ABSTRACT
This book is the result of my efforts to think in "untimely" ways about youth. My interest in doing so arose from many interactions with "real" teenagers, social science research on youth, and theories of adolescence and from my own dissatisfaction with how youth were represented in scientific and popular cultural texts. Youth were usually presumed to be deficient, a little crazy, controlled by hormones, and educators and parents were warned that their actions and effectiveness were always broadly circumscribed by teenagers' immaturity, by their being in transition. Thus it seemed that a circular reasoning was in place, and I went from hormones to peers to self-esteem to age and back again in attempting to get out of the loop of common sense. The common characterizations of youth, I slowly realized, comprised a sealed system of reasoning, and the inability to talk and think about youth outside the discourse of "adolescent development" limits educators and parents in considering how different interactions and schooling practices might in effect make adolescence different. Thus a belief in the social constructedness of youth and age was one starting assumption of this work.
