Myth: Rebellion against authority is a natural stage of teen development

Myth

At puberty, teens are emotionally unstable and rebel against the entire world

Fact

The rebellion "stage" may be an artifact of compulsory schooling.

The most important process that governs an individual's attitude towards the world is the conceptualization process that determines the architecture of the brain, and the topology of the concept network. The lifetime progression of that process does not seem to show a specific "stage" that would favor rebellion. At the time of puberty, some hormonal, neural and emotional upheavals may take place. This is not a rebellion stage. At worst, a degree of chaos may be introduced by the disruptive effect of temporarily accelerated conceptualization.

However, there are external factors that may produce the illusion of the rebellion stage. The main force is compulsory schooling that entails limits on freedom at home. On one hand, there is a rebellion-driving force that gradually increases the loads in learning and the demands put by the adult world. Arrival of puberty may coincide with a transfer to a middle school (as explained in Closed systems of socialization). That insurrectionary force is tempered by a gradual development of learned helplessness. If the process of "easing into obedient adulthood" is slow enough, there may be no rebellion. Rebellion is replaced with helplessness, which at puberty may have dramatic consequences such as suicide.

The other external force is the end of compulsory schooling on the horizon. When teens are just 2-3 years from the end of the compulsory schooling period, their rebellion eases. They feel that freedom is just about a corner. Some teens imagine that college is the ultimate educational emancipation. Others want to follow Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or their modern equivalents. Some just want to get a job and to get rid of adult governance.

In terms of the rebellion against school, the age of 14-15 is a magic peak of external forces when (1) burdens are extreme and (2) freedom is far away enough. This rebellious peak has very little to do with brain development. It is largely an expression of social dynamics that can make or break a young man. Paradoxically, we seal the myth by refusing teens the right to vote on the grounds that they are too rebellious. See: Let them vote!

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Figure: Wrong reasoning about schooling generates an unhappy society: At the bottom of the picture, we can see how the coercive pressure of schooling converts a happy, carefree child into a well-performing student. Educational systems around the world aim at maximizing testing performance, e.g. as in the PISA benchmark. In the middle, we can see that coercive pressure has a bad impact on overall learning, primarily due to the fact that it undermines the learn drive, and only passionate learning brings optimum outcomes. At the top, we can see how the battles with school coercion can either break a student or make a rebel. Instead of actual learning, a student can learn helplessness, or learn to hate the coercive system. That hate can spill to many areas of life and culminate, in extreme cases, in terrorism, murder, or other forms of violence. In the end, by employing coercion, instead of living in a happy world of free learning, we live in the world characterized by apathy, helplessness, psychiatric disorders, addictions, hate, and violence. The remedy is trivial: respect for human needs!