The aim of education in a democratic society is personal growth; but growth, to be significant, does not mean movement in all directions. The development of a mature human being is marked not by a fitful succession of interests, but by the emergence of an organizing center which gives purpose, direction, or meaning to life. [Sidney Hook, Education for Modern Man: A New Perspective, 1963, Wipf and Stock, 2019, p. 33]
The task we all face as human beings … is to find and become who we are. …
[N]o matter the subject matter ostensibly being taught, the real point is to help the students find themselves, and to find their own passion. Anything else is to lead them astray, to do them actual damage. [Derrick Jensen, Walking On Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution, Chelsea Green, 2004, p. 144]
[T]he central developmental task of adolescence is self-definition. Adolescence is the period during which a young person learns who he is, and what he really feels. It is the time during which he differentiates himself from his culture, though on the culture’s terms. It is the age at which, by becoming a person in his own right, he becomes capable of deeply felt relationships to other individuals perceived clearly as such. … A successful initiation leads to group solidarity and a warm sense of belonging; a successful adolescence adds to these a profound sense of self—of one’s own personality. [Edgar Z. Friedenberg, The Vanishing Adolescent, 1959, Dell, 1970, pp. 28-29]
Identity formation is not a by-product of adolescence. It’s the main goal. … the time when we start to really become the person we end up being. Of course we are never done, or fixed in a certain state. The beauty of being human is the ability to evolve, adapt, change, grow, learn. But the experiences and feelings and skills we build in adolescence become foundational. In this stage, teens grapple with questions of who they are, what they want to be, and where they fit into society. Erik Erikson, a seminal figure in the field of child development, called this stage of adolescent development “identity versus role confusion.” By testing many identities, teens start finding the one that feels right. …
If the goal of adolescence is finding meaning and ways to matter, and discovering some of the clues to who you want to be, kids need to look around. Instead, young people who spend most of their time in Achiever mode are so focused on one outcome—achieving—they never look up to consider alternative possibilities. In economic terms, they crowd out the time and space to explore what they actually like or care about because they are playing too much field hockey or studying for too many AP tests. [Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop, The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better, Crown / Penguin Random House, 2025, pp. 97, 78]
[I]ndividuation is inseparable from the growth of efficacy—that is, from learning how to think, acquire skills, master challenges, cope with new and unfamiliar situations, and extend the range of competence. What we are able to do is intrinsic to the experience of who we are. Through learning, I continue the process of creating myself—not just in childhood but across a lifetime. [Nathaniel Branden, Taking Responsibility: Self-Reliance and the Accountable Life, 1996, Fireside / Simon & Schuster, 1997, p. 33]
For the school, the first step is to increase greatly the emphasis placed on competence. I mean intellectual competence, particularly, since that has been slighted by the school as well as by the rest of our culture. But the need goes deeper than that.
The significance of competence in developing a stable identity is that it makes the self-concept specific. …
By helping the adolescent develop good, specific reasons for thinking well of himself, the school can contribute greatly to a stable identity. These reasons are competences, and adolescents with the help of good teachers can become very competent in mind, heart, and body. It is essential, however, that the adolescent think of this competence as his own and make it his own. The school must bring itself to recognize and respect a far wider variety of competence than it now does; more particularly, it must learn to accept the student’s pride in his own distinction as well as cultivate his participation in the things it thinks are important.
School ought to be a place where you can not only learn to be a scholar, a fighter, a lover, a repairman, a writer, or a scientist, but learn that you are good at it, and in which your awareness and pride in being good at it become a part of your sense of being you. More emphasis on the sciences, higher standards, stricter discipline: these, of themselves, will not help at all. They may hinder. A school that, while raising standards in certain academic areas, treats the student more than ever as an object or an instrument, simply becomes a more potent source of alienation.
What is needed is no program of technical training-cum-indoctrination, but the patient development of the kind of character and mind that conceives itself too clearly to consent to its own betrayal. [Edgar Z. Friedenberg, The Vanishing Adolescent, 1959, Dell, 1970, pp. 216-218]
[I]t is within our power to tell our children … the absolute truth. They will have succeeded if they discover something they love doing and learn how to do it well. To say that this accomplishment is more important than making a lot of money and more important than fame or prestige is not idealism. For those of us who have been lucky enough to be happy in our adult vocations or avocations, it is the reality of our lives.
