapegoats rather than attacking the idea of scapegoating is a perpetual barrier to modernization.

Kip Winsett
Mike, When I look at the financial burdens that today's youth have to bear I am stunned. The average college grad is $20,000 in debt as a result of getting an education. Usually their first jobs pay below reasonable living wages and I can't imagine how most of them can afford housing. And the credit card companies have been shameless in their hustle to get college students signed up.

More and more we seem to see our children as something to be exploited. OK, I understand that from the corporate point of view but why aren't parents up in arms about what's going on?

Richard Farson
Mike, thanks for that most illuminating analysis of what has happened to stereotyping as politicians and others need to redirect demogogic scare tactics toward youth. Will the Democratic party wake up to its potential by lowering the voting age? We don't often see abrupt about faces after such harsh image building, but sometimes. We are now seeing it in the global warming issue as corporations that have denigrated it are recognizing in it substantial prospects for new business. Maybe all it would take would be for someone like Bill Clinton to advocate it. After all, his wife wrote the article on children's rights. I have a contact there. Maybe I'll suggest it. Whatcha think?

Mike Males
These issues, too, are interrelated. First, I have confidence in high school and college students, to the point that I don’t feel sorry for any of them who get hustled into getting credit cards and overrun them with frivolous spending. Teens don’t need protecting from themselves. If we’re going to argue for lowering the voting age and extending rights to adolescents, we need to hold young people responsible for paying the price (a reasonable price, not a draconian one) for bad decisions.

Second, perhaps 10% or 20% of student debt today results from frivolous spending. Fully 80% of their debt is inflicted by us in the form of outrageous tuition hikes. California regents just approved another 7% fee increase for the University of California system, and here’s the most outrageous part--they justified it in part "to improve mental health services that have reached a crisis point." The phony image of hordes of rapist, suicidal students was fanned by my own American Federation of Teachers spreading self-serving lies as outrageous as anything the Right dispenses. Understand, I’m all in favor of establishing reasonable client guideline ceilings for college mental health personnel and hiring more staff when exceeded, but AFT didn’t do that; instead, the union took the low road of waving incendiary junk defaming students as crazed and dangerous. The tuition hike will inflict more stress on students AFT laughably says they want to hire counselors to reduce.

Hillary issued a quip supporting the 16 voting age (after it was promoted on West Wing), but don’t count on her or Bill for anything. Bill was the most anti-youth president ever, and Hillary is decades distant from child advocacy days. In California, National Youth Rights Association advocates for the 16 voting age were ridiculed by Democrats (and voted down) who claimed tiny teenage brains weren’t capable of responsible franchise. Every day since 1968, I’ve prayed for the painful death of the Democratic Party (yes, I voted for Carter twice and admire his betterment after being president: yes, I voted for WJ Clinton--once. Never again). The Republicans are just doing their job--consolidating anti-future pro-aristocracy forces--evil, true, but I do think someone should advocate for the old order just because not everything new is automatically good. The real reason our country is failing because Democrats are failing at their job of resisting the above with future-affirming, power-dispersing duty in favor of sniveling Red State strategies.

I think we have to make the case in California. If Republicans thought the youth vote would help them one iota, they’d force through bills to let teens vote by any means legal or otherwise. Democrats won’t back 16 year-old voting even after young voters clearly defeated right-wing ballot issues in the last two elections and line up behind Democrats by 75-80% margins. Democrats are captive of narrow special interests such as my teachers’s union that profit (or think they do) from reviling young people.

Parents? I have no idea where they are. Parents seem to be so cowed--by the rage of their rotten-parent wing that angrily denounces their own kids in public forums (what kind of parent would write a book or go on Oprah to denounce their "troubled teen" by name before millions of people?), the incessant official/media/program barrage that demonizes any parent that dares to trust a teenager with any rights at all--that the good parents are silent. None of what we have been talking about in these exchanges evidences a healthy adult generation with genuine parental concern for its young. This is a terrible time, and the rise of predatory programs-industries that play on fears to profit from reducing youth to a saleable commodity is an inevitable result of fear of youthful diversity and change. All fed by older generations whose own personal disarray and greed have soared beyond control.

