combine to bring about that unfortunate result, the chief cause of this
high mortality is the unsympathetic attitude of high school teachers
toward the adolescent. But, you may ask, why unsympathetic? Because they
regard them as fickle, unstable, and irrational, and so have but little
patience with them. I'll admit that the adolescent seems all that at
times, but that is only on the surface. The developmental
changes--physical and moral--thru which he is passing often make the
life during this period one of turmoil. From fourteen to eighteen--the
normal high school period--is frequently called the "storm and stress
period" of life. Not having made a study of the situation, high school
teachers, in the main, do not know the fundamental scientific facts, and
therefore can not account for actions, points of view, signs of
waywardness, lack of appreciation, poor lessons, etc., etc., that
sometimes characterize the youth while a student in the high school.
They often lay to an unclean mind what springs from a perfectly normal
development of the sex function; they are sure that moral perversity is
the basis of actions that are more correctly explained by reference to a
moral nature merely in the process of development; they think that pure
laziness alone explains the lack of vigorous work, whereas the boy is
growing so fast that he has no strength for anything else; they scold
him for being awkward and say it is due to carelessness and a slip-shod
mind, because they do not know that the muscles sometimes grow faster
than the bones, making accurate co-ordination a physical impossibility;
in a word, to general, all round cussedness they charge behavior that
should be referred to high blood pressure, aching bones, the knitting
together by fiber growth of the various brain centers, and finally, to
youthful enthusiasm, all of which are perfectly normal signs of
developing youth. They do it because they do not know any better. They
are ignorant of many things that touch, and vitally, the young people
with whom they are working. But how could it be otherwise? They have
never given any reflective thought to the matter. The term "half-baked"
that they often apply to the adolescent in disgust, or in coarse jest,
is, from this point of view, more applicable to themselves.

That, I say,--the unsympathetic attitude of the high school teacher
toward the adolescent--is the chief cause of the high mortality of high
school students. That, co