My Dream School Turns Out to Be Stupid

~ Clarissa

Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University and one of the country’s foremost authorities on puberty, thinks there’s a strong case to be made for this idea. “It doesn’t seem to me like adolescence is a difficult time for the kids,” he says. “Most adolescents seem to be going through life in a very pleasant haze.” . . .

In the 2014 edition of his best-known textbook, Adolescence, Steinberg debunks the myth of the querulous teen with even more vigor. “The hormonal changes of puberty,” he writes, “have only a modest direct effect on adolescent behavior; rebellion during adolescence is atypical, not normal.”

Sweet Jesus on the cross. And this “scholar” works at my dream university, a place were I wanted to work so much that I totally bombed the phone interview. (It was also the only one among the 180+ places where I applied that specifically attracted me. The rest were pretty indistinguishable to me.) I was so nervous that I couldn’t have done worse even if I’d downed a bottle of rum right before getting interviewed. And all that stress was for a place where people of this scarily low intellectual caliber work.

I’m now really glad I didn’t get a job there. This way I don’t have to work with somebody who obviously does his research “in a very pleasant haze.”

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Published by Clarissa

14 thoughts on “My Dream School Turns Out to Be Stupid”

  1. The thing is that you don’t have the experience or wisdom to deal with problems nearly as well when you are in your teens as you do later. It took me until my 40s to learn how to properly handle things, ie not freak out. I was a slow learner, but most people are not very emotionally mature until at least their mid – 20s.

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  2. Academic freedom means the right to have dumb opinions, among other guarantees. Don’t write off Temple because of one faculty member. I suspect that there are other faculty members there. with differing views.

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  3. Well my adolescence was a pleasant haze, actually, to be honest. But I was also profoundly repressed. Not that this mattered in the social and political context I had been in. Contexts like those really do matter, but are rarely taken into account.

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      1. Could be so. But still, there are differences in terms of cultural emphasis. If a high level of individualism is not required by a society it will ne toned down. But if the pressure is on you to act and respond as an indvidual, you really do need to get up to speed and fast.

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          1. Yes, I hope it can start to live too. But I’m no longer waiting for it. I’ve got mine and if others want to scramble to get theirs, they’ll have to work out how to do it.

            Also nothing wrong with getting one’s eyes out of one’s navel to look at how others have historically structured their societies. A broader perspective may not kill the wanna-be individual. Then again, it might, but who am I to care?

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