Adult animosity against adolescents

Age-based prejudice against young people is so pervasive and entrenched that even youth advocates usually struggle to recognize it. As a result of the assumptions that teenagers are troublemakers, adults have prejudices towards them, and you can often find that adults feel the need to control what children do.

Many people, for instance, tend to believe that teaching geometry to preschoolers is too challenging because we are teaching geometry while we are teaching geometry forms. According to the quote, people normally fail to understand the differences between children thinking, and adults’ level of critical thinking due to the reason that most people force children to think just like adults without considering children have low thinking capacity as compared to mature adults. The same applies to parents towards adolescents because parents do not take time to explain to some issue; for example, sex and sexual matters are sensitive thus parents are reluctant to provide proper guiding and counselling regarding sex and sexual issue. Instead, most parents enlighten adolescents about sex and sexual basics without giving facts about consequences of engaging in early sex and sexual activities. Therefore, I find the quote significant to the topic and the issue regarding adults prejudice against adolescents.

“Another concern of ordinary teachers is to widen the knowledge of a child through continual appeals to the environment and generalizations,” page 167. Teachers try to force children to see and to reflect on everything failing to understand that the mind of the child is not yet widened to understand everything and this brings confusion and exhausts the child’s energy hence losing interest. An adult should leave the children to discover the beauty of the environment on their own, and as a result children find will experience a new happiness at every discovery and this satisfies and encourages them. The adult should, therefore, leave the child to do the things that fit in the child’s mind instead of an adult trying to make the child act like him.

”The teacher wanted to interrupt them to free me. The teacher was about to interrupt”, page 168. The teacher wanted to interrupt the children from stroking the hands of the visitor and also from coloring the tree in red color since the teacher knew the color of a tree is green. Prejudice of adults against the adolescents is seen here when the teacher tries to stop the children from doing what they feel its worthy failing to understand that the child has a lower memory than the adult. However, the child makes an intellectual progress after doing a repetition of something and learns after failing like discovering the color of the tree is green and not red when goes to the field.

”The children used objects distributed to them by the teacher, who later returned them to their proper place,” page 120. The children make an attempt at returning the objects given to them by their teacher to where they belonged, but they were not instructed to do so, and the teacher concluded that they were disobedient. For example, when a child falls and gets dusted, he or she will always try to wipe the dust, and this shows how the child tries to put everything in order.

”He regards play as we would regard a game of chess or bridge,” page 122” in child’s life, the play is very important because they lack something else to do and you find that children select the toys of their own choice to use in playing.

Conclusion, it is clear from the above quotes and discussions that that adults prejudice against the adolescents and therefore, does not free the children from doing what they want because they are under control. This shows that the young to some point should be allowed to do things that fit their mind.