Joseph A. Montagna
The study at the University of Chicago was conducted in 1977. Its purpose was to gather information about being a teenager in America, hoping to yield an accurate account of what teenagers do with their time. The study involved seventy-five high school students from a community near Chicago. The community is a mixture of urban and suburban living, uppermiddle and lower-middle class families, and subject to the same pressures as any community in America today. The high school is more than eighty years old with a student population of approximately 4,000. The 75 students included relatively equal numbers of males and females from every socio-economic segment of the community. Also, there were proportionately representative numbers from each of the four grades in the high school. The data were collected in a unique fashion. Participants were issued electronic pagers which signaled the students at random times during the waking hours. Students were asked to complete a questionnaire as soon as possible after being beeped. The questionnaire focused on the following: the location at the time of signal, the activity in which the student was engaged, the student’s mood, the quality of the student’s participation, the student’s desire to be engaged in the activity, and whether others were present. Extra space was provided for the student to provide Comments, also.
The students involved in the study are not a representative sample of American adolescents. The authors of the study do not try to make a claim that they are. What the study does is provide us with a picture of what is like to an adolescent within this group of 75 young adults. The thoughts and responses of these students can be useful to us in our own work with our students.
If there is one thing that we can say about adolescence with complete predictability it is that it is unpredictable. The Chicago study found that adolescent experiences are marked by frequent and drastic mood changes, some of which occur within very short periods of time. These mood swings illustrate that the process of socialization of our youth is a never-ending conflict between the goals and rules of society and the instincts, values and habits of the adolescent. In this period of choice the adolescent is pulled and stretched in a number of directions by a variety of forces. How the individual copes with these conflicting forces is what determines what the person is likely to become in later life. Conflict is a necessary and inevitable part of our lives. If it is channeled into a constructive mode of thinking and behavior, the individual grows. If it is not, then the individual languishes, beginning a downward spiral that mitigates against growth.
Csikszentmihalyi and Larson, in their book about the Chicago study, borrow a term from physics and information theory that is helpful in understanding the above—entropy. In physics, entropy describes a loss of energy in a system that is due to some disorder in that system. In information theory, entropy refers to some disorder in transmitting or receiving patterns that result in a loss of meaning. Psychic entropy; therefore, is the individual’s reception of conflicting information in consciousness, causing unpleasant experiences and a diminished capacity to perform.
Psychic entropy in the short term manifests itself as guilt, anxiety, alienation, frustration,or boredom. Positive growth can be realized by an individual who has such entopic experiences, that is, if the individual perceives them as temporary setbacks, and uses this feedback to turn one’s attention inward to resolve them, e.g. a person who is guilt ridden over letting down a loved one by not fulfilling a commitment, who then analyzes the situation and resolves either to follow through on commitments, or not to make commitments that cannot be kept.
There are four basic forms of disorder in consciousness that are termed psychic entropy: bad moods, passivity, diminished or absent motivation, and the inability to focus one’s attention. These experiences are inevitable in growing up and living. One point of view of the authors of the Chicago study is that a consistent pattern of disorder in consciousness may be permanently damaging to a person’s growth and productivity in adult life.
The opposite term of psychic entropy is psychic negentropy, order in consciousness. It is a state in which the person feels “whole”, positive and enthusiastic. It is a person performing at one’s optimal level. There are four main characteristics of psychic negentropy: positive feelings toward self and others, a sense of competence, one’s identification with the goals of the activity, and effective concentration. Psychic negentropy is not static. It is dynamic. New order is created out of experience and the self is constantly growing. Psychic negentropy does not seek to return to a previous state of order, however, since it is out of experience that growth and new order evolve. An illustration of this is a boy who has been jilted by his girlfriend. He works this out in his mind by rationalizing that there are other girls out there, ones whom he can love and will love him in return. However, the boy does not return to a previous state of innocence which existed before this incident. New order is created from this experience, and the boy becomes cautious about with whom he shares his love.
Can the above be useful to teachers and students? I believe that we can analyze instances whereby students have had good and bad experiences, and search for the underlying causes. If a student, for example, has a bad experience in math class, was it due to his (the student) not being prepared for class, or were there other reasons beyond his control? If the student was, indeed, not prepared for class, then what were the causes of this? Was it because he cut yesterday’s class and missed the lesson, or that he wasn’t paying attention? Perhaps the student needs to become better organized concerning his use of time? If only we can get our students to view the larger picture:.
As parents and teachers we cannot help but ask ourselves whether we are doing the right thing. Often, perhaps always, it is too late when the answer is realized—the youngster is now an adult. We can, however, look closely at indicators that exist in their present lives which will help us to assess their progress (or lack of it) toward a productive adult life. How the adolescent spends his time, the quality of his experiences, his habits and activities are all good indicators of the kind of person he is likely to become.
Where do adolescents spend their time? What do they do with their time? With whom do they spend their time? Laurence Steinberg calls these areas the contexts of adolescence. Csikszentmihalyi and Larson refer to them as the external landscape. We will be looking at these areas to map the daily experiences and interactions of adolescents.