Richard Farson
Having written a book about children I thought I was especially sensitive to the negative images of children confronting us daily, but I must say that your answers in this interview have greatly heightened that sensitivity. I hear and see such degrading images all the time now. Several times just today I heard terribly unfair and damaging stories of children--and that was on PBS!

I attribute some of the problems you outline as a result of the change from parenthood (the state of being a parent) to parenting (a word that was rarely used two decades ago, and now refers to what I think of as the technology of parenthood, the new behavioral requirements and burdens that have made the role of a parent a nightmare.) Children have not prospered under parenting, and certainly parents haven't. I understand your disgust with parents who expose their children on national TV. Do you have further thoughts about the recent historical development of parent-child relations as part of this picture of oppression? And what about drugs? I heard somewhere that 40% of K-12 students are on chronic prescription drugs. Also requested or approved by the parents.

Kip Winsett
I saw a brief news report last night that really jumped out at me because it was so obviously doing some of what you have described. apparently a new "study" has been released that shows that 50% of college studetns abuse alcohol and/or drugs and 23% have serious drug abuse problems. Crime on college campuses (including rape) is up, kids have been allowed to schedule classes to suit themselves with the result that party time now starts on Wednesday night. One commentator was adamant that alcohol and even advertisements for alcohol must be banned from all college campuses.

Mike Males
Media reporting on youth is completely uniform. The same reports are recycled over and over on every network, with exactly the same take, in a relentless monotony that makes following them useless. If you saw the standard media story on "college drinking" or "teen suicide" or "younger girls sexualized by media images" in 1995, nothing in the media since has been worth attention. I watched a hundred media stories on the ongoing MySpace panic just to see if ONE reporter would try different approach--what a joke of a story, where one untoward incident among 70 million members becomes a national crisis--and EVERY story was absolutely, cloningly identical. It was an unbelievable demonstration of how bankrupt the media has become on youth issues--not just the mainstream news, but the largely worthless alternative media, whose idea of cutting-edge reporting on youth is to rerun the worst junk from the corporate press.

Normally, a society is (or should be) hopeful about its young people. If nothing else, parents should be insulted at insinuations that their teens are conniving evil spawn. It strikes me--and very few other people, apparently--as bizarrely crazed that American adults should take such delight in incessantly trashing the youth that they, after all, raised. Every time I see another one of these mindlessly repeated teen-terror tales in the media, I wonder, "what is wrong with these grownup reporters and profiteering experts they quote that they would say things like this? How can parents not be outraged at seeing the youth of their communities libeled as monsters?" If some scumbag Dateline NBC or USA Today reporter tried to exploit ‘Son of Sam" Berkowitz as an illustration of how terrible Jews are today, or Andrea Yates as exemplifying some underlying horror afflicting all suburban mothers, anti-defamation groups and feminists would (I hope) demand some firings at the network. If someone can explain to me how the news coverage of Columbine or your local network’s "teens out of control" segment tonight differ from crude, mean-spirited bigotry that has no place in a society claiming even a semblance of fair-mindedness, I’m all ears.

The attack on college students as baseless as any other. The study trumpeted in the media is was by the notorious Joseph Califano, who has been repeatedly caught using faulty methods designed to lead to wildly exaggerated results. For those reasons, the media and his funders, chiefly the federal drug folks, love him, as do the culture-war lobbies from left to right. Various interest groups, led by counselors (who I believe need more staffing to counter past cutbacks and growing student populations) have fanned fears of more rapist and suicidal students with flimsy anecdotes. The solutions are as empty and phony as befits a callous age in which youth are just commodities to be exploited. Assume the commentators really believed we had a dire teen/student drinking crisis--what’s the single most effective thing parents and other adults can do to prevent their children from having problems? Lobby for laws to prohibit all drinking by parents. The teens of non-drinking parents are 60% to 70% less likely to drink themselves, so banning drinking by parents constitutes an astoundingly effective anti-student-drinking "policy." Not only that, but the serious dangers parents’ drinking, smoking, and rising drug abuse presents to their kids would diminish as well. Of course, no one would EVER propose such an idea--I’ve tried it, and if you want to see a discussion go silent, just suggest curbs on adult drinking. That shows just how little we really care.

