Frustration in Adolescent Youth Its Development and Implications for the School Program

This presentation is an attempt to produce a framework out of the knowledge of the growth and development of children and youth for use in determining the school program. This is necessary at a time when education has accepted the objective of secondary education. Educators are in agreement with parents and citizens generally that all youth between the ages of 12 and 18 should attend school. Today, roughly 70 percent of youth of this age group are attending school. It is believed that the dropping out of school at these ages should be reduced. Educators are not making their attack on this problem primarily through increasing the compulsory school age laws to include these ages, rather they are attempting to set up educational programs which will have appeal for youth of these ages so that they will desire to attend school. This is to a considerable extent an unrealized goal for education since a number of youth have been attending school to a considerable extent because of the compulsory school attendance laws and in relation to the strictness with which those laws were being enforced. It is believed that advances in the knowledge of the growth and development of youth enable the set up of procedures which will make possible more complete attainment of this goal. Recently, an attack on this problem has been promoted by the Office of Education under the title of Life Adjustment Education. This bulletin attempts to systematize the fundamental psychological rationale for the direction Life Adjustment Education is taking and to aid in its further development and possible redirection in order that it may more adequately reach its goal. A simplified framework of principles governing the behavior of youth is outlined in this bulletin. This is done by unifying all behavior as of one type--that of making choices of goals and procedures for reaching those goals; by noting that these actions are accompanied by affective states classified as negative, positive, or neutral, and that the problem of education is to keep the balance of the affective influences while the youth is growing up and developing. The task of education consists in providing those activities which develop all potentialities of an individual and by doing so more or less automatically provide the necessary affective or driving force. This bulletin consists of eight sections, as follows: (1) Characteristics of Psychosocial Development; (2) The Motivation Principle in Psychosocial Development; (3) Influence of the Emotions on Psychosocial Development; (4) Frustration; (5) Evidence on the Development of Frustration in the Early Years; (6) Evidence of Frustration in Adolescent Psychosocial Development; (7) The Prevention of Frustrated Behavior through the Educational Program; and (8) Implication for the Educational Program in the Identification and Rehabilitation of Frustrated Individuals. (Contains 3 tables, 11 footnotes, and 15 figures.) [Best copy available has been provided.].