9 - Schools, Peers, and the Big Picture of Adolescent Development

Summary

The pioneering work of Jean Piaget is now so closely identified with psychology that the fact he held appointments in sociology and wrote sociology texts is often forgotten – by both psychologists and sociologists. This trend is unfortunate because Piaget’s approach to human development serves as a meeting point – and integration point – between these two disciplines as well as others so crucial to building a scientific base of understanding about adolescence. After all, Piaget’s constructivist perspective emphasizes the give-and-take between developing youth and their environments, between the personal and the social. This give-and-take can best be deconstructed, therefore, by drawing on the real strengths of both of these two disciplines as well as other related disciplines.

As a trained sociologist and social demographer whose home base and primary audience has steadily moved toward developmental psychology, I have drawn heavily on developmental insights to understand the contextual and structural conditions of society. Specifically, in my work, I examine population trends and societal inequalities as manifested in the American educational system but try to view them through the more intimate lens of developmental and interpersonal process. Basically, my stance is that a population looks they way it does, in part, because of the normative patterns and group differences in how young people in that population grow up and find their places in the world. This idea underlies my somewhat Piagetian working conceptual model of adolescent development. In this model, development unfolds within a field of constraints imposed by the environment but is also acted on by the developing adolescent, with environment referring not just to the commonly studied proximal settings of the developmental ecology (e.g., the family, peer group, neighborhood), but also to the larger pieces of the very machinery of society – organizations, institutions, stratification systems, culture, and even history itself.