In healthier societies, parental pride in their kids prevents governments and interest groups from going hog-wild in vilifying youth. What has happened in the US is an extremely troubling disappearance of normal adult continuity in concern and hope for younger generations, and the numbing sameness of media stories and expert commentary demonizing young people and pushing meaningless, self-serving cure-alls year after year testifies better than my opinionizing on just how far this generational abandonment has advanced.

Richard Farson
Mike the richness and intelligence of your answers is undiminished as our interview continues--I'm sure an eye-opener for all of us. I figure if we can just keep you going for a few more such answers, you will have written your next book. All Americans need to read your research and your thinking.

So let me ask another question. 50% of K-12 teachers leave before they've been in the field five years--about 30% after their first year. Many of them leave because they didn't expect to have to spend so much energy in discipline and control, and to fail at it so often. Part of the reason they leave, of course, is that women have more opportunities than they did in my generation where teaching was one of about three respectable professions for women (librarian and nurse were the others). So today's teachers are not so limited in their options. But still, the behaviors that are described, even by teachers who remain, don't seem to fit with my experience as a student. Of course we didn't have Ipods and cell phones and video games and other distractions. And perhaps there is less respect for authority. But I wonder if you would help us get a better picture of what is really happening in schools today. And I particularly would be interested in your position on compulsory education.

Mike Males
This statement is apparently from a 1999 survey, "Beginning Now," by the NEA as part of its lobbying effort for better teaching training programs. Although NEA listed "discipline" first on the list of a dozen new teacher concerns, I can’t find the original survey posted any longer to see if discipline was the worst, or just one, of a long list of concerns cited.

It’s curious that the annual Phi Delta Kappan survey of all public school teachers at http://www.pdkintl.org/research/tpoll.htm that same year found only 6% of teachers citing discipline as their biggest problem; only 4% said their schools were disorderly or unsafe. Many times more cited more parental involvement, smaller class sizes, and funding as the most important issues facing schools.

The percentage of teachers reporting discipline as their school’s biggest problem has DROPPED SHARPLY since Phi Delta Kappan’s first poll in 1984, when 19% of teachers reported discipline as their worst problem--three times more than in 1999 (46% of teachers in 1984 said discipline was the biggest reason new teachers left the profession).

The only recent survey I could find was by MetLife, at: http://www.ncctq.org/publications/October2006Brief.pdf

which found that in 2005, 20% of new teachers in schools with 50% or more low-income students cited discipline as a problem (40% cited parents as a problem!). Only 17% of teachers said they were very or somewhat likely to leave within the next 5 years--though the numbers soared for teachers at inner-city schools. This poll cited a 2004 survey finding that 25% of teachers thought that new teachers leave because of discipline problems; 47% cited low pay as the biggest reason, and 38% cited society’s lack of support for teaching.

Adding all this up, I see very little support for the common belief that discipline, disorder, violence, or crime have risen as classroom problems; they all appear, in both student and teacher polls, to have diminished over the years. We hear sensational anecdotes of rude students with cellphones and Ipods (I heard many a professor complaint but encountered few such problems myself from the 1,500 students I taught at UCSC over 5 years; my students were apologetic for cellphone rings). We hear claims going back to Socrates (actually, Hesiod, 700 BC) that respect for authority and teachers is declining. I have no idea how to evaluate such grousings except that adults have vented them for thousands of years.

