7. The Adolescent at School
The high school has powerful influences in shaping or forming adolescents’ concepts of who they are and who they will be. This kind
of feeling occurs in persons’ life in their transition from childhood to adulthood. The youth who is successful in high school, their future
remains open but if they fail and leave school, their doors to future have been closed.
According to Arthur, the high school is in a more strategic position than the home to influence the lives of adolescents. The school has
more access to and can exercise more authority over the peer group. Also, high school teachers and counselors are freer than
parents to view adolescents other than their own children objectively. Teachers are not as emotionally involved with the
adolescent as are his parents. If he or she confides an aspiration, or has a problem, or confesses a weakness, the high school teacher
has less reason than the parent to feel personally responsible for the adolescent’s state of mind.
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What adolescents bring to their high school experience will have an important influence on what they get from it. With the exception of
those few whose lives have been blighted almost beyond repair, each adolescent student is still teachable and malleable, each is still in a
condition to be inspired, or restored, or impaired.
8. Theories of Adolescent Development
a. Biological Theory
The biological theories of adolescent development explain adolescent in terms of biological changes. In other word, the
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Arthur T. Jersild, The Psychology of Adolescence, USA: The Macmillan Company, 1963, Second Edition, pp. 325 – 326.
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characteristics of the adolescents period are assumes to result more from hereditary forces more than environmental conditions.
The first of the major biological theories of adolescence was formulated by G. Stanley Hill. He was heavily influenced by
the work of Charles Darwin and sought to apply the principles of evolution to an understanding of human
development. His most fundamental belief, derived directly from evolutionary theory, is expressed simply in the phrase
“ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”. Ontogeny refers to the changes that individuals within a species undergo from
conception to maturity. Phylogeny refers to the series of changes through which species passed as they evolved from
primitive life forms to those forms presently known.
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Like Hall, Arnold Gessel based his developmental theories on the belief that biological factors were largely responsible
for the personality characteristics of children at various stages in their development. Unlike hall, however, he gave
environment an important role in accounting for variation among individuals. These differences, he felt, would be due
first to genetic factors that determine not only the sequence of maturation but also the “constitution” of the individual.
Second, they would be due to environmental factors ranging from home and school to the total cultural setting.
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b. Sociological Theory
Whereas the biological theories are concerned primarily with the role of genetic and evolutionary factors in development, the
sociological theories are concerned with the role of society and
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Guy R. Lefrancois, Adolescent …………, pp. 107 – 109.
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A. L. Gessel, L. B. Ames, Youth; the Years from Teen to Sixteen New York: Harper, 1956, p. 22.
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culture. Sociological theories generally maintain that adolescence varies from culture to culture and is not due primarily to genetic
factors. Chief among sociological approaches is that advanced by Robert Havighurst.
Among the developmental tasks that Havigust lists for adolescents have been already mentioned above on point major
tasks of adolescence.
c. Physiological Theory
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