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A Time and Place for Teenagers

High schools and adolescence grew up together. Before the modern high school took shape in the 1920s, hardly anyone thought about "adolescents" as a defined group.

Young people, for the most part, were simply "children" until at some point in their teenage years they left school, married or got a job, and joined the world of adults.

In Middletown, Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd's 1929 study of Muncie, Ind., the terms even for high school students are "children" or "boys and girls"--not "adolescents" or "teenagers." The notion of a distinct age group, the members of which were more like one another than they were like children or adults, was...