1. There is a dues of 5¢ each meeting.
2. You must obey the president.
3. You must come to as many meetings as possible.
4. You must bring a message if one of the members who lives near you can’t come, and learn why if possible.

[Signed] Carol Elaine Bailey
President

These were the rules for my newly launched “Start Training to be a Teenager Club.” Written on the back of a piece of notebook paper, they were preceded on the front side by the tenets for the club: 

⚫ Marks the most important things to learn, to be in this club and try to do and learn,

• How to dance, not perfect, but learn (rock-and-roll, polka, waltz, and boogie woogie)
• Listen to more radio programs and radio songs.
• Get as many hit records as you can.
• Learn to pick out the right size and color clothes when you go shopping, and learn how to pick out tomorrow’s school clothes.
• Learn how to sew, wash the dishes, sweep, dust, clean up your room, fix meals, take care of younger brother or sister and clean up the yard.
• Learn to be polite to grown-ups and company
• Learn how to make strange guest feel comfortable

The page fluttered to the ground last week as I moved files in preparation for our travel to Weimar this summer. I showed the now-fragile paper to my husband Hank, who responded with restrained bemusement and noted my early penchant for bullet points.

It does give one pause to find such a piece of nostalgia. I laughed at the bottom part of the front page where a membership blank was drawn up:

Dear ________

If you would like to join a club called ‘Start Training to be a Teenager,” please let me know by checking the following:

1. Would you like to be a teenager? __ Yes __No
2. Would you like to join this club? __ Yes __No
3. Would you obey the rules on the other side of this paper? __ Yes __No
4. Would you try to learn the things above? __ Yes __No

Recalling no laborious effort to hand-copy this form for distribution, I will assume that “Carol Elaine Bailey” ended up serving not just as president, but as the sole member of the club!

You’d be hard-pressed to find a twelve-year old today describing the teenage years with such blithe, simplistic concepts. Clearly, my biggest concerns were mastering the Boogie Woogie and learning how to press my own clothes (remember, everything needed to be ironed back then). Today’s youngsters, by contrast, are engulfed in waves of disastrous imagery and dismal information. Loving parents and grandparents have little choice but to engage early in unfathomably frank conversations in order to give children a defensive position against a swirl of disturbing issues.

Still, as serious as the situation is now, I do have hope. In the work Hank and I do, we encounter phalanxes of families engaged in struggling against, and triumphing over, our current cultural challenges. Their children are receiving a solid education through traditionally rooted, rigorously framed curricula, taught sometimes at home and sometimes in select brick-and-mortar schools. I meet these pre-teens and teens regularly at conferences and in online classes. Their accomplishments and budding wisdom leave me breathless. They are far better informed, far more widely read than the general populace of their peers. They overflow with creative ideas and young, yet honest, wisdom to the point that it is easy to forget they are “just teens.”

In short, they exemplify a status that was assumed when I grew up. Our parents strove to raise solid adults, not to perpetuate childhood. The teenage stage needed to be tolerated, but it was not intended to define a person’s character or world view. Teenage mentality was expected to fade by age 18 when a young person was ready to take the next step, be it a job, a marriage (not so unusual), the military, or, for a select few, college.

I admit to smiling each time I see news stories about another major company opening up its jobs to high-school graduates. Some may recoil from the momentum this trend is gaining, but it is impossible to pretend that today’s college education, with specific exceptions, resembles the one that parents of the World-War II generation hoped to achieve for their children.

From my windows here in Weimar, I look out on the extensive Park an der Ilm, one of Europe’s most famous “Romantic” parks formed by the ideas of 19th-century German and English poets and philosophers. Several thousand people cross through it every day: mothers pushing highly crafted European strollers, students of Bauhaus University and Liszt Conservatory of Music, toting painstakingly created three-dimensional architectural models and instrument cases slung over their backs. Countless people ride bicycles through the park’s paths that connect outlying regions of the city to its historic center. Some may be riding for pleasure but most are going somewhere.

And into the mix of it we have thrown our 7 and 9 year old grandkids, on bicycles better than the ones they have at home. They already learned on Day 1 of cycling that riding a bike here is serious (even if it is just on the graveled paths of the peaceful park). Nonsense and lack of consideration in public areas like this park will not be tolerated. Kids may be kids, but they had better abide by basic rules. Not to do so endangers others, both cyclists and pedestrians. One reason, then, that we made a point to bring our own kids, and now our grandkids, to Weimar has to do with giving them models for growing up in a more orderly fashion.

Things are not perfect here with youth or teenagers–nor do I wish to imply that. But consistently one sees how European children, from the earliest ages, are taught how to function in public, even while they enjoy whatever stage of childhood they presently occupy. Kids learn to walk on the right, not act like idiots on escalators, hold doors for those entering into a shop, and keep voices down rather than sound like a pack of hyenas. Children seem to be taught to examine toys in the shop with their eyes (mostly), rather than grabbing them off the shelf. Even little kids kids consume bratwurst, sandwich wraps, or cones of gelato with care while walking to and from places. Furthermore, the refuse goes straight in the trash, not on the ground.

Childhood is a precious thing. But it is meant to pass. Kids are supposed to create horse clubs, art clubs, and even “Start Training to be a Teenager” clubs: these activities prepare them for the hard work of organizing and implementing ideas when they are grown. Children are meant to run and play, dig in the mud, master the difficulties of progressively more challenging playground equipment, and cry at skinned knees and disappointed ventures.

All of this happens in preparation for leaving childhood behind. And a traditional education based in rigor and intellectual discipline serves as the fuel for stepping into adulthood, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually.

Thus, you train to be a teenager and to be an adult by running, jumping, and falling and through exposure to great books, significant art, fine music, glorious poetry, fairy tales, and heroic legends. You train, too, by mastering a long line of practical skills from ironing clothes to baking, cleaning, and learning to use tools. And last, but not least, you train through learning two points that I was surprised to find in my long-ago tenets: learning to be polite to grownups and understanding how to help a stranger feel comfortable and welcome.