Educational success needs to be redefined accordingly. The goal of education is to bring children into adulthood having discovered things they enjoy doing and doing them at the outermost limits of their potential. The goal applies equally to every child, across the entire range of every ability. There are no first-class and second-class ways to enjoy the exercise of our realized capacities. It is a quintessentially human satisfaction, and its universality can connect us all. Opening the door to that satisfaction is what real education does. [Charles Murray, Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality, Three Rivers, 2008, p. 168]
Part of learning who you are, part of being able to hear your inner voices, is discovering what it is that you want to do with your life. Finding one’s identity is almost synonymous with finding one’s career, revealing the altar on which one will sacrifice oneself. … In our schools, however, many vocational counselors have no sense of the possible goals of human existence, or even of what is necessary for basic happiness. All this type of counselor considers is the need of the society for aeronautical engineers or dentists. No one ever mentions that if you are unhappy with your work, you have lost one of the most important means of self-fulfillment. …
[T]he schools should be helping the children to look within themselves, and from this self-knowledge derive a set of values. [Abraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, 1971, Penguin, 1993, pp. 177-178, https://www.slideshare.net/imbangjtrenggana/abraham-h-maslow-the-farther-reaches-of-human-nature-penguin-nonclassics-1993]
Erik Erikson, writing from the viewpoint of psychoanalytic theory, identified “purposefulness” as a key criterion of “vital individual strength” during our adult years. He argued that an essential task of our earlier years is to emerge from childhood with “a realistic sense of ambition and purpose.” From another perspective, the social psychologist Carol Ryff and her colleagues have reported strong associations among purpose, personal growth, relationship-building skills, a sense of command over one’s life, and a positive self-image. …
The emerging discipline of positive psychology, which studies the key motivators of human happiness, … has shown that a sense of purpose is prominent among the list of character traits that lead to happiness. … One of these findings is the intriguing paradox that the happiest people are rarely those who expend a lot of effort trying to attain pleasure for themselves. …
What does matter for happiness is engaging in something that the person finds absorbing, challenging, compelling, especially when it makes a valued contribution to the world beyond the self. [William Damon, The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life, Free Press, 2008, pp. 27-28]
A youngster who has abandoned the task of defining himself in dialectical combat with society and becomes its captive and its emissary may be no rarity; but he is a casualty. …
Must there be conflict between the adolescent and society? The point is that adolescence is conflict—protracted conflict—between the individual and society. There are cultures in which this conflict seems hardly to occur; but where it does not, the characteristic development of personality which we associate with adolescence does not occur either. …
Adolescent conflict is the instrument by which an individual learns the complex, subtle, and precious difference between himself and his environment. …
But conflict is not war; it need not even involve hostile action. It must, to be sure, produce some hostile feelings, among others. But there need be no intent to wound, castrate, or destroy on either side. Conflict between the adolescent and his world is dialectical, and leads, as a higher synthesis, to the youth’s own adulthood and to a critical participation in society as an adult. …
Delinquency, apathy, and seductive fawning are not aspects of the essential conflict between youth and society which constitutes adolescence. They are the consequences of the conflict having gone terribly wrong, and a corresponding wisdom and patience—more than is usually available under actual working conditions—are needed to restore it as a fruitful process. [Edgar Z. Friedenberg, The Vanishing Adolescent, 1959, Dell, 1970, pp. 32-34, 36]
“Increasing differentiation” may indeed be part of the story of everyone’s development, but “increasing differentiation” can itself be the story of staying connected in the new way, of continuing to hold onto one’s precious connections and loyalties while refashioning one’s relationship to them so that one makes them up rather than gets made up by them. [Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life, Harvard UP, 1994, pp. 221-222]
[W]e see groups of boys and young men disaffected from the dominant society. The young men are Angry and Beat. The boys are Juvenile Delinquents. … [M]ost of the authorities and all of the public spokesmen explain it by saying there has been a failure of socialization. … And, not enough effort has been made to guarantee belonging, there must be better bait or punishment.
But perhaps there has not been a failure of communication. Perhaps the social message has been communicated clearly to the young men and is unacceptable. …
“Is the harmonious organization to which the young are inadequately socialized, perhaps against human nature, or not worthy of human nature, and therefore there is difficulty growing up?” If this is so, the disaffection of the young is profound and it will not be finally remediable by better techniques of socializing. Instead, there will have to be changes in our society and its culture, so as to meet the appetites and capacities of human nature, in order to grow up. [Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society, Vintage, 1960, p. 11]
[W]hat is growing within the adolescent demands expression, requires it, and must, in addition, be received by the world and given form—or it will wither or turn to rage. … It is [in adolescence] that a man desires solitude and at the same time contact with the vivid world; must test within social reality the new power within himself; needs above all to discover himself for the first time as a bridge between inner and outer, a maker of value, a vehicle through which culture perceives and transforms itself. …
[F]amily, community, and school all combine—especially in the suburbs—to isolate and “protect” him from the adventure, risk, and participation he needs; the same energies that relate him at this crucial point to nature result in a kind of exile from the social environment.
