Customer Reviews

The Adolescent Society: The Social Life of the Teenager and Its Impact on Education

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In my opinion, this is the most important book about education ever written by a sociologist. It has influenced the way sociologists and many others think about education and adolescence.

To my knowledge, this is James Coleman's first book. He subsequently published profically on a broad range of topics including including rational choice theory, mathematical applications to sociological issues, the analysis of longitudinal data, comparsions of public and private schools, and on and on. He remained prolific until the end of his life, and throughout the late '60's, the '70's, and the '80's he played a conspicuous role in determining the agenda for research in the sociology of education.

All this is noteworthy in the present instance because The Adolescent Society emphatically does not foreshadow Coleman's subsequent prominence. I read the 1961 edition when I was an undergraduate, and I vividly recall being struck by the commonplace, even patently obvious nature of Coleman's findings. Again and again, he returned to the same theme: adolscents -- even materially and ethnically advantaged ones -- participated in a distinctive society that had norms, values, objectives, and modes of social interaction sharply at odds with the larger social system dominated by adults.

The Adolescent Society is a fairly long book, containing a formidable body of qualitative data, but its reason for being seemed, and still seems, to be documentation of the obvious, namely that adolescent society is real and different. How could anyone have missed this growing up? Were the circumstances of Coleman's upbringing so sheltered, peopled only by folks over twenty-one, that he did not participate in a distinctive adolescent society when he was of that age? Seems very unlikely.

At the time I concluded that the existence of a distinctively adolescent society was really just a pretext for writing Coleman's book. Not an especially compelling pretext, but a pretext nevertheless. In any case, the book is well written and easy to read, and that's all to the good. However, don't expect sociological enlightment from Coleman's account. The Adolescent Society is commonsense and everyday information masquerading as social science. Nevertheless, it remains a sociological classic. What does that tell us about sociology? Who knows?