In Childhood and Society, Erik Erikson describes the American adolescent:

"Adolescence is the age of the final establishment of a dominant positive ago identity. It is then that a future within reach becomes part of the conscious life plan. It is then that the question arises whether or not the future was anticipated in earlier expectations.

"The problem posed by physiological maturation has been stated forcefully by Anna Freud. '. . . Aggressive impulses are intensified to the point of complete unruliness, hunger becomes voracity and the naughtiness of the latency-period turns into the criminal behavior of adolescence. . . . Habits of cleanliness, laboriously acquired during the latency-period, give place to pleasure in dirt and disorder. . . ."

* * *

Erikson continues:

"What the regressing and growing, rebelling and maturing youths are . . . primarily concerned with is who and what they are in the eyes of a wider circle of signficant people as compared with what they themselves have come to feel they are; and how to connect the dreams, idiosyncrasies, roles, and skills cultivated earlier with the occupational and sexual prototypes of the day.

"The danger of this stage is role diffusion; as Biff puts it in Death of a Salesman: 'I just can't take hold, Mom, I can't take hold of some kind of a life.' . . . Youth after youth, bewildered by his assumed role, a role forced on him by the inexorable standardization of American adolescence, runs away in one form or another: leaves schools and jobs, stays out at night, or withdraws into bizarre and inaccessible moods. Once he is 'delinquent,' his greatest need and often his only salvation is the refusal on the part of older youths, of advisers, and of judiciary personnel to type him further by pat diagnoses and social judgments which ignore the special dynamic conditions of adolescence."

* * *

"His goals are vaguely defined. They have something to do with action and motion."

* * *

"How does his home train this boy for democracy? If taken too literally, one may hardly dare to ask that question."

* * *

"This American adolescent, then, is faced, as are the adolescents of all countries who have entered or are entering the machine age, with the question: freedom for what, and at what price? The American feels so rich in his opportunities for free expression that he often no longer knows what it is he is free from."

A law "to provide for the Instruction of Youth, and for the Promotion of Good Education" was passed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1789. The following paragraph from this law, which applied to Harvard University, is still in force:

"Be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, That it shall be, and it is hereby made the duty of the President, Professors and Tutors of the University at Cambridge, Preceptors and Teachers of Academies, and all other instructors of youth, to take diligent care, and to exert their best endeavours, to impress on the minds of children and youth committed to their care and instruction, the principles of piety, justice and a sacred regard to truth, love to their country, humanity and universal benevolence, sobriety, industry and frugality, chastity; moderation and temperance, and those other virtues which are the ornament of human society, and the basis upon which the republican Constitution is structured; and it shall be duty of such instructors, to endeavour to lead those under their care (as their ages and capacities will admit) into a particular understanding of the tendency of the beforementioned virtues, to preserve and perfect a republican Constitution, and to secure the blessings of liberty, as well as to promote their future happiness; and the tendency of the opposite vices to slavery and ruin."