Customer Reviews

Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids: American Teenagers, Schools, and the Culture of Consumption

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Professor Murray Milner, Jr. asks "Why do American teenagers behave the way they do?" His new book, Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids, examines a list of negative behaviors:

"Why are many teenagers obsessed with who sits with them at lunch, the brand of clothes they wear, what parties they are invited to, the privacy of their bedrooms, the intrigues of school cliques, who is dating or breaking up with whom, what is the latest popular music? Why have alcohol, drug use, and casual sex become widespread?"

Some people assume that teen troubles are just the result of hormones, psychological development, race, or class, but Dr. Milner rejects that notion. He zeroes in on the basic nature of compulsory, age-segregated education.

Milner argues that if we want to understand teens, we must "focus on the way adults have used schools to organize young people's daily activities, and the teenage status systems that result from this way of structuring their lives." Milner claims that students in high schools behave the way they do because they seek "status." In an effort to be popular with their peers, they divide themselves into groups like "preps" and "jocks" at one end of the social scale and "freaks" and "geeks" on the other.

Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids is serious sociological research, but remains quite readable. The book unravels the mysteries of food fights, varsity letter jackets, drinking parties, and all the other marks of "youth culture." The strength of Milner's work lies in his ability to connect all these disparate dots into a coherent pattern, and then show how the pattern of the public high school is driven by the overarching quest for status.

According to Milner, human beings tend to seek one or more basic kinds of power. The three main options are economic, political, or status power. Consider, for example, Bill Gates, President Bush, and Pope John Paul II. Each of these three exercises a vast amount of power, but in three different forms. For many people, status can be just as important as money or politics. When large numbers of people organize themselves around the pursuit of status (rather than money or political power), they form what Milner calls a "status system." Familiar status systems are the British aristocracy, the American South before 1860, and India's caste system.

Much of Milner's life work was done in India and Bangladesh, where he studied the sociology of native Hindu cultures. Traditional Indian society is rigidly divided into different castes, with those at the highest level (Brahmins) rigidly separated from the lower tiers of society, all of which, in turn, look down on the "untouchables" at the bottom of the social structure. In his previous work (Status and Sacredness: A General Theory of Status Relations and an Analysis of Indian Culture) Milner challenged the assumption that India's caste system is the product of unique cultural circumstances. He tried to explain the factors that would lead people to develop such a system, and developed a "general theory of status relationships" to explain what he observed. This general theory explains more than Hindu caste systems, however: it also makes sense of high school cafeterias.

Arguing that American high schools are status systems, too, Milner says the system has developed because students have so little power over other aspects of their lives. During their four years of compelled attendance at a public high school, young people have little opportunity to invest their time or energy into their own life goals. They are forced to go to school because other people make them.

Despite the lack of economic or political power, high school students have near-complete power over status, and Milner shows how effectively they use this power. Inside the high school, it is the students, not parents or school administrators, who decide who is "cool." Once the group decides it is "uncool" to associate with adults, students tend to do whatever it takes to prove they have rejected their parents' and teachers' norms. While most people would call such teenage behavior "anti-social," Milner insists that it is the predictable result of social pressures.

Milner examines high school behaviors one by one, and time after time, he shows how these behaviors directly serve to raise or lower status. Much of what he describes is dysfunctional, involving deviant or destructive acts like drug use or hazing. His theory explains why objectively bad choices can raise the status of the child who makes them. The boy who smokes seems "cool" to his crowd, and the girl who dresses provocatively attracts the more popular boys. Cruel putdowns reduce the status of others, and thus raise one's own. Good choices, by contrast (like obedience and hard work), often earn the contempt of one's peers.

Milner claims that these dysfunctional behaviors can all be traced back to our educational system which isolates students in an artificial society allowing them to pursue other interests. He makes a compelling case, leaving the reader wondering how such schools can possibly survive. Milner provides the answer to that mystery, too: the secret is that almost everybody likes the current system.

Young people like the high schools, Milner says, because they escape the authority of their parents. Parents like the schools because it gives them more free time. Organized labor supports compelled attendance because it eliminates competition for unskilled jobs. Corporations like the system because they can count on a ready supply of part time workers (without health care or other expensive benefits) while insuring a constant stream of eager young consumers, compelled to buy the latest fashions in order to keep up with their status-conscious peers. Both public school teachers and the politicians who employ them gain power and influence when the scope of the school system is increased.

Milner has not researched homeschooling, but his theory helps explain why homeschoolers seem so different from their peers in traditional schools. There is little that public school students can change in their environment except for their status; but homeschoolers experience the opposite. Homeschoolers can change just about everything in their environment except for status. A first-born son is a first-born son, no matter how he scores on standardized tests.

If homeschoolers cannot change their status, Milner's theory would suggest that they might try to gain economic or political power, instead. The facts bear this out: homeschool kids have started a surprising number of small businesses, and homeschoolers have developed a well-deserved reputation for being "the most effective lobbyists in America." The average homeschooled student respects his parents, work hard at his studies, and spend his time, energy, and money on things he is interested in, not on whatever it takes to look "cool" to others. The result, according to the latest research, is that homeschool graduates are succeeding in life: 58% of homeschool graduates are "very happy," 73% find life "exciting," 92% are satisfied with their finances, and 96% are satisfied with the work they do (Dr. Brian Ray, "Homeschooling Grows Up," 2003).