Thus the young, in that vivid confrontation with the thrust of nature unfolding in themselves, are denied adult assistance. [Peter Marin, “The Open Truth and Fiery Vehemence of Youth,” 1969, The Cosmos Reader, edited by Edgar Z. Friedenberg et al., Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971, pp. 808-809]
We all get socialized once. We spend the first years of our lives learning the usages of our families, our neighborhoods, our religions, our schools, and our nations. We come to an understanding of what’s expected. We come to see what the world takes to be good and bad, right and wrong. … Socialization isn’t a simple process, but when it works well, it can produce individuals who thrive in themselves and either do no harm to others or make a genuine contribution to society at large.
But primary socialization doesn’t work for everyone. There are always people—how many it’s tough to know, but surely a minority—who don’t see their own natures fully reflected in the values that they’re supposed to inherit or assume. They feel out of joint with their times. …
To be young is often to know—or to sense—what others have in mind for you and not to like it. But what is harder for a person who has gone unhappily through the first rites of passage into the tribe is to know how to replace the values she’s had imposed on her with something better. She’s learned a lot of socially sanctioned languages, and still none of them are hers. But are there any that truly might be? Is there something she might be or do in the world that’s truly in keeping with the insistent but often speechless self that presses forward internally?
This, I think, is where literature can come in—as can all of other arts and in some measure the sciences, too. By venturing into what Arnold called “the best that has been known and thought,” a young person has the chance to discover new vital possibilities. Such a person sees that there are other ways of looking at the world and other ways of being in the world than the one’s that she’s inherited from her family and culture. [Mark Edmundson, Why Teach?: In Defense of a Real Education, Bloomsbury USA, 2013, pp. 159-160]
[O]ne may say that in a somewhat negative way, clients define their goal, their purpose, by discovering, in the freedom and safety of an understanding relationship, some of the directions they do not wish to move. They prefer not to hide themselves and their feelings from themselves, or even from some significant others. They do not wish to be what they “ought” to be, whether that imperative is set by parents, or by the culture, whether it is defined positively or negatively. They do not wish to mold themselves and their behavior into a form which would be merely pleasing to others. They do not, in other words, choose to be anything which is artificial, anything which is imposed, anything which is defined from without. They realize that they do not value such purposes or goals, even though they may have lived by them all their lives up to this point. …
[G]radually [the client] chooses the goals toward which he wants to move. He becomes responsible for himself. He decides what activities and ways of behaving have meaning for him, and what do not. …
I would not want to give the impression that my clients move blithely or confidently in this direction. No indeed. Freedom to be oneself is a frighteningly responsible freedom, and an individual moves toward it cautiously, fearfully, and with almost no confidence at first.
Nor would I want to give the impression that he always makes sound choices. To be responsibly self-directing means that one chooses—and then learns from the consequences. So clients find this a sobering but exciting kind of experience. As one client says—“I feel frightened, and vulnerable, and cut loose from support, but I also feel a sort of surging up or force or strength in me.” This is a common kind of reaction as the client takes over the self-direction of his own life and behavior. [Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy, Houghton Mifflin, 1961, pp. 170-171]
Our cultural insistence on generalized patterns of response that ignore the significance of subtle but vital human differences is one of the things that most seriously impedes adolescence. …
[T]he school attacks the problems of self-definition in a heterogeneous student group as if they were problems in social integration. Integration is the only attack a school that works like a blender can take; no matter how hard it tries, the problem of preserving the integrity of individual experience is beyond it. …
The process of becoming an American, as it goes on in high school, tends to be a process of renunciation of differences. This conflicts directly, of course, with the adolescent need for self-determination; but the conflict is so masked in institutionalized gaiety that the adolescent himself usually does not become aware of it. He must still deal with the alienation it engenders. [Edgar Z. Friedenberg, The Vanishing Adolescent, 1959, Dell, 1970, pp. 65, 91, 94]
When controlled, people act without a sense of personal endorsement. Their behavior is not an expression of the self, for the self has been subjugated to the controls. In this condition, people can reasonably be described as alienated.
The issues of autonomy and authenticity, as opposed to control and alienation, are relevant in all aspects of life. They are sometimes manifest dramatically, with societal implications, and other times, subtly, with only personal ramifications. …
Authoritarians of our era have relied on control, and they have gotten a healthy dose of rebellion along with the conformity they had hoped for. But what is even worse, and what has gone largely unrecognized, is that the price of compliance is itself very steep. That price—profound alienation with all of its ramifications—is detailed in this book. [Edward L. Deci with Richard Flaste, Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation, Penguin, 1996, pp. 2-4]
[I]t is often obvious that balking in doing [school] work … means exactly what it says: The work does not suit me, not this subject, or not at this time, or not in this school, or not in school altogether. The student might not be bookish; he might be school-tired; perhaps his development ought now to take another direction. Yet unfortunately, if such a student is intelligent and is not sure of himself, he can be bullied into passing, and this obscures everything. [Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-education and The Community of Scholars, Vintage / Random House, 1964, pp. 127-130]
A youngster in trouble or in deep disturbance or conflict is likely to need help with many practical problems, but most of all he needs help in understanding himself and his relation to other people and institutions; he needs help in learning what his real feelings are. He faces a crisis in the formulation of his identity; his basic need is to learn enough about what he is really like, and what he really wants and needs, to permit him to make intelligent decisions about how he wants to act with respect to the available alternatives.
Such youngsters need skilled professional services, but the service they need is that of a psychotherapist, not of a petty official. A civil service, in dealing with him, is most likely to constitute itself a Ministry of Adjustment; however sophisticated its staff may be about psychodynamics, its basic interest will be in the kind of problem the student creates for the school and for other people. This will serve as the real basis for classifying him and disposing of his case. It is almost impossible for a school guidance counselor or dean really to believe that his function in dealing with a particular student may not be to promote adjustment, but rather to help the youngster to find rational rather than destructive alternatives to adjustment, in circumstances where adjustment would cruelly violate his emerging conception of himself and the basis for his self-esteem. [Edgar Z. Friedenberg, The Vanishing Adolescent, 1959, Dell, 1970, pp. 132-134]
[A] major characteristic of genuine love is that the distinction between oneself and the other is always maintained and preserved. The genuine lover always perceives the beloved as someone who has a totally separate identity. Moreover, the genuine lover always respects and even encourages this separateness and the unique individuality of the beloved. Failure to perceive and respect this separateness is extremely common, however, and the cause of much mental illness and unnecessary suffering. …
Adolescents frequently complain that they are disciplined not out of genuine concern but because of parental fear that they will give the parents a bad image. … Such adolescent resentment is usually justified. Their parents generally do in fact fail to appreciate the unique individuality of their children, and instead regard their children as extensions of themselves, in much the same way as their fine clothes and their neatly manicured lawns and their polished cars are extensions of themselves which represent their status to the world. [M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology Of Love, Traditional Values And Spiritual Growth, Touchstone / Simon & Schuster, 1978, pp. 160-165]
For many children in this culture, parents’ demands for achievement have all but crowded out kids’ internal push toward autonomy. It is hard to develop an authentic sense of self when there is constant pressure to adopt a socially facile, highly competitive, performance-oriented, unblemished “self” that is promoted by omnipresent adults. This may encourage some children to perform at high levels, but, more important, it also encourages dependency, depression, and a truncated sense of self in most children.
Parents pressure their children to be outstanding, while neglecting the very process by which outstanding children are formed. … From a psychologist’s point of view, outstanding children are those who have developed a “self” that is authentic, capable, loving, creative, in control of itself, and moral. [Madeline Levine, The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids, HarperCollins, 2006, p. 65]
Say to them, O father, O mother, … O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth’s. … I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. … If you are noble, I will love you; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not selfishly, but humbly and truly. [Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” 1841, Selected Essays, Lectures, and Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Pocket Books / Washington Square Press, 1965, p. 254]
[I]ndividuality is something developing and to be continuously attained, not something given all at once and ready-made. It is found only in life-history, in its continuing growth; it is, so to say, a career and not just a fact discoverable at a particular cross section of life. [John Dewey, “Progressive Education and the Science of Education,” 1928, John Dewey on Education: Selected Writings, edited by Reginald D. Archambault, 1964, U of Chicago P, 1974, pp. 176-177]
Related:
– Why is cultivating individuality in education important?
– Why is it important for young people to take on responsibility? What opportunities do they have for substantive responsibility?
– What is a “gap year”? How can we incorporate maturing activities into education?
– Why do the questions of education, and a purposeful life, demand individual attention?