The most serious teacher concerns about discipline center in the poorest schools. As a former substitute teacher in inner-city high schools--the kind of teacher and setting guaranteed to catch the worst misbehaviors--I can attest that until you get to know students by name and figure out how to deal with problems caused by a handful, classrooms can be intimidating. I seriously doubt things have gotten worse than what I faced in the poorer schools of New Orleans and Los Angeles in the early 1970s--or, for that matter, Blackboard Jungle days, in which Glenn Ford complains about how much unrulier 1955 students were than those of previous generations.

Jean Twenge’s sickening new all-the-rage book, Generation Me, doesn’t seem even aware of how hackneyed her snivelings about "students today" are. She defines students as disrespectful if they ask too many questions, since her superior knowledge should be obvious. I’m afraid I’m not enough of an educational theorist to know whether schooling should be compulsory. I certainly don’t think parents and communities should be allowed to wall off their kids from the world.

I’m constantly amazed at how resentful older folks are that if a student today doesn’t know something, they can just "google it." Or that students today can download and paste in plagiarized work (versus students of my time, who had to painstakingly copy other’s work by hand, as 70% of my senior English class got caught doing with encyclopedia articles in 1967). That information is abundantly available today, and requires tougher evaluation--the way I’ve caught a few students cheating was when they passed off some easily-recognized, conventional idiocy as their own--is a good thing, and I think teaching (at both the high school and university levels) is struggling to keep up with this changed reality. What are the "core skills" students need to have to maximize learning in 2007? If rote computer searching skills are taught in grade school, it seems to me information evaluation and application techniques should dominate secondary and post-secondary education.

If you google "2+2=" directly, you get just one page with the automatic web calculator response: 4. Imagine traditionalists hollering: kids today don’t even have to memorize what 2+2 equals!! But if you search for documents containing 2+2=, you get an incredible list of millions of pages beginning with the vast history of binary relationships, modern digital applications, every damn thing in rich detail and wildly varying accuracy (I hope Orwell’s warning is in there high up). So--in a world when even this most elemental, most practical of mathematical axioms has expanded millions of times past its memorizably simple meaning of Tom Sawyer’s day--what do 2007 students today HAVE to know? And how drastically will that change in by 2020, when most will still be in school?

I would support an evolving (reformed is too weak a word) universal education system that humbly recognized that "a practical man can be counted upon to perpetuate the blunders of his ancestors" (Disraeli). I find the information explosion wonderful, both as a learning and teaching resource. We adults certainly are NOT irrelevant, as any of you who have spent time recently in a classroom knows. But we teachers are rapidly yielding our exclusive monopoly over the skills the young need to a future in which skill acquisition is better understood by the computer literate young, and what we as teachers offer is ever-evolving techniques of practical skill application. My students were constantly producing new information even in fields I think of myself as an expert, and my role shifted rapidly to helping them assess its accuracy and usefulness--and future relevance, which made me smile a bit, because even by age 19, students are seeing their modernity eclipsed by the bewildering new crop of 13 year-olds, who they think of as too worldly for their tender ages.

Richard Farson
Very persuasive, Mike. Once again pop psychology has probably damaged the image of today's young by overestimating disciplinary problems.

The executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, Paul Houston (one of our ILF Fellows) describes a conversation with a top mathematician who told him that what is taught in school as basic math skills is of no help in preparing one for serious work in mathematics, where critical thinking and other qualities are needed. I've been thinking that maybe there are no basic skills at all, and our organization of schooling around them, and the evaluation emphasis that follows, then applied to other educational subjects where it certainly doesn't belong, such as learning Shakespeare, will soon be outdated. Perhaps the only "basic" skills that need to be learned are the ones you mention, how to access the information, knowledge and wisdom that is increasingly available, providing sophisticated answers that undercut what we understand to be basic skills, like 2 + 2.

Perhaps teachers must become meta-professionals, architects of the design of education where computers and parents and paraprofessionals and aides and mentors and students helping each other (students at all levels from kindergarten through grad school already learn more from each other than from their teachers) are organized into learning environments, which could easily be non-geographical, as this interview is. Do you think that the age of school buildings may be drawing to a close?

