High School & Adolescent Development

Do High Schools Further Adolescent Development?

Many psychologists have written and discussed various theories of adolescent development and their relation to adjustment in adulthood. For the purposes of this paper, the discussion will be centered on the ideas of Piaget, Erikson, Anna Freud, and Sigmund Freud and whether American high schools enhance the adolescent's efforts in psychosexual development, identity formation, and cognitive development.

Piaget is widely known for his work in the area of cognitive development of young children. However, in relation to the theories of the psychology of adolescence, many of his concepts are helpful. According to Piaget, the period of propositional operations appears between the ages of eleven and fifteen. At this stage of intellectual sophistication, ideally the young person is able to apply operations to operations and transformations to transformations, building on the lesser complex mental capabilities of the earlier stages of maturity (Chandler, p. 99).

Piaget emphasizes that the stages must always appear in order, and that one cannot expect a child or youth to perform tasks when they have not mastered the skills of the previous levels of cognitive development. Movement through the stages presupposes the availability of materials and activities which enhance the more sophisticated intellectual grasp, and if the adolescent is deprived, cognitive progress will be slower.

According to Piaget, the mastery of sophisticate

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ientific inquiry and industrialization, and these influences affected his theories of human behavior. For example, in the world of physics, steam energy builds up and causes forceful change upon machinery which can become steam-operated. Freud used this view of transformational energy as a part of his theory of the libido. The libido is a source of a tremendous amount of life energy which can be harnessed for productive activity, or it can be repressed, causing all kinds of bodily tensions and psychological difficulties (Lerner & Spanier, 1984, p. 147). Freud believed that the libido was focused on five sites of the body which correspond to levels or stages of human development--the oral, the anal, the phallic, latency, and genital sexuality. In adolescence the person is groping with genital sexuality and forming unions with other individuals, whether or not for the purposes of procreation. Freud also developed a system of thinking about human personality development, which is categorized into three structures--the id, the ego, and the superego (Lerner & Spanier, 1984, p. 153). Anna Freud held many beliefs that were similar to her father's. Both Freuds note that when all elements of the personality are present and function

Category: Psychology - H