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338 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. ii (1961)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0338 and id is 1 raw text is: FOREWORD

Some twenty years ago, Kingsley Davis described the sociological or structural
factors (reviewed by David Matza in this volume) which made for youth-adult
conflict. But even 19 million individual rebellious adolescents do not add up
to an army or even a resistance movement. They add up-as so many of the
articles in this volume indicate-to bearers of a conservative (Reiss), traditional
(Bealer-Willets) culture which, far from rejecting adult values, pays them the
supreme compliment of imitating or borrowing them and adapting them to its own
needs. Teen-age culture, even in its contrapuntal forms, is an adaptation (Matza,
Reiss) or prototype (Dansereau) or caricature (Bealer-Willets) of adult culture.
This volume might well be viewed, therefore, as a picture of adult culture today as
reflected in the teen-age culture which it fosters.
The first paper presents a general over-all view of teen-age culture in its
archetypical form, including its material aspects-clothes, recreational equipment,
automobiles-and its nonmaterial aspects-values and attitudes. It makes a
distinction between the younger teen-age culture, which has a large lower class
component, and the older teen-age culture, which, because it is carried by college
students, has a larger upper-middle class component.
The paper by Charles Brown presents teen-age culture as it reveals itself in
the recently burgeoning teen-type magazine which is, in effect, written by teen-
agers themselves. Teen-type magazines highlight the importance of fun and
popularity as values in teen-age culture.
The spread of teen-age culture to England and Europe suggests that the condi-
tion which give rise to it are not peculiarly American but, rather, characteristic
of any culture which is sufficiently affluent to afford a leisure class of teen-agers;
John Mays shows that the English and European versions of teen-age culture
are similar, if not identical, to that of the United States.
The second main subdivision of this volume examines the values of teen-age
culture in more depth. Coleman documents the relatively great value placed on
athletics, as compared with intellectual achievement, and explains it in terms of
the basic functions performed by it. He suggests that the same functions might
well be performed by games based on electronic computers. Dansereau finds
teen-age culture to be a probable prototype of adult culture in which life must
be organized around leisure rather than around work and in which the work that
remains is largely of the kind which involves manipulation of people rather than
of things. As a training ground for adjustment to this world, he finds the
leisure-dominated culture of the teen-ager quite functional. The sexual code
which teen-agers have evolved for themselves in which the criterion of what is
right and proper inheres in the nature of the relationship rather than in institutional
sanctions is analyzed in the paper by Ira Reiss.
Variations on the archetypical theme are presented in the third part of this
volume. Bealer and Willets train their microscope on rural versions of teen-age
culture. They examine three kinds of rebellion-against tradition, against parental
norms, and against parents-as-people. On the basis of their own longitudinal
research, they report some surprising findings. As the more urban-oriented leave
rural areas, the differences between rural and urban young people become greater
ii

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