Terence Blacker: Show a little more respect to teenagers

Startling as it may seem, people of this age are, with a few exceptions, normal human beings

Heaven knows what some of our most revered public moralists would have made of some of the scenes of teenage behaviour that I have witnessed this week. A respectable town hall was taken over by a horde of more than 300 15-year-olds. The noise that they made throughout the evening was deafening.

Heaven knows what some of our most revered public moralists would have made of some of the scenes of teenage behaviour that I have witnessed this week. A respectable town hall was taken over by a horde of more than 300 15-year-olds. The noise that they made throughout the evening was deafening.

At one point - I shudder to report this - a boy actually appeared in a skirt, blonde wig and wearing a fake bust under his shirt. Not one of the adults who were present did anything to calm the situation.

With talk of respect and the yob culture in the air, and the great hoody debate raging across the nation, it was a good moment to venture into a heartland of teenage life.

The occasion was something called the Angus Book Award and, as an exercise in teenage democracy, it was an eye-opening experience. The brainchild of Moyra Hood, a senior librarian working for Angus Council in Scotland, it involves third-year students at high schools and academies in Forfar, Montrose, Brechin, Arbroath and Carnoustie reading five recently published new novels for their age group and voting for a winner.

On Wednesday, each of the five authors visited two schools to talk to some of those who had judged and voted for their books. That evening, at a ceremony entirely run and presented by pupils, cases were made for each of the books (I confess that it was my story of gender confusion Boy2Girl that encouraged a boy from Arbroath High School to get kitted out in skirt and wig) and the result announced.

Without wishing to malign the 15-year-olds of that part of east Scotland, it seems likely that they face the same kind of problems and pressures - family break-up, the decline in parental authority, a crass celebrity-obsessed media - that are experienced by teenagers elsewhere. Having spent time with some of them, I can testify that they are as boisterous, skittish, moody and generally irreverent as one would hope and expect from people of their age.

So why was the atmosphere in their classrooms and in Montrose Town Hall so far away from the dark and alarming perspectives on teenage life that are currently being touted by politicians and commentators?

The secret does indeed reside in the matter of respect, but it is not, I suspect, of the kind that Tony Blair and the family-values brigade are proposing. What those who run this prize do every year is to offer young people in the area the chance to vote in their own small election and to run the final ceremony in their own way. They show them, in other words, the respect of the world of grown-ups.

Why it works is really not that complicated. Startling as it may seem, people of 15, 16 and 17 are, with a few exceptions, normal human beