In the past year, 30% of U.S. high school students have stolen from a store and 64% have cheated on a test, according to a new, large-scale survey suggesting that Americans are too apathetic about ethical standards.
Educators reacting to the findings questioned any suggestion that today’s young people are less honest than previous generations, but several agreed that intensified pressures are prompting many students to cut corners.
A remembrance service took place on 27 November 2008 at Southwark Cathedral for Damilola Taylor and all young people lost to violent crime. The date marks eight years since the murder of Damilola. The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, who chaired the inquiry into the 11-year-old’s murder investigation, delivered the sermon during the service.
This is holy ground ”“ we should take off our shoes. We are here for Damilola Taylor, and for the families still grieving for their young ones murdered on our streets for the past eight years. We are treading on the holy ground of human grief, of love wounded by violence.
And yet on this holy ground, where we must tread so gently, there are voices we must hear, and things we must learn. For we stand also at the foot of the cross, where I believe God took upon himself our sorrows and our love turned in on itself, so that we may return from our self-imposed exile to our true home of love.
Like girls sifting through dresses at Macy’s, the teens milled through aisles of sparkling pastel- and florescent-hued homecoming gowns, stepping into dressing rooms to try them on and then modeling them before their mothers.
But it wasn’t Macy’s. The girls were at a South Florida flea market where the charity Becca’s Closet gives used and new gowns to high school students unable to afford one. One mom said her hours as a nurse’s aide had been cut. Another whose mortgage payment had increased said she felt humiliated to ask for help.
“I heard money was really tight, especially in our household,” said Desiree Banton, a 16-year-old who attends a technical school and was trying on peach, lime green and bright blue gowns. “And my birthday is around the same week, so I knew it was gonna be really difficult to get everything done for homecoming.”
Good news for worried parents: All those hours their teenagers spend socializing on the Internet are not a bad thing, according to a new study by the MacArthur Foundation.
“It may look as though kids are wasting a lot of time hanging out with new media, whether it’s on MySpace or sending instant messages,” said Mizuko Ito, lead researcher on the study, “Living and Learning With New Media.” “But their participation is giving them the technological skills and literacy they need to succeed in the contemporary world. They’re learning how to get along with others, how to manage a public identity, how to create a home page.”
The study, conducted from 2005 to last summer, describes new-media usage but does not measure its effects.
“It certainly rings true that new media are inextricably woven into young people’s lives,” said Vicki Rideout, vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation and director of its program for the study of media and health. “Ethnographic studies like this are good at describing how young people fit social media into their lives. What they can’t do is document effects. This highlights the need for larger, nationally representative studies.”
The number of young people considering a military career has significantly increased for the first time in about five years, buoyed by more positive news out of Iraq.
Military officials predict interest will rise even further because of the worsening economy.
“We’d like to think now we’ve bottomed out here and (recruiting) now will continue increasing,” said Curtis Gilroy, a Pentagon personnel official. “A lot of that is because of the relatively good news out of Iraq.”
The percentage of young people who said they would probably join the military increased from 9% to 11% in the first half of this year, according to a Pentagon-sponsored survey. The poll questioned 3,304 young people ages 16 to 21.
Compared with the Baby Boomers who were seniors in 1975, 12th-graders surveyed in 2006 were much more confident they’d be “very good” employees, mates and parents, and they were more self-satisfied overall, say Twenge and co-author W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia. Between half and two-thirds of the Gen Y teens gave themselves top ratings, compared with less than half in their parents’ generation. The report is in Psychological Science.
Boomer parents “are more likely than their parents were to praise children ”” and maybe overpraise them,” Twenge says. This can foster great expectations or perhaps even smugness about one’s chances of reaching “the stars” at work and in family life, she adds. “Their narcissism could be a recipe for depression later when things don’t work out as well as they expected.”
I will be speaking at a seminar at this major event this morning which draws hundreds of youth from throughout the diocese. Please pray for the gathering, the speakers, Bishop Lawrence, and especially the participants. if you have a moment, check out the homepage of the youth minstry in the diocese of South Carolina. They do fantastic work–KSH.
The study is the first to draw a direct link between sexual content on TV and the likelihood that teens who watch it will become parents. Researchers examined survey data from about 2,000 teens. They plucked out 23 popular shows and asked how much teens watched each. They coded the replies to established indicators of sexual content for each show ”” everything from nudge-nudge jokes on network sitcoms to full-blown intercourse on steamy cable dramas.
What they found: By age 16, teens who watched a lot of sexually charged TV were more than twice as likely to be pregnant or father an out-of-wedlock baby as teens who watched very little: 12% vs. 5%. The gap holds steady through age 20. Researchers controlled for parents’ race, income and education and teens’ total TV time.
Previous studies have linked sex on TV to earlier initiation of sex; this is the first to link TV sex to pregnancy.
“I don’t find it surprising,” says Jane Brown, who studies media and adolescent health at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill….
Surveys show that cheating in school ”” plagiarism, forbidden collaboration on assignments, copying homework and cheating on exams ”” has soared since researchers first measured the phenomenon on a broad scale at 99 colleges in the mid-1960s.
The percentage of students who copied from another student during tests grew from 26 percent in 1963 to 52 percent in 1993, and the use of crib notes during exams went from 6 percent to 27 percent, according to a study conducted by Dr. Donald McCabe of Rutgers. By the mid-1990s, only a small minority said they had never cheated, meaning that cheating had become part of the acceptable status quo.
Dr. McCabe’s later national survey of 25,000 high school students from 2001 to 2008 yielded equally depressing results: more than 90 percent said they had cheated in one way or another.
This spring, Disney pop star Miley Cyrus became the center of a media backlash when Vanity Fair released photos of the Hannah Montana lead in nothing more than a sheet. While the magazine is known for pushing boundaries of propriety, these images were particularly troubling due to the age of the star (15) and those who emulate her (girls as young as 8). The images illuminated the way children younger and younger are becoming players in a sexual culture traditionally reserved for adults.
How did children come to be seen as sexually available as adults? M. Gigi Durham contends in The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It (4 stars) that the sexualization of children, especially young girls, is largely perpetuated by print and electronic media. Durham’s title evokes Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 Lolita, a modern classic about a French scholar who falls in love with a 12-year-old. What does the Lolita Effect look like today? “Adult sexual motifs are overlapping with childhood””specifically girlhood, shaping an environment in which young girls are increasingly seen as valid participants in a public culture of sex.” Durham, a University of Iowa communications professor, argues that the Lolita Effect harbors a special interest in those less discerning about sexual boundaries.
To the untrained eye and ear, the scene of young professionals sipping cocktails with a steady stream of popular music playing in the background seemed like a typical Thursday night at Forum, a trendy Union Square watering hole for those born around, say, 1983. The only clues that there could be something out of the ordinary taking place were a bright orange sign that said “Ignighter” and a large supply of blue drink tickets that were cycling through the crowd. No, this wasn’t a corporate morale booster, an alumni gathering or a charity event. It was a group date.
Group-dating — think of it as double-dating on steroids or as Facebook in the flesh — is making a noticeable blip on the dating radar, as a younger generation turns away from such courtship rituals as the blind date. Even Web sites like e-Harmony and Match.com have become passé. Instead of just going out alone or in pairs, a bunch of people — roughly equal numbers of each sex — engage in a social activity together. One group of three or four friends meets up with another.
Group-dating plays to the tastes of a generation that’s become disillusioned with Internet dating sites, particularly the lies that users tell about themselves online; the futile process of trying to meet people at bars; and blind dates that feel like job interviews. Instead, these young men and women want to have their dating lives simulate the way they meet people in real life: through concentric circles of friends. Especially for recent college graduates who suddenly find themselves without the social anchors of a campus, going out on “a random,” as Internet dates are referred to, is like jumping into a pool of sharks.
The number of teenage murders in London will reach a record level this year as police struggle to cope with the surge in youth and gang violence.
The toll reached 26 with the death of Oliver Kingonzila, 19, at the weekend ”“ the same as the total for the whole of 2007, with three months of 2008 remaining.
Scotland Yard said yesterday that youth violence was its “biggest challenge”, while senior detectives privately conceded that further deaths were almost inevitable.
Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, described the youth murders last year as “completely unacceptable”. But tough enforcement measures, a high detection rate and millions of pounds being spent on antiknife crime initiatives have not stopped the rate of killing rising sharply from 17 in 2006, 16 each in 2005 and 2004, and 15 in 2003.
It is just after 5 p.m. in what was once one of Latin America’s most sexually conservative countries, and the youth of Chile are bumping and grinding to a reggaetón beat. At the Bar Urbano disco, boys and girls aged 14 to 18 are stripping off their shirts.
The place is a tangle of lips and tongues and hands. About 800 teenagers sway and bounce to lyrics imploring them to “Poncea! Poncea!”: to make out with as many people as they can.
And make out they do – with stranger after stranger, vying for the honor of being known as the “ponceo,” the one who pairs up the most.
Chile, long considered to have among the most traditional social mores in South America, is crashing headlong against that reputation with its precocious teenagers. Chile’s youth are living in a period of sexual exploration that, academics and government officials say, is like nothing the country has witnessed before.
“Chile’s youth are clearly having sex earlier and testing the borderlines with their sexual conduct,” said Dr. Ramiro Molina, director of the University of Chile’s Center for Adolescent Reproductive Medicine and Development.
An Indiana high school is making a bold move to create a safer environment for students — they’ve banned students from carrying bags including purses, during the school day. Female students are upset about the changes.
CBS 2 Northwest Indiana Bureau Chief Pamela Jones reports the principal and district administration of Hanover Central School in Cedar Lake would not discuss the matter.
But parents say the bag ban has actually part of the policy here for about three years. It’s just being enforced now. Students are buzzing about a rule at the school that bans purses.
“It’s kind of stupid,” said junior Natalie Goetz.
They say the principal made an announcement on the first day of school notifying students that all purses — and backpacks, for that matter — would have to be left in lockers.
As unambiguous as we might wish the subject were, though, the reality of teen sex and pregnancy won’t go away just because some want it to. It isn’t laughable. And it’s not really news.
The hormonal imperative to reproduce has been getting young Americans in trouble since before there was an America: As many as a third of colonial brides were pregnant at the time of the Revolution, according to several historical sources, and possibly more than a third of births were out of wedlock.
What has changed, though, is birth control. The modern day fairly bristles with it.
Among sexually active 15- to 19-year-olds, 83 percent of girls and 91 percent of boys report using contraception””possibly explaining the 34 percent drop in teen birth rates between 1991 and 2005, according to the non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation.
Yet the recent reversal of that trend (teen births have since risen 3 percent) reminds us that we must never relax our efforts at education. Every single kid has to be given the necessary information and urged to be smart, even when hormones scream.
Getting pregnant young is a tough thing. Carrying a baby and raising the child is hard work; giving one up is, for many, even harder. And though I support reproductive choice, it can’t be argued that abortion is a cakewalk either. I know””and I was an adult when I had mine.
And abstinence programs just don’t work: A 2004 study by Yale and Columbia Universities found that fully 88 percent of those who pledge abstinence have premarital sex anyway.
So we’re left with birth control, and information. And kindness, and compassion.
If there is a shame here, it’s a national shame ”” a failure of our puritanical society to accept and deal with the facts. Teenagers have sex. How often and how safely depends on how much knowledge and support they have. Crossing our fingers that they won’t cross the line is not an intelligent strategy.
To wit, our ridiculous experiment in abstinence-only education seems to be winding down with a study finding that it didn’t work. States are opting out of it. Parents don’t like it either. According to a 2004 survey sponsored by NPR, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, 65 percent of parents of high school students said that federal money “should be used to fund more comprehensive sex education programs that include information on how to obtain and use condoms and other contraceptives.”
We need to take some bold steps beyond the borders of our moralizing and discomfort and create a sex education infrastructure that actually acknowledges reality and protects our children from unwanted pregnancies, or worse
The number of teen suicides has fallen slightly, but the rate remains disturbingly high, possibly fueled by drug warnings that have scared many from using antidepressants.
The suicide rate was about 4.5 per 100,000 in 2005, the most recent data available. That follows an 18% spike the previous year that alarmed experts when first reported.
That’s because until then, suicides among 10- to 19-year-olds had been on a steady decline since 1996.
Dr. David Fassler, a psychiatry professor at the University of Vermont, said the report suggests a “very disturbing” upward trend that correlates with a decline in teen use of antidepressants.
That decline stems from the Food and Drug Administration’s 2004 black-box warning label because of reports that the drugs can increase risks for suicidal tendencies.
Social scientists map the social topology of a school by having students rate their peers on various measures, including likeability. For instance, the question “Who would you most like to hang around with on a Saturday?” quickly reveals a list of those who are considered the best company (potential dates excluded). This is a different measure of popularity from prominence ”” the quarterback and the cutest cheerleader may or may not qualify ”” and identifies a gifted class of a different kind.
Some 15 to 20 percent of high school students fall into this category, according to Mitchell Prinstein, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, and it’s not hard to find them. They tend to have closer friendships, to excel academically and to get on well with most others, including parents ”” their own and their friends’.
In a continuing study of 185 students in a school in Charlottesville, Va., researchers led by Joseph P. Allen of the University of Virginia have concluded that this group is “characterized by a degree of openness to strong emotional experience” and optimism about their relationships, past and future. “These are very, very socially skilled kids who are really able to master the intricacies of diverse social situations,” Dr. Allen said in a phone interview.
Surveys suggest that about 50 percent of students are average ”” that is, they have good friends but are neither especially liked nor disliked by classmates. The remaining 30 to 35 percent are split between low-status or “rejected” students, who are on the bottom of the heap, and neglected ones, who don’t show up on the radar at all.
Yet most youngsters in any school know who their popular, likable peers are, and can learn by observation in a dynamic social situation that, after all, lasts four years. “We have evidence that the neglected kids are the ones most likely to move up, or to move between groups,” Dr. Prinstein said. “These are the ones with no established reputation, they kind of blend into the woodwork, and this can give them a kind of freedom.”
In “The Way We’ll Be,” the man whose organization has been uncommonly accurate in its predictions does not press his luck with political fortune-telling. Senators John McCain and Barack Obama are mentioned only three times each, since this book aspires to predicting more than short-term election trends. Mr. [John] Zogby instead concentrates on what he sees as tectonic shifts in American attitudes and argues that the importance of these changes has not been adequately understood.
The truly prescient political or marketing team, he argues, would be paying more attention to granular micro-precincts (i.e. “sports fans, pet owners, international travelers, early risers”); shopping destinations (Wal-Mart vs. Target); and secular spiritual attitudes than to the categories that mattered in the past. The historian charting the evolution of American values would pay more attention to Hurricane Katrina than to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
If the bad news is that Americans have lost faith in institutions they once trusted, like the government that so grievously failed Katrina victims, Mr. Zogby sees good news in the resilience of the young. He suggests that tomorrow’s American majority will be less materialistic, less tolerant of baloney, more practical and more closely linked to the rest of the world. “At long last, cynicism bottoms out,” he predicts in one wildly optimistic moment.
Mr. Cosby’s appearance in the predominantly black neighborhood was to encourage residents to enroll in Baltimore City Community College. During a nearly hour-long speech, Mr. Cosby said it’s never too late for high school dropouts to improve.
“There’s no love out there,” Mr. Cosby said of the street life. “The only thing out there is how to write your entrance exam to jail. We’ve got to teach. The church is open. Go on in.”
Mr. Cosby has been the source of controversy when he has addressed mostly black audiences. His criticisms of men fathering children out of wedlock have been called divisive. He spent most of his Baltimore speech, however, imploring his audience to seek self-improvement and to build pride within their community.
Young people of St. Ambrose said Mr. Cosby’s message of hope at St. Ambrose could be a catalyst for change.
“It means a lot for someone that popular,” said Maulana Waters, 15, “to come out and speak to regular people like us.”
Another mother nearby had a litany of reasons why the series was good for girls. “Twilight helps girls realize they don’t need to settle for anything less than what they really want,” she began. “It teaches them to keep high standards. That there are guys that will treat them with respect. Girls today need to learn this, and they can learn it from this series.”
When asked about the fact that there were almost no boys present at the event, this group of women said that they knew boys who had started to read the series because they realized that “to get the girls, they need to figure out Edward.”
As clergy and parents and even a few teachers struggle to make a case for abstinence among the young, it may seem strange and unexpected that Ms. Meyer has served up one of the most compelling and effective arguments for abstinence in mainstream American culture — through a teen vampire romance. It may also be that she is trying to stay true to her faith’s teachings on sex even within her fiction. Regardless, Ms. Meyer has somehow made not having sex seem like the sexiest decision two people can make and has conveyed this effectively to her teenage audience.
Some of her young fans are hoping for a sex scene in “Breaking Dawn,” however. As one girl told me: “I’m looking forward to Bella and Edward getting married so they can have sex.” What a novel idea.
“As of 2008,” the 49-year-old professor of English at Emory University writes in “The Dumbest Generation,” “the intellectual future of the United States looks dim.”
The way Bauerlein sees it, something new and disastrous has happened to America’s youth with the arrival of the instant gratification go-go-go digital age. The result is, essentially, a collective loss of context and history, a neglect of “enduring ideas and conflicts.” Survey after painstakingly recounted survey reveals what most of us already suspect: that America’s youth know virtually nothing about history and politics. And no wonder. They have developed a “brazen disregard of books and reading.”
Things were not supposed to be this way. After all, “never have the opportunities for education, learning, political action, and cultural activity been greater,” writes Bauerlein, a former director of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts. But somehow, he contends, the much-ballyhooed advances of this brave new world have not only failed to materialize — they’ve actually made us dumber.
The problem is that instead of using the Web to learn about the wide world, young people instead mostly use it to gossip about each other and follow pop culture, relentlessly keeping up with the ever-shifting lingua franca of being cool in school. The two most popular websites by far among students are Facebook and MySpace. “Social life is a powerful temptation,” Bauerlein explains, “and most teenagers feel the pain of missing out.”
The nation’s campaign to get more teenagers to delay sex and to use condoms is faltering, threatening to undermine the highly successful effort to reduce teen pregnancy and protect young people from sexually transmitted diseases, federal officials reported yesterday.
New data from a large government survey show that by every measure, a decade-long decline in sexual activity among high school students leveled off between 2001 and 2007, and that the rise in condom use by teens flattened out in 2003.
Moreover, the survey found disturbing hints that teen sexual activity may have begun creeping up and that condom use among high school students might be edging downward, though those trend lines have not yet reached a point where statisticians can be sure, officials said.
“The bottom line is: In all these areas, we don’t seem to be making the progress we were making before,” said Howell Wechsler, acting director of the division of adolescent and school health at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which conducts the survey. “It’s very troubling.”
Coming on the heels of reports that one in four teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease and that the teen birth rate has increased for the first time in 15 years, the data are triggering alarm across the ideological spectrum.
Proponents of sex education programs that focus on encouraging abstinence are launching a nationwide campaign aimed at enlisting 1 million parents to support the controversial approach.
The National Abstinence Education Association, a Washington-based advocacy group, said that it sent e-mails last week to about 30,000 supporters, practitioners and parents to try to recruit participants and plans to e-mail 100,000 this week as part of the first phase of the $1 million campaign.
The e-mail is promoting the Parents for Truth campaign, which the group hopes will eventually involve 1 million parents nationwide to lobby local schools to adopt sex education programs focusing on abstinence and to work to elect local, state and national officials who support the approach.
“There are powerful special interest groups who can far outspend what parents can in terms of promoting their agenda. But we recognize that parents more than make up for that by their determination and motivation to protect their own children,” said Valerie Huber, the group’s executive director.
Earlier this year, at the Academy Awards, a group of singers took the stage at the Hollywood Kodak Theater and gave a performance that blew the audience away.