Mike Males
I’m at a loss on where schools should go (hopefully someone is thinking beyond the No Child Left Behind debate). I miss the Fifties in that regard, with radical reform informing discussion. I’m still an admirer of Shakespeare, but whether and where the core of basic skills will shift is beyond me. It does seem to me the direction is away from memorization (measured by standard tests) and toward information retrieval and application skills. Yes, I do think school buildings--fixed locations in general--are becoming less important, implying new forms of socialization that seem to scare older folks (especially the culture warriors) badly but again, to me, simply expand personal communications.

Kip Winsett

What do today's youth think about this sad state of affairs? Are they aware of just how so much has been blown out of proportion? Do they see their parents and grandparents as being tech incompetents and anti-youth?

It seems curious with all you've mentioned that in many ways, here in America, we worship youth - at least the physical image.

Richard Farson
In the current issue of The Nation, columnist Alexander Cockburn argues that we are being misled, because of the upcoming presidential election, into thinking there is a new violent crime wave. The Police Executive Research Forum, including William Bratton of the LAPD and John Timoney of Miami, has just put out a report stridently titled Violent Crime in America: 24 months of Alarming Trends. Bratton has predicted "a gathering storm" of violent crimes. Apparently the statistics used are just the number of crimes, not the rate, and therefore not corrected for population increases. Critics are noting that while the rate did go up slightly in 2005, it had fallen in every single previous year since 1991. "How can they claim that violent crime is out of control when it had fallen for thirteen straight years before rising by 1.3 percent for just one year?"

By the end of 2005, 7 million people--one in every 32 American adults--were behind bars or on probation or parole. The United States had 5 percent of the worlds people and 25 percent of the world's prisoners.

How do these numbers look to you, Mike, and what is the role of youth in this picture?

Mike Males
Yes, Americans worship the image of youth--the kouros, in classical Greece--which makes us hate them even more (this is also the view of the nation’s leading long-term researcher on adolescence, Northwestern University’s Daniel Offer). Three million medically unnecessary cosmetic surgeries on middle-agers every year plus many more informal cosmeticisms, nearly all to restore a youthful appearance, testify to that. Again, this is disgusting. We control cultural fetishes. We can choose to age gracefully, to end our youth-envy that makes us irrationally hate them for being youthful. We could even show our respect for youth by analyzing their culture with more than lip-curling horror. I happen to like a lot of modern, harder-edged indie music also popular among a wing of younger people today, for example, but you couldn’t pay me to be 16 again. Not because that was a traumatic age, or a worse age to be today, but because I got to be 16 already in this life (during a great time to be young, the 1960s), and I now want to see what being 56 is like. Nearly every adult I know who virulently hates teenagers secretly wants to be one--take a look at the dress and hairstyles of the writer of the awful movie, "Thirteen," or the culture-warriors who angrily berate teens for their fashion tastes (could they be trying to look more adolescent?).

The Nation, like most of the Left, has ranged from worthless to despicable on youth issues over the last decade--mainly, the magazine doesn’t care about youth, and when it does, it is just to affirm some 1970s-trapped liberal program mentality in the culture war against equally obsolete right-wingers. Dealing with Nation editors on youth issues is like talking to some 19th century prigs, and other progressive media such as Alternet, which has sunk to recycling corporate media hysteria about young people, are equally bad. Cockburn has been better than most, and his crime column is on target. His column didn’t mention that police are openly blaming the supposed "surge in violence" on black youth "gangs." Indeed, LAPD chief Bratton was in Washington at the police forum meeting trumpeting rising terror on the streets of Los Angeles at the same time his own department’s posted figures showed violent crime down sharply in 2005 and 2006, especially among youth. The problem is that the ingredients for an increase in violence are still present--widespread poverty and unemployment, an un-addressed middle-aged hard drug scourge, severe stresses on families, reduced access to education and jobs among lower income groups--and the reaction if a crime rise does become manifest are likely to be much more harshly repressive than even the ones of the 1990s.

