Themes To Explore - The Adolescent

Themes to Explore - The Adolescent by T. H. Parker and F. J. Teskey, published by Blackie in 1970, is a wonderfully earnest school anthology devoted to that most mysterious and unstable of human conditions: being a teenager.

The title alone tells you almost everything about the educational mood of the period.

The Adolescent.

Not “Teenagers”.

Not “Growing Up”.

Not “Why Is My Bedroom Door Always Shut?”

The adolescent is presented almost as a newly discovered species requiring careful observation.

One imagines teachers approaching cautiously with notebooks.

Published as part of Blackie’s Themes to Explore series, the book brings together material intended to encourage discussion, reading and thought around adolescence, growing up and the awkward territory between childhood and adulthood.

This was 1970, when the generation gap was a serious topic, youth culture had become impossible to ignore, and adults were becoming increasingly aware that young people possessed opinions.

This came as a surprise to some of them.

The late 1960s and early 1970s were particularly fertile territory for books about teenagers because society had only recently begun treating adolescence as a distinct cultural category.

Teenagers had music.

Teenagers had clothes.

Teenagers had money.

Teenagers had opinions about authority.

And, most alarmingly, teenagers sometimes expressed those opinions aloud.

Educational publishers naturally concluded that this required a book.

The result is the sort of school reader designed not simply to teach comprehension but to provoke thought about identity, relationships, independence, conformity and the process of becoming an adult.

In other words, all the things adolescents themselves were already thinking about while pretending to stare out of the classroom window.

There is something wonderfully period about the whole concept.

Today we have endless websites, documentaries, podcasts and psychological explanations devoted to teenage life.

In 1970, somebody at Blackie could apparently say:

“We should produce an anthology called The Adolescent.”

And everybody nodded gravely.

Books like this are fascinating now because they preserve not only the texts themselves but the educational assumptions surrounding them.

What did teachers think teenagers needed to read?

What behaviour was considered normal?

What counted as rebellion?

What worried adults?

And how much of the discussion still sounds suspiciously familiar more than half a century later?

Probably quite a lot.

Adolescence has benefited from many advances in technology since 1970.

Teenagers now possess smartphones, social media, streaming services and the ability to communicate instantly with hundreds of people without leaving their bedrooms.

The underlying emotional machinery appears to have remained largely unchanged.

Parents are unreasonable.

Teachers do not understand.

Nobody has ever felt this way before.

Everything is embarrassing.

Civilisation continues.

This book therefore has an unexpected second life as social history.

What began as an educational reader about young people has become a document from a period when those young people are now, inconveniently, pensioners.

The adolescent of 1970 is now quite likely to be complaining about adolescents.

History enjoys these little jokes.

For collectors of vintage school books, educational history, social history or anyone interested in changing attitudes towards youth, The Adolescent is a pleasing survivor.

It is also ideal for former pupils who remember books like this being distributed in class with the solemn expectation that a room full of fourteen-year-olds would engage maturely with “themes”.

Some probably did.

Others drew moustaches on the illustrations.

Both are educational outcomes of a sort.

Condition: Good. A sound used copy with normal signs of age and handling. Published in 1970, it has survived longer than adolescence itself generally does, although some might argue that adolescence now lasts until approximately forty-three.

ISBN: 0216876605.

A charmingly period educational anthology exploring the teenage years from an era when adults were only just beginning to suspect that young people might constitute a social category of their own.

Sold by Crappy Old Books — preserving adolescence long after everyone involved should theoretically have grown out of it.

Keep browsing: See more Poetry books Other books by TH Parker and FJ Teskey