Growing up in New Guinea: a study of adolesence and sex in primitive societies

The way in which each human infant is transformed into the finished adult, into the complicated individual version of his city and his century, is one of the most fascinating studies open to the curious-minded. Whether one wishes to trace the devious paths by which the unformed baby which was oneself developed personality, to prophesy the future of some child still in pinafores, to direct a school, or to philosophize about the future of the United States the same problem is continually in the foreground of thought. How much of the child's equipment does it bring with it birth? How much of its development follows regular laws? How much or how little and in what ways is it dependent upon early training, upon the personality of its parents, its teach ers, its playmates, the age into which it is born? Is the framework of human nature so rigid that it will break if submitted to too severe tests? To what limits will it flexibly accommodate itself? Is it possible to rewrite the conflict between youth and age so that it is less acute or more fertile of good results? Such questions are implicit in almost every social decision in the mother's decision to feed the baby with a spoon rather than force it to drink from a hated bottle, in the appropriation of a million dollars to build a new manual training high school, in the propaganda plans of the Anti-Saloon League or of the Communist party. Yet it is a subject about which we know little, towards which we are just developing methods of approach.