• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=594WLzzb
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Youth Culture
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What surprised you most?
What surprised you least?
WHY?
Generation Gaps
Generation gaps are the differences between
yourself and your parents generation.
How do you and your generation compare to your
parents' generation? Are you really much different
from them? If so, what are the differences? More
interestingly, what are the similarities between the
teenagers of yesterday and the teenagers of today?
What about teenagers in other parts of the world?
Do you think they share the same attitudes?
Values? Interests? Challenges?
In the past, societies had initiation rites to mark the abrupt
transition from childhood to adulthood. Most modern
cultures, with the exception of some ethnic groups, no longer
mark that transition with a common ceremony. Instead there
is a grey period, a time when people are neither children nor
adults but some kind of combination of both. That grey period
seems to last much longer too. Adulthood seems to come
much later for the modern youth than it did for their
counterparts a century ago.
Even the term teenager is relatively new. It didn’t exist until
the 20th century.
Storm and Stress
G. Stanley Hall first began to study the teenager in the early
1900s. He came up with the concept of “storm and stress” to
describe adolescent behaviour and suggested that
adolescence is marked by three key aspects: conflict with
parents, mood disruptions, and risky behavior.
Do you agree?
Hall’s work has more recently fallen out of favour. While most
modern psychologists believe that this type of behaviour is
more likely during the teenage years, they also argue that not
all teenagers will experience “storm and stress”.
Social Scientists Speak from Research
Anthropologist Margaret Mead argued that the storm and stress of
the teenage years are not inevitable.
After living with and studying a group of teenagers from the nation of
Samoa, she concluded that Samoan teenagers did not go through the
same emotional and psychological distress that North American
teenagers do. She suggests instead that the latter are a product of a
Western culture which has created an environment that forces
teenagers to rebel.
She and sociologist Mike Males have also pointed out that modern
laws give contradictory messages to youth. Western laws set adult
expectations and provide adult punishments for youth at the same
time that other laws take away rights (the right to vote, for instance).
Do you agree?
Social Scientists Speak from Research
Psychologist Jean Piaget noted that the period
known as adolescence occurred when cognitive
development increased, and thus fostered conflict
as the individual gained the cognitive ability to
reason, dispute, and theorize on an adult level. He
appears to argue that teenagers are simply figuring
things out and challenging ideas with which they do
not agree.
Does Piaget agree or disagree with Mead or Hall?
How much? In what ways?
Social Scientists Speak from Research
Talcott Parsons (Age and Sex in the Social Structure
of the United States, 1942) said that adolescence
was a necessary period of transition where the child
breaks fee of the parent-child relationship and the
safety of the family home in order to begin to
establish a home and family of his or her own.
Does Parsons agree or disagree with Hall or Mead?
How much? In which ways?
Counter-Culture
Culture has been called "the way of life for an entire society" . As such,
it includes codes of manners, dress, language, religion, rituals, norms
of behaviour and systems of belief.
The terms “subculture” and “counter culture” are frequently used to
describe youth. The idea is that youth have to break away from
established culture in order to create their own culture, independence,
and identity. Frequently youth in the 20th century have adopted their
own unique modes of dress, language, music and other norms. Think
about such youth phenomena as the lingo used in instant messaging
and the first rock and roll bands in the 1950s.
One group who are frequently identified as having developed their
own culture are the youth of the 1960s: the hippies.
Counter Cultures
Some terms that are frequently associated with
the counter cultures are identity, alienation,
conformity and social change.
Explain why.
Identify whether each is an example of
culture, or is it an example of a sub or
counter culture and explain why?
Sub and Counter Cultures
Is the presence of a subculture or counterculture, by necessity positive or negative?
Is its absence by necessity positive or negative?
What are the benefits or costs of each?
Hippie Culture
Watch the following video clips and complete the
appropriate section of handout titled, Defining
Youth Culture.
Clip #1
Clip #2
Clip #3
Clip #4
Then complete the section about youth today.
Punk Culture
As you watch the following documentary, The
Punks Are Alright, complete the handout of the
same title.
You will also need to complete the appropriate
section of the “Defining Youth Culture” handout.
Generation Comparison
Read the 3 sets of lyrics and answer the
questions:
The Punks Are Alright
The Kids Are Alright
The Kids Aren’t Alright