A Few Words About “A Parley with Youth,” My Latest Book

How do you talk to high school students?

In A Parley with Youth, which is out soon, I attempt to answer this question not with theory but with a series of demonstrations. It’s not a book written for a classical audience, but a Christian one, and it features twelve dialogues between me and the high school students I taught over a nineteen-year career. Like every fictional character, the students in the book are composites of people I’ve known. Likewise, the dialogues are pieced together from hundreds of conversations I’ve had concerning topics about which Christian teens are both curious and combative: dating, R-rated movies, video games, friends, parents, promises to keep silent, college, missions work, identity, and “finding your voice.”

These are just a few of the topics discussed, yet the real center of the book isn’t one issue or another but the teenage way of interpreting the world, the teenage heart—the teenage worldview, perhaps. As Aristotle points out in his Rhetoric, youth don’t see things the way adults do, and neither youth nor adults see things the way old people do. Young people are changeable and fickle in their desires, cannot bear to be slighted, and love victory—hence their love of games, which create the possibility of victory. They “love too much, hate too much,” “overdo everything,” trust others too readily, and don’t respect money (because they’ve never been without it). And yet they are also hopeful, courageous, “more regulated by feeling than reason,” “fonder of their friends than older men are,” funny, insolent, and witty. In all this, young people make up a very particular kind of audience, and any adult that wants to be taken seriously by youth must engage them knowingly.

In order to properly engage young people, several conditions must be met.

First, the adult must like youth. The high school teacher must find high school students to be good company. He must know what young people are like and find them (at very least) sort of delightful human beings.

Second, the adult must remember his own youth clearly, and he must have more than a few fond memories from his youth. He is free to say he wasted his youth—most people do—and yet he also must be able to discern that all the “wasted” time was ultimately worth something.

This second qualification is important because a failure to remember one’s own youth either leads one to take young people too seriously or else not seriously enough. The adult who takes youth too seriously is apt to flatter them, praising them too much and too easily, and hastening them to privileges they haven’t earned. Such adults also encourage when they ought to correct, correct when they ought to punish, and punish when they ought to praise. Soft men are soft on boys and aim to create soft boys, but if there’s anything that brings out the temper in soft men it’s when young men show a little backbone—and it’s because it makes soft men feel guilty. The same people who are soft on crime are hard on real virtue.

The failure to remember one’s own youth also leads to harshness with the young. If you remember your own youth, you remember not only your moral failures and your ignorance, but also the nobility of your motivations. When I was young, I was an idiot—and yet, I can nonetheless remember occasions of greatness, courage, and even purity of intention. Often enough, the raw material of youth—which is obnoxious, tedious, and vexing to adults—does not need to be destroyed but refined. The zeal, energy, and immoderation of youth needs to be edited, curated, moderated, polished. Much of what’s good in a good adult looks top-heavy, wild, and destructive at sixteen.

Nonetheless, there are very few teachers and counselors left in the world who are too harsh on youth. That was the sin of a former age—the 19^th century, perhaps, when literature was filled with stories of teachers beating children with rods for, say, sneezing out of turn. That era of history slowly gave way to the present, wherein all the former sins have been frantically overcorrected, for our niceness to children is now just as immoderate as our meanness was before. In that former era, people who argued for moderation were accused of being coddlers; in our era, people who argue for moderation are accused of being brutes.

What the too-soft adults of our time fail to recognize about high school students, though, is that they appreciate straight talk, know when they’re being patronized, and quickly lose interest in adults who flatter them. The sort of person apt to disagree with this claim tends to confuse high school students with their parents, who are far more likely to prefer their children be flattered—and who avoid straight talk whenever possible. The same students who tyrannize and exploit weak teachers during class openly complain about that weakness to strong teachers. As someone who has never really had discipline problems in the classroom, I have collected a treasure hoard of stories from bad kids about incompetent teachers. Listening to their complaints for many years has informed the way I talk to all high school students. Plenty of bad kids go on to be good teachers simply because they both understand and loathe the same mismanaged classrooms they helped create.

The high school characters in A Parley with Youth will probably challenge the credulity of readers who don’t spend much time in large rooms full of teenagers. They will either seem too insightful or too cutthroat, too cynical or too naïve, too smart or not nearly smart enough. But youth is—as Aristotle noted several thousand years ago—an age which is given to extremes. The most heartless, callous, kill-them-all-let-God-sort-them-out sentiments I’ve ever heard have come from high school boys. The most cravenly materialistic expressions of desire for wealth and glamour I’ve ever heard have come from high school girls. The most exquisite acts of social cruelty I’ve ever personally witnessed—the insults, the complete indifference to human feeling—have come from Christian teenagers. And yet, the same Christian teenagers also maintain a glorious devotion, love, and openness with their friends which is frankly beyond the power of most adults. Both sides, both extremes, must be accounted for when conversing with youth.

A Parley with Youth was written for students, parents, and teachers—each of whom will take away something different.

I believe students will enjoy the opportunity to vicariously debate an adult on issues they often discuss among themselves. What’s more, many adults claim they want to “help teens think through the issues so they can make wise decisions,” but what teens really want is to be told, “You’re right, actually” or, “You’re wrong,” or, “Are you serious? Do you hear what you’re saying? That’s absurd,” followed with genuine explanations, not vague appeals to “really pray about whether you think you’re ready for” whatever daft plan has been concocted.

If A Parley with Youth is read aloud in a book club, classroom, youth group, or Sunday School, a savvy adult could draw quite a lot from the book that your average sophomore couldn’t get on their own. The book is full of arguments, but it’s also designed to facilitate further conversation. At times, lynchpin arguments are flagrantly omitted. Students will want to respond to both the student character and the teacher character in the book. They will want to fill in arguments that fall flat, challenge arguments that pass too easily, demand qualifications, resist qualifications. Some young readers will discover themselves in the young characters, others will sympathize with the teacher’s frustrations. Either way, it’s my hope that the book gets every young readers to think of himself as someone who can and should engage with adults—questioning them, pestering them with arguments and inquiries, challenging them, rebutting them, beseeching them, and listening carefully. The titular “parley” was chosen carefully. I’m not suggesting children talk to their parents this way, and yet one of the most compelling and unique blessings a teacher offers the young is the chance to converse with an adult in a blunt manner. A high school junior knows that I can’t forbid him from dating an unbeliever or watching The Wolf of Wall Street, which makes me a very different sort of conversation partner than mom or dad—who can forbid such things, perhaps even without explanation.

It’s my hope that A Parley with Youth will give parents a new perspective on the role that teachers can and should play for students, and that teachers also see this role as an agreeable possibility. Of all my accomplishments as a teacher, the one I’m most proud of is the significant number of former students with whom I remain in contact, some from the very beginning of my career. Students rightly determine that teachers who flatter them aren’t worth staying in touch with—it’s not the teachers who say, “So, I think there’s some interesting things going on in Drake’s ‘Hotline Bling,’ but tell me what you like about this song,” that students come back to see after they head off to college. When the temptations of the world fall heavy on nineteen-year-olds, and their own moral failures begin to accrue interest, it’s the teachers who told them, “Drake sucks, man,” that students return to for advice.

You can order A Parley with Youth here.