Professor Milner spends a significant amount of time examining the relationship between American consumer culture and our current educational system. In the early twentieth century, activists like John Dewey tried to shape the schools to churn out millions of laborers who would be willing to spend their lives at the mindless tasks of the modern assembly line. They insisted that our economy depended on such producers. Today, Milner says, our economy depends on consumers to keep it going-and age-segregated schools do a marvelous job of raising status-conscious shoppers who will reliably throw out their old products and buy new ones as soon as the fashions change.

If "socialization" means being shaped into a peer-dependent, status-conscious consumer, then parents and policy-makers need to take a serious look at the youth culture of our modern schools. If Milner is correct, then high school students are continuously tempted to do whatever it takes to "be cool" in the eyes of others. Far too many young people waste their time, energy, and money in the quest for status, while the few who refuse to join the high school rat race wind up labeled "geeks" or "dorks."

In this reviewer's opinion, Milner's thesis is sound--but not likely to be popular. Homeschoolers can take advantage of this analytic framework, but the rest of America will have trouble responding. No matter how incontrovertible Milner's claims may be, it is safe to predict a deafening silence from the teachers' colleges and other academic institutions that prop up today's educational system.

Everything is traced back to a struggle for power and I like having that as a root throughout the book. I am only 25 and a lot of the elements of childhood reflected in the book are relatively fresh in my memory. I frequently found myself saying "ohhh" and wondering how I missed a lot of this. It drove me nuts, though, as I realized how difficult it would be to emerge from these behaviors and has kept me up a few nights. The previous reviewer must have been somewhere different than I because the book hit many nails on their respective heads (haha).

Dr. Milner is correct that adolescents "lack...power over

the central features of their lives." One power I wish teens

had is to prevent portrayals such as this.

This book is an exercise in unreality. Adults are charged

with "inadvertently" exercising the wrong kinds of controls

over teenagers, which excuses adults from facing the fact

that our own values and behaviors--not what structures or

lectures we aim at adolescents--are the most critical

influences on the young.

"Why do American teenagers behave the way they do?" Dr.

Milner asks. The USA has 30 million teenagers, ranging from

Hmong migrant laborers to middle-class Latinos to Marin

upscalers (note: the last are the only ones culture critics

care about). No responsible social scientist uses a term

such as "behave the way they do" to describe such a large,

diverse group.

"Why are many teenagers obsessed with who sits with them at

lunch, the brand of clothes they wear, what parties they are

invited to, the privacy of their bedrooms, the intrigues of

school cliques, who is dating or breaking up with whom, what

is the latest popular music?" he asks. Because adults around

them are obsessed with the same kinds of status markers.

Hard to believe, but teens account for just 3% of consumer

spending in the US. Who accounts for the other 97%? That's

right--the parents, educators, and adults Dr. Milner depicts

as so disturbed and baffled at where teenagers could

possibly get the idea that what clothes you wear, what

styles you affect, who you associate with, what circles you

are included in, what other people's sex lives are like,

etc., are important. Dr. Milner treats adults simply as

controllers and arbiters, not as role models whose own

smoking, drinking, sexual behavior, fashion consciousness,

status seeking, and cliquishness crucially impact those of

the young. This is a fatally un-introspective book.

Dr. Milner asks: "Why have alcohol, drug use, and casual sex

become widespread?" They haven't. These behaviors have

declined sharply among teens in recent decades and, more

important, consequences of such behaviors (drunken driving,

drug overdose, pregnancy) have plummeted among today's

adolescents compared to previous generations. Today's

parents have far worse illegal-drug and alcohol abuse

problems than their teenage kids do. The question is: why

doesn't a noted social scientist such as Dr. Milner know

these things?

This book perfectly illustrates the hierarchical

arrangements of grownup society Dr. Milner is so troubled by

when reflected by adolescents. Where "cool kids" distance

themselves from "geeks," Milner distances adults (high

status) from adolescents (low status). Where popular high

schoolers view outcasts as being weird, different, messing

up the school, and requiring insults and thumpings from the

alphas to restore the proper order, Milner charges teens

with objectionable, unhealthy values that are messing up our

society and require superior adults to reassert our

corrective authority. When it comes to us versus them, power

versus reject, meaningful achievement versus superficial

status, painful introspection versus blaming scapegoats, and

every other flaw we see so clearly in teenagers but are

blind to in ourselves, Dr. Milner's book inadvertently

illustrates the degree to which high schoolers anticipate

grownups and grownups recapitulate high school.

Mike Males, Sociology Department, University of California,

Santa Cruz

Although a very interesting sociological study, this book reads more like someone's doctoral thesis or a sociology textbook. It's full of tiny print on shiny paper, interview and study results, footnotes -- very dry and detailed. The precis is well-documented and explained that adolescent consumerism is fostered by the "in" teens themselves, not the other way around. But the book makes it seem as if no teen can be more than a jerk if he/she attempts to avoid or scorn the dominant culture. That's a sad commentary on the need to conform in an age of diversity and, we hope, increased tolerance. This is a pretty heavy read, definitely not entertainment.

The book was in very good condition. It was like new. Fast and speedy delivery.