At CJCJ, we just did a study of crime trends among California youth (whose imprisonment rates have plummeted to record lows over the last decade, to the point that only the most violent, chronic offenders are now behind bars) and Texas youth (whose imprisonment rates have soared, especially for lower-level property and drug offenses, over the last decade). Amazingly, Texas, with 50% fewer youth, now imprisons 60% more youth than California does. The result? Both states experienced IDENTICAL 51% declines in youthful crime rates. That is, it makes no difference what we do after arrest--teen crime trends are independent of all the supposed solutions to them. This validates an impressive 1970s study showing that whether 2,500 youthful arrestees were assigned randomly to be (a) harshly prosecuted and sentenced, (b) assigned to community programs, or (c) simply released without charges, the re-offending rate over the next 2 years (30%) was EXACTLY THE SAME. But we live in an age in which lying and special-interest promotions trump science, and so you can believe that many interests are champing to clarion any imaginary or real increase in youth crime.

Richard Farson
Mike, since those teenagers assigned to "community programs" did no better than those harshly treated or not treated at all, do you conclude that there is no specific approach that might lower the teenage crime rate? I realize it is coming down sharply anyway, but are there programs that do work? Since our attitudes toward youth seem not to have improved, to what do you attribute the reduction in youth crime?

Mike Males
Yes, I conclude that the experts on all sides are wrong and that we have no idea what brings down juvenile crime--or reduces other problems. Our companion studies indicate that preventing younger teens from drinking, or driving at age 16, etc., simply result in greatly increased problems in older teen and young adult years. A major imperative is to get one-size-fits-all experts to stop interfering in teens’ lives until they can put aside ideology and look at crime trends and causes realistically.

However, if you’re asking me to substitute my own dubious "expert" opinion as to why juvenile crime and other problems did come down so dramatically in the face of forces that should have produced the opposite result, my answer is humble: I don’t know. One possibility is compensation: teens are acting better because, especially in the most troubled families, they have to take responsibility at younger ages. While it remains true that teens from high-risk families (that is, where the parents have serious difficulties) have more problems than those from low-risk families, fewer teens today emulate the problems of their elders. For example, American black and Latino youth now display the lowest drug death rates of any population I can find in any country, and white youth also display remarkable safety. Second, I think racial diversity may produce synergistic effects. In coastal California, formerly high black and Latino rates of homicide have plummeted to closer (but still not close) to white rates, while formerly high rates of white teen suicide have plummeted to levels close to those of blacks, Latinos, and Asians. Once races are disaggregated, California youth of today show among the lowest rates of nearly all serious problems of any youth in the country.

Richard Farson
I recall the Institute for Human Development at Berkeley (formerly the Institute for Child Development) long ago saying that they had to revise their initial hypothesis, that children from "benign" environments, stable families, etc. would do better than those children who had the more difficult childhoods in coping with the problems of late adolescence and early adulthood. They found just the opposite, that apparently those children who had been coping all along were better able to cope later. How does that square with your reporting that teens from high risk families have more problems than those from low risk families?

Richard Farson
When one knows a field well, as you know yours, it's amazing how we regard most of our professional peers as wrong. Someday we need to discuss the nature of expertise, because it appears that not only are we experts often wrong, we are usually wrong, and as you point out, sometimes almost all of us are wrong.

What can we do about educating the publc with respect to expertise? It's a real dilemma, because we need expertise, but it is so often misleading...dangerously so.

Richard Farson
Your take on all these matters we've discussed so far is so refreshingly counter to the popular images that I can't resist asking you about how you regard adolescent sexuality. I don't want to get you in trouble, but I've been reading Judith Levine's Harmful to Minors where she argues that it is no service to keep children so protected from sex as we currently are doing. I know that we have so frightened children and their parents that adults no longer risk speaking to children. What do you make of all this?

