Teenager

“ The period of adolescence here assumes the prominence that childhood has in the psychological study preparatory to teaching in lower schools. This is the period of beginnings, the beginning of a more ambitious and generous life, a life having the future wrapped up in it; a transition period, of mental storm and stress, in which egoism gives way to altruism, romance has charm, and the social, moral, and religious feelings bud and bloom. ”

“ Youth, like the extremity of age, had effaced the strongly marked characteristics of middle life, and mutually assimilated them all. They were a group of merry youngsters, almost maddened with the exuberant frolic someness of their years. ”

“ Pathetic and spectral, they cannot persuade the callowest undergraduate that they are of his kind, for between them is fixed a great gulph—they have passed their examinations, and they wear the snowy ermine of the Bachelor’s gown.”
“But I,” his voice thrilled, “I shall be ever of the company of the Young, a happy, happy youth, for ever fair, immutable in my sempiternal adolescence....” ”

“ Hardly could any argument for extreme youth be made from any of these lines, except as based on the term "boy." The term [Pg 34] "youth" obviously has a broader significance, and by no strained construction, especially if coming from a man of advanced years, may be applied to persons on the morning side of life without any precise or clear reference to, or indication of, their age. We should therefore turn to the lines containing the appellation "boy" for whatever of force there is in the claim for the extreme youth of the poet's friend. ”

“ At the beginning of the period of childhood for which the Junior Course is intended, approximately nine years of age, there appears to be in the life of the normal boy or girl a real transition as the traits and interests of earlier years give way to those of full fledged boyhood and girlhood. Strange premonitions of impending physical and mental changes now appear, with suggestions of riper years that are rapidly approaching. The physical and mental changes of this period are accompanied by an awakening of social consciousness. ”

“ The adolescent stage of life has long seemed to me one of the most fascinating of all themes, more worthy, perhaps, than anything in the world of reverence, most inviting study, and in most crying need of a service we do not yet understand how to render aright. ”

“ The pure but ignorant boy going for the first time into the new life of the school, looking up to the older boys with that peculiar veneration the younger boy almost always feels for the older, moved in his senses by what he hears and sees, may speedily forget such home warnings as seem vague and pointless, and he may yield himself to a course most disastrous to his future. ”

“ When she heard him sing and whistle in the woods that afternoon, she had thought him a young man. There was the joyousness and buoyancy of youth in his looks and voice. To-night, however, she saw that he was not a boy, but a man fully her own age. ”

“ A boy of twelve is a very different personality from what he was at three and seven, and will be at seventeen and twenty-one. Your boy or girl at twelve will reject, with scorn, a fairy tale that lights up the wondering eyes of the young child. It is necessary, therefore, for the parent or the child-lover to know at just what age a particular type of story is adaptable, or when the particular ethical truth intended to be impressed can best be assimilated. ”

“ In exploring such sources we soon see how few writers have given true pictures of the chief traits of this developmental period, which can rarely be ascertained with accuracy. The adult finds it hard to recall the emotional and instinctive life of the teens which is banished without a trace, save as scattered hints may be gathered from diaries, chance experiences, or the recollections of others. But the best observers see but very little of what goes on in the youthful soul, the development of which is very largely subterranean. ”

“ And oh, youth!—take my word of it— youth in dressing-gown and slippers, dawdling over breakfast at noon, is a very decrepit, ghastly image of that youth which sees the sun blush over the mountains, and the dews sparkle upon blossoming hedgerows. ”

“ The path of earthly life, beginning at the gateway of birth, passes through the sunny meadow-land of Childhood, and also through a strange, mysterious land to which we have referred as the Land of the Teens, before reaching the Heights of Maturity. This Land of the Teens is peculiar in that the inhabitants are neither children nor adults, and yet, with the inexperience of children, they have many of the desires and emotions of grown-up people. ”

“ YOUTH, or Adolescence, in general, is that happy period of human life, which commences from childhood; continues as long as the fibres increase in dimensions or firmness; and terminates at full growth: among the Romans, it was computed from the age of 12 to 25, in males, and to 21, in females. In modern times, the term adolescence, includes the age of from 15 to 25 years, and sometimes to 30. ”

“ A feeling will become habitual if continually indulged and expressed, and it is during adolescence that habits are permanently fixed.
27. Needs of the Intermediate Age.—The needs of this period are of two sorts—important and imperative. It is exceedingly important that the pupil be treated with consideration, respect, and appreciation, that he be given good literature, that he be guarded and guided in his social life. It is imperative, however, that he be established in the right relation to God and to his neighbor at this time of new consciousness of these relationships. ”

“ Nor is the season of Youth therefore to be pitied—for Passion respires and expires in bliss ineffable, and so far from being eloquent as the unwise lecture, it is mute as a fish, and merely gasps. In Youth we are the creatures, the slaves of the senses. ”

“ I have watched individuals sitting on the seashore playing with the sand for an hour at a time; so that when I shall attempt to define the plays of adolescents, let me not be understood as meaning that these are the only plays of adolescents, for adolescents do all that the preceding groups have done. That which I shall attempt to describe will be the plays that the adolescents have that are not found to any particular extent before adolescence, and which may thus be called characteristics of adolescence. ”

“ The second characteristic of the period is with reference to its plays, and there seems to be all of savage out-of-door life—hunting, fishing, stealing, swimming, rowing, sailing, fighting, hero-worship, adventure, love of animals, etc. This characteristic obtains more with boys than with girls." "The plays of adolescence are socialistic, demanding the heathen virtues of courage, endurance, self-control, bravery, loyalty, enthusiasm." ”

