Act Your Age!: A Cultural Construction of Adolescence

by Lesko; Nancy

• ISBN13: 9780415887625
• ISBN10: 0415887623
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-03-21
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Are our current ways of talking about "the problem of adolescence" really that different than those of past generations? For the past decade, Act Your Agehas provided a provocative and now classic analysis of the accepted ways of viewing teens. By employing a groundbreaking "history of the present" methodology that resists traditional chronology, author Nancy Lesko Lesko analyzes both historical and present social and political factors that produce the presumed "natural adolescent." This resulting seminal work in the fireld of youth study, forces readers to rethink the dominant interpretations on the social construction of adolescence from the 19th century through the present day. This new edition is updated throughought and includes a full new chapter on 1950s-era assumptions about teenage youth and the corresponding connections to teens today. As in all chapters, Lesko provides careful examination of the concerns of nationalism, sexuality, and social order in terms of how they are projected onto the definitions of adolescents in the media, in schools, and in the home.

Author Biography

Nancy Lesko is Maxine Greene Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Series Editor's Introduction	p. xiii
Introduction: Troubling Teenagers	p. 1
Up and Down the Great Chain of Being: Progress and Degeneration in Children, Race, and Nation	p. 16
Making Adolescence at the Turn of the Century: Romancing and Administering Youth	p. 41
Back to the Future: Model Middle Schools Recirculate Fin-de-Siècle Ideas	p. 77
Time Matters in Adolescence	p. 91
Cold War Containments: Freedom, Youth, and Identity in the 1950s	p. 116
"Before Their Time": Teenage Mothers Violate the Order of Proper Development	p. 135
Our Guys/Good Guys: Playing with High School Athletic Privilege and Power	p. 146
When the Romance Is Gone… Youth Development in New Times	p. 164
Cutting Free from the Great Chain of Being: Toward Untimely Teenagers	p. 178
Afterword to the Second Edition	p. 187
Notes	p. 190
References	p. 208
Author Index	p. 227
Subject Index	p. 229
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