Sorry for the lapse, but I’ve been trying to get a book started that involves reviewing the major books on youth on the bookstore shelves now. I had suspected they were bad, but I’m floored at just how atrocious these books are. You would think these Ph.D.s and MDs had absolutely no understanding of basic statistics, original research, or ethics. The only thing I can think is that these authors are motivated to write books because they’re enraged at their own kids and can’t admit it (though a number take cheap shots), so their wars with their children are transferred to a war on all youth. That doesn’t explain why books going into their third edition in 2001 still contain fundamental statistical errors and

rely on un-updated 1985 data. What this all amounts to is what I’ve feared: no one really cares whether what they say is accurate or fair, so long as it’s hostile and self-aggrandizing.

I think we have to factor in the selection process of politicians, and the major media, in elevating bad science that upholds prevailing prejudices. I keep hearing that media reporters don’t care about facts, but about spinning a yarn of good and evil. Books that uphold and provide scripts for that media need get publicity. But it isn’t just the media. Reporters can’t sell stories no one reads or watches, so that means a large chunk of the public wants youth presented in exactly that way--over and over. They present youth or the culture and media youth patronize as evil, the professionals and grownups fighting youth evil as good, and the melodrama continues.

One would think puritanical, good-evil American thinking would be most enraged about teenagers and sex, but in fact, we’re more tolerant of teen sex than about drinking, drug use, or other behaviors which we criminalize (will actually arrest and even jail teens for) and demand complete abstinence. Not as tolerant as European or Latin cultures by a long shot, but we’re not yet to the stage of arresting sexually active youth. Why is that?

My theory is pretty cynical, and it revolves around the reason Judith Levine dissed me over things I didn’t say. We don’t demonize teenage sex because adults benefit from it in direct ways--that is, adults have sex with teenagers and always have. Prior to 1970, there was no such thing as "teen pregnancy" in the US--check Reader’s Guide if you doubt that. Teens, like my grandmother married at age 16 to my then-25 granddad in 1912, had always had and raised babies. What happened around 1970, and after, to change "teen pregnancy" from a normal behavior to a vilified symbol for all that is wrong with American civilization? The claim that more teen births are unwed and generate "social

costs" doesn’t wash, since unwed births have been rising among adults (especially over-35 adults) even more rapidly, generating even more social costs due to greater complications. The unwed-teen and social cost arguments are just excuses for demonizing teens, not the real reason.

Here’s what I think is the real reason: prior to 1960, adult men had been the impregnators of virtually all teenage girls. In 1920, 92% of fathers in births to teen girls were 20 or older; even in the 1950s, that figure was 85%. Then, suddenly, in the 1960s and 1970s, rising wages among teen boys made them competitors for teenage girls that had once been the near-exclusive territory of older men. By the early 1970s, 40% of teen girls’ births were fathered by teen boys. The preoccupation of 20-age men with teenage women formerly had freed up 20-age women for older men, but now 20-age men were responding to teenage boy competition by impregnating more 20-age women. The tribal elders began to rumble--but no one articulated exactly why.

In the mid-1970s, liberals and conservatives alike suddenly discovered the "epidemic of teen pregnancy"--which explicitly meant, then and now, teenage boys having sex with teenage girls. That is the only image that reliably sells in the whole teen pregnancy debate, and I believe it is founded in strenuous efforts to shove teen boys out of competition so that teenage girls could once again become reserved for adult men. Sure, there are occasional salvos against "statutory rape" and "predators," which means only that the girl’s family does not approve of the particular adult man who has targeted their little blossom. In the real, unpublicized world, men over 20 continue to father the large majority of births among high-school-age girls.

