10.11 Historical Experiences of Adolescence at Mid-century
10.11 Historical Experiences of Adolescence at Mid-century
Katharine Rollwagen, Department of History, Vancouver Island University
The idea that adolescence was a separate and vital stage of human development only emerged at the turn of the 20th century. By the end of the 1950s, when the largest cohort of children ever born in Canada reached adolescence, the depiction of teenaged children as moody and rebellious was widespread, and psychologists and educators were publishing books to help parents understand, guide, and discipline their teenagers. It’s likely that many adolescents caused their parents no less and no more grief than they do today.
While “kids these days…” may seem a timeless adult complaint, several aspects of adolescent experience changed in mid-century Canada. One important change was the frequency of secondary school attendance and graduation. In 1939 in Ontario, studies showed that for every 100 pupils that started school at age five, less than half reached Grade 11 and only 12 finished high school. The secondary school curriculum was focused on academics and university preparation, and at least half of teenagers left school as soon as they could, at age 16. In farming communities, boys’ education was often shortened or interrupted because their labour was needed on the farm; in urban centres, working-class boys and girls continued to contribute to the family income, either through part-time or full-time jobs. By 1951, the census recorded that 40% of young people aged 15 to 19 years were attending school. More were obtaining high school diplomas than ever before.
As more young people remained in school, the high school became the institution most associated with teenagers and with youth culture. The growing influence of youth culture was another important change in adolescent experience in mid-century Canada. High schools gathered more adolescents together, more often, and for longer periods than any other institution. In the postwar years, more Canadian high schools had sports teams, music bands, and other extra-curricular activities to bring young people together. Since the 19th century, secondary school students had fostered their own, age-based and class-based cultures; however, when fewer teenagers attended school, the impact of that culture was not noticed beyond the schoolyard. By mid-century, adolescent trends, athletics, and activities were widely reported in newspapers and magazines, and many adults — from psychologists to journalists and medical doctors to advertising agencies — saw the high school as the best laboratory in which to study the habits, values, and desires of Canadian boys and girls. Teenaged behaviours were closely scrutinized and often criticized as deviant and — in the context of the Cold War —potentially dangerous. For example, the media, psychologists, and parents all questioned the teenaged trend towards going steady (developing longer and more serious heterosexual relationships rather than dating