Review of A Tribe Apart: A Journey into the Heart of American Adolescence by Patricia Hersch (New York: The Ballantine Publishing Group, Random House, 1998). Prepared by Ron Brandt for the 21st Century Initiative.

Most adults — especially those who have little contact with today’s adolescents — will be shocked and upset by Patricia Hersch’s portraits of eight teenagers growing up in Reston, Virginia. Yes, kids have always rebelled, taken risks, and done stupid things, but these young people don’t just make little mistakes; they use drugs, get drunk, have sex, steal from local stores, and regularly lie to their parents. Not all of them do all these things, but most do enough to make the reader ask how this can be happening. Reston is a planned community inhabited by the well-to-do and well-educated, and these boys and girls are not delinquents but typical kids.

Their stories are compelling because Hersch is a masterful story teller. A former contributing editor to Psychology Today, she combines a reporter’s thirst for concrete details with a psychologist’s insights into human motivation. Developing her characters like a novelist, she makes you wonder how she could possibly know so much about their personal lives. In the introduction she explains how she knows, calling her idea “simple”: “A lone adult wanderer, I would enter into the adolescent world, get to know it on its own terms, and tell representative stories of growing up from the points of view of eight kids. My sample would not only be selected to illustrate the whole spectrum of adolescence from seventh through twelfth grade. The study would stretch over a period of years, from 1992 through 1995, with updates to the present, 1997, to get a sense of development and maturation.”

Simple her plan may have been, but it was a challenge to carry out. She had to establish close, trusting relationships with individual teens naturally wary of a snooping adult. She had to promise never to reveal confidences except in the book (under false names), and could not tell parents what she was learning, no matter how concerned she might have been. The result is a remarkable accomplishment, both as fascinating reading and as documentation of an apparent social problem.

Hersch did her study because she was worried about the apparent lack of adult presence in the lives of children and youth. It seemed ironic that in Reston, of all places — a New Town founded as a place for families to mature, “an environment that at least superficially appears nurturing” — both parents in most homes are at work, and “adolescents are growing up with no adults around.” As a result, “In the vacuum where traditional expectations for young people used to exist, in the silence of empty homes and neighborhoods, young people have built their own community.”

Reading her honest but sympathetic accounts of young men and women moving from comfortable homes to drunken orgies to high school classrooms where teachers may or may not have a clue, one wonders how typical these kids are. If typical, are their adolescent excesses really so different from those of earlier eras? If so, is Reston unusual, or if similar studies were done elsewhere, would we find the same disturbing situation in other communities large and small? Finally, is this phenomenon peculiarly American, or is it true of developed societies worldwide? Hersch has an opinion: “Today’s kids have an abundance of the ‘space’ the Sixties kids coveted, enough to do their ‘own thing’ with great regularity. Their dramatic separation from the adult world … creates a milieu for growing up that adults categorically cannot understand because their absence causes it.”

How this book relates to the 21st Century Initiative:

A Tribe Apart provides frightening evidence that, even in favored communities where young people have lavish homes, the best of food and medical care, loving parents, modern schools, and well-qualified teachers, their values are skewed by an exploitive economy and a powerful peer culture. Brain research has found that we learn what we pay attention to and that what we pay attention to is determined by our emotions. Children’s learning is affected as much by the attitudes and values they bring to the learning situation as by the skill and devotion of their teachers.

We believe the problem of adolescent alienation from adult society cannot be solved by any changes that might be made in schools alone. Even individual parents are often unable to equip their children to resist these influences. Education requires a shared relationship between schools and their surrounding communities which goes far beyond token “parent involvement.” That is because some of the most important things young people need to learn cannot be taught in classrooms. Adults will not see enough of the qualities they seek in adolescents — responsibility, consideration, “common sense” — until new arrangements provide for every maturing child to have long-term, personal learning relationships with adults similar to the apprenticeships of former times.

More articles by Ron Brandt