Students: On the Fringe of a Golden Era

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"If Booth Tarkington were to write Seventeen today," says a Connecticut high school English teacher, "he'd have to call it Twelve." Sociologist Reuel Denney notes with fascination the shopping list of a twelve-year-old suburban girl: "Water pistol, brassiere, permanent." When a 16-year-old Louisville boy, as a practical joke, gravely announced at dinner that his girl friend was pregnant, the first reaction of the stunned family came from the boy's younger brother, 13. "My God," he said. "You'll lose your allowance."

Worldly, interesting, informed and even intellectual when barely out of childhood, young kids all over the U.S. are pulling down the entry age to teendom. Even as they do, the affluent society is pushing up the average age of school leaving. The lengthened span of teen-agery—what Johns Hopkins Sociologist James Coleman calls "the coming earlier to social maturity while having to spend a considerably longer period in a dependent role"—is further fattened by a growth rate of teen-age population that is four times as high as the U.S. average. The country now has 24 million people aged 13 to 19.

This one-eighth of the nation is chiefly formed and fashioned by the schools, where teen-agers spend half of their waking hours. If Lyndon Johnson succeeds in getting "every child the best education the nation can provide," the schools' responsibility will grow ever greater. And by and large the pattern works: in the mid-1960s, smarter, subtler and more sophisticated kids are pouring into and out of more expert, exacting and experimental schools.

They Know More. Caltech President Lee DuBridge believes that "there is no question that today's teen-ager coming to one of the major colleges is better educated and more seriously motivated than ever before." Profiting by a vast improvement in teaching methods, curriculums and equipment, "our children know more about things than we did," says New World Foundation Consultant Frank G. Jennings. Ellsworth Tompkins, executive secretary of the National Education Association's 30,000 secondary school principals, holds that "over the past seven or eight years we have experienced in the schools the most important developments since the establishment of public education."

In no society of all history have more teen-agers gone to school and stayed there through such advanced ages. In 1900 only 13% of U.S. children of the ages 14 through 17 were students. By 1940 the ratio had risen to 73%. Now enrollment is close to 95% of the high-school-age population, and more than half the graduates will enter college. With 700 two-year colleges already enrolling nearly a million students, experienced trend watchers forecast that in 1980 the ordinary U.S. student will not leave the classroom until he is 20 or 21.