In the early 1990s, I published an article in the Journal of Sex Research, followed up with several other articles, detailing for the first time the extent to which post-high-school men, not high school boys, were the overwhelming reproductive partners for school-age girls. I was trying to show that what we call "teenage" pregnancy is really a mainstream, adult-teen event and typical of the way poorer populations parent and gain power, and we should stop beating up on girls. You would have thought I set off a bomb. The Teen Pregnancy Industry angrily insisted nothing of the sort could be proven. California, fortuitously one of only three states with detailed records of ages of fathers, settled the matter--it’s adult men, not juvenile boys, who are the partners for pregnant girls. By 1995, the Teen Pregnancy Industry was shifting to see how it could take advantage of this new reality in an age of welfare reform.

To make a long travesty short, after sporadic attempts, none of these interests could find a reliable way to exploit this adult-teen issue, primarily because adult men (unlike teenage girls) have powerful defenders. I learned the hard way from serving on the Wellness Board and arguing over this issue over the last decade that really, the Industry only cares about teens having sex with teens. The Urban Institute even issued an acclaimed report that declared--I’m not kidding--that adult men impregnating teenage girls is "squarely within our social norms"--but teenage girls getting pregnant is deviant behavior! What the Teen Pregnancy Industry wants for their agendas is to maintain anger at sexually active

teenage girls, with ancillary anger at teenage boys, and to sweep the uncomfortable general reality of adult-teen sex under the table by citing only its rare "predatory" fraction. That underscores what infuriates Americans--note the recent regression to panic over the pretense that even junior high boys are scoring, which is a complete lie.

By the way, I want to make a distinction between the honest members of the adolescent sexual health movement, mostly storefront groups that are genuinely concerned with providing better information and contraception to under-served low-income teens--versus the racist, dishonest, cruel, exploitative national political groups who proclaim bigoted "social cost" notions to justify demonizing black and Latino young people who have babies under the rubric of "preventing teen pregnancy."

There may be 20% of adult-teen sexual relationships that involve criminal exploitation, but nearly all are consensual and traditional (that is not to say ideal, but adult-adult sex is not ideal or non-exploitative, either). Obviously, as partner age gaps (to the extent they imply partner power imbalances, the real issue) increase, exploitation rises, but I would rather seen the terms "teenage sex" and "teen pregnancy" abolished, since they refer to nothing useful. Levine and others are clearly annoyed at me for raising the whole adult-teen sex issue, and she attributes to me the statement that I wish I’d never raised it (this is a misquote--what I said is that I wished the whole phony issue of "teenage sex" and "teen pregnancy" had never been invented by interest groups). Levine disparages

teen-teen partners, which makes me suspicious.

What everyone is most comfortable with is returning the whole teen-sex "social problem" to teen boys and teen girls, to restore the visceral, unmentioned, unadmitted goal of preserving teenagers as sex partners for adults without the competition of teen-teen sex. I can’t prove, but I would bet, that if teenage boys are successfully pushed out of the picture and adult men once again become the primary partners for teenage girls, the whole "teen pregnancy" issue will quietly disappear--to the marvel of commentators on all sides.

My own opinion is that I’m delighted with the rising education, job, and social status of teenage girls--which should be extended to poorer teens--which will enable them to choose adult or teen partners on a more egalitarian basis than in the past. (I’ve left out gay relationships here, and I apologize, but I’m ignorant of this area.) The first step is to get rid of obsolete misnomers such as "teenage sex and pregnancy," stop demanding that teens be the ones to handle responsibility for abstinence or contraception, and face facts the Teen Pregnancy Industry strives to deny: teenagers are sexual beings, and giving them genuine economic and social power is the way to prevent both exploitation and unwanted outcomes. Reducing the power of teens as we’re now doing is disastrous and only reinforces my suspicion that what the established are really striving for is to reduce teenage status to make them more easily exploited by adults in every respect.

Kip Winsett
Wow! That was certainly a "to the point and no holds barred" expose.

I know we've taken up much more of your time than we had planned Mike, and I really appreciate how unselfish and generous you've been.

Thanks for an absolutely terrific interview.

Richard Farson
Let me add my voice to Kip's. Every one of your answers was a source of important new learning for me. I can't thank you enough.