“ In this book I have endeavored to relate the story of a boy's early experiences in college life—a boy who was neither unnaturally good nor preternaturally bad, wholesome, earnest, impulsive, making just such mistakes as a normal boy would make, and yet earnest, sincere, and healthy. We all have known just such boys and are grateful that they are neither uncommon nor unknown. ”

“ We stood to each other from boyhood upwards in every possible relation, whether of an educational, warlike, delicate, or social character, which the warm and fitful feelings peculiar to boyhood and youth can produce. ”

“ Accordingly, at this stage it becomes incumbent on the adult to attach himself to the boy, to restrain him, to divide the time for him, and to circumscribe the fancies born of his self-confidence,—a course of action rendered all the more necessary by the circumstance that the boy is a stranger as yet to the timidity with which the youth joins the ranks of men. ”

“ Dealing with adolescence, an unformed period of human life, it is necessarily without the climaxes we expect in dramas in which the characters are adult, and the gruesome scene in the churchyard with which the play closes—a scene with such peculiar symbolism could spring only from a Teutonic imagination—leaves much unended. ”

“ Only after I had observed that several very fair persons, who happened, to pass near me, had gray hair, did I notice that the bloom of youth still glows upon the faces of those who are 35 to 40 years of age! ”

“ He's arrived at that pathetic period of a man's life when almost any really blond girl still in her teens switches him into a second state of adolescence and makes him a most ridiculous object—what the novelists call the 'Forty-nine feeling,' I believe. ”

“ The girl in her teens is glad she is alive, and her evident and keen enjoyment of a world which some of her elders have found hard and a little disappointing does more to cheer and brighten the dull gray of the commonplace than she knows, or than we stop to remember. ”

“ Like certain young men of the beginning of the present century and the end of the last, who became illustrious at an early age, he looked excessively young, and was as fresh as a school-girl, though he had his hours of pallor. ”

“ The boy of ten who is sent away from home to a private school finds that he has to take absolutely new views of life in almost every particular. Perplexed by the new horizon, the novel atmosphere, and with his young heart aching for home tenderness and affection, he is assisted in adjusting himself to his altered circumstances by bullying and sneers. ”

“ They have themselves spoken when juniors with bated breath of supposed 'cases.' They would like to be spoken of like that themselves, to feel themselves moving in an atmosphere of conjecture and intrigue, to gather an added sense of their own importance. ”

“ He represents, we might say, youth in general. But there is a difference between him and the average youth in one respect—he thinks. On reaching the girl's room, he is already in a thoughtful mood; and when she falls asleep upon his knees, tired with the dancing and banqueting of the evening, he does not think of awakening her. ”

“ In this world of human affairs there is no worse nuisance than a boy at the age of fourteen. ”

“ Student life is perhaps the best of all fields, unworked though it is, for studying the natural history of adolescence. Its modern record is over eight hundred years old and it is marked with the signatures of every age, yet has essential features that do not vary. ”

“ When the teacher has resolved to make the effort to reach out for the girl who is leaving the Sunday-school in large numbers, the clear and challenging question, “What makes a class attractive to the girl in her teens?” ”

“ The years of adolescence in the male are characterised by an impulse to travel, to adventures, but in addition to all kinds of ideal efforts and to religious activity. The loftiest ethical ideas alternate with a self-conscious bumptiousness. ”

“ The young write in full sympathy with, as well as for, the young, they have a pensive satisfaction in feeling and depicting the full pathos of a tragedy, and on the other hand they delight in their own mirth, and fully share it with the beings of their imagination, or they work out great questions with the unhesitating decision of their youth. ”

“ Gifted people seem to conserve their youth and to be all the more children, and perhaps especially all the more intensely adolescents, because of their gifts, and it is certainly one of the marks of genius that the plasticity and spontaneity of adolescence persists into maturity. ”

“ My boy's closest friend was a boy who was probably never willingly at school in his life, and who had no more relish of literature or learning in him than the open fields, or the warm air of an early spring day. ”

“ I said to the Boy that night when I went in to see him and to have the talk which was as regular as the coming of the night itself. "A girl can keep her ideas of beauty always, but a boy is supposed to drop his when he begins going to school. ”

“ Young, he is, of course, and still awaiting the development which life's deeper experiences are to bring, but nevertheless he is not again to taste the joy, the zest, or the enthusiasm which come to careless boyhood. ”

“ I must have a junior, with my increasing practice, and you are the junior I want. We are old and tried friends; we have worked together; we like and trust one another, and you are the best man for the job that I know. ”

“ Every sentence arrests, and the sympathy with boy-life, as well as the compelling earnestness of the diction, must grip any boy-audience in quite an unusual manner. The style is manly, non-sentimental, and is suitable for boys aged eleven to sixteen. ”

“ The boy’s school life soon begins to develop self-reliance, full of possibilities, of curiosity and questionings, the period of formation of thoughts, feelings and desires. And when a boy reaches that stage in his life when he is permitted to go down town alone—he at once begins a new life. ”

“ Among these examinations were full sets of the questions used for entrance to the high school for the last twelve years, and every one of these was given to the class in hand. The children of the sixties must have been tough little things, for not one of them had nervous prostration. ”

“ But the child grows up, and reaches adolescence. He stands on the threshold of life, and the school-bench is left behind him. School has taught him but little—a few facts and some elementary information. ”

“ As you say, a half-year has been a long time—to a child. I had just come from abroad then with my parents, and I had been most of the time in a school where girls are just children, no matter what their ages. ”

“ It indicates that the stages of mental growth anticipating adolescence form a separate and formative type of psychological study; that a knowledge of the changes which then take place is as vital a matter of human concern as can well be imagined; and that the shaping of interest, which then first buds, remains the supreme question of educational practice. Thus both for education and for psychology, adolescence has a directive importance. ”