Introduction

The term ‘adolescence’, which comes from the Latin adolescere, meaning ‘to grow up’, has a long history, but it is hard to pin down the precise meaning of the word or the length of the period it refers to. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it loosely as ‘The process or condition of growing up; […] the period which extends from childhood to manhood or womanhood […] ordinarily considered as extending from 14 to 25 in males, and from 12 to 21 in females’, though this estimate seems very conservative, particularly in regard to males. By contrast, Webster classes adolescence as ‘the period of life from puberty to maturity terminating legally at the age of majority’ – in other words, lasting nowadays until about eighteen or twenty, depending on the culture to which the individual belongs. The word ‘adolescence’ appears in the work of Augustine of Hippo (‘adolescentia’)1 and in medieval medical treatises; it also occurs in English texts from the fifteenth century onwards. Cowper’s Tirocinium of 1785 uses it specifically to describe school pupils.2 However, the concept of ‘adolescence’ as we now recognize it in the West only came into general currency around the time of the epochal twovolume study by the American sociologist Granville Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, published in 1904. The precise understanding of the idea has changed, and continues to change, through history, as well as differing between cultures. Nonetheless, most people agree that adolescence is a prelude to mature citizenship, and our assumption must be, therefore, that adolescence is the place where the values of citizenship are learned.