The song was called “Raise It Up” and Impact Repertory Theatre, a group of young singers, writers and dancers based in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem, delivered a powerhouse performance, fusing a soulful sound with unabashed energy.
The song, much like the group’s performance, had not gone unnoticed and was nominated for best song after the group appeared in the 2007 movie “August Rush.”
School is out, and Aaron Stallings, his junior year of high school behind him, wanders the air-conditioned cocoon of the Woodland Hills Mall in search of a job.
Mr. Stallings, 18, says he has been looking for three months, burning gasoline to get to the mall, then filling out applications at stores selling skateboard T-shirts, beach sandals and baseball caps. He likes the idea of working amid the goods he covets. But so far, no offers.
“I’m going to go to Iraq and get a job,” he says acidly. “I hear they’ve got cheap gas.” He grins. “I’m just playing. But I’ve been all over, and nobody’s hiring. They just say, ”˜We’ll call you tomorrow.’ And no one ever calls back.”
As the forces of economic downturn ripple widely across the United States, the job market of 2008 is shaping up as the weakest in more than half a century for teenagers looking for summer work, according to labor economists, government data and companies that hire young people.
This deterioration is jeopardizing what many experts consider a crucial beginning stage of working life, one that gives young people experience and confidence along with pocket money.
Little more than one-third of the 16- to 19-year-olds in the United States are likely to be employed this summer, the smallest share since the government began tracking teenage work in 1948….
High school students in this well-to-do Westchester suburb pile on four, five, even six Advanced Placement classes to keep up with their friends. They track their grade-point averages to multiple decimal places and have longer résumés than their parents.
But nearly half the students at Briarcliff High School have packed their schedules so full that they do not stop for lunch, prompting administrators to rearrange the schedule next fall to require everyone to take a 20-minute midday break. They will extend each school day and cut the number of minutes each class meets over the year. Briarcliff currently does not require students to have a lunch period.
In a school where SAT scores are the talk in the hallways and more than half the seniors are accepted to their first-choice college, Briarcliff’s principal, Jim Kaishian, said mandatory lunch is intended to reduce stress on teenagers so caught up in the achievement frenzy they barely have time to eat or sleep.
This year, 12 percent of Briarcliff’s 665 students have no free periods, while an additional 30 percent have classes the entire time the cafeteria is open.
“We see kids rushing to eat; we hear about stress levels going up,” Mr. Kaishian said. “We’ve watched as some kids implode and bend under the weight of having to go period after period without a break.”
Jennifer Glickman, a 17-year-old high school junior, gets so stressed some days from overwork and lack of sleep that she feels sick to her stomach and gets painful headaches.
A straight-A student, she recently announced at a college preparatory meeting with her mother and guidance counselor that she doesn’t want to apply to Princeton and the other Ivy League schools that her counselor thinks she could get into.
“My mom wants me to look at Ivy League schools, but my high school years have been so stressful that I don’t want to deal with that in college,” says Ms. Glickman. “I don’t want it to be such a competitive atmosphere. I don’t want to put myself in this situation again.”
High school has long been enshrined in popular culture — from the musical “Grease” to television shows like “Beverly Hills 90210” and “Friday Night Lights” — as a time of classes, sports and overwrought adolescent drama. But these days, junior year is the worst year in high school for many ambitious students aiming for elite and increasingly selective colleges — a crucible of academic pressure.
Almost two-thirds of middle- and upper-middle-income high school students in the San Francisco Bay Area told researchers that they were “often or always” stressed by schoolwork, according to a series of surveys of 2,700 students conducted last year by Stanford University researchers.
More than half the students reported that they had dropped an activity or hobby they enjoyed because schoolwork took too much time. More than three-quarters reported experiencing one or more stress-related physical problems in the month prior to the survey, with more than 50% reporting headaches, difficulty sleeping, or exhaustion….
Read it all from the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal.
We believe in the God of Life, who creates and loves people, who acts in history and who promises never to leave us alone.
We believe in Jesus of Nazareth, who is our brother, who wants not to be idolized but to be followed.
We believe that we dwell in the presence of the Holy Spirit; without her we are nothing; filled with her we are able to become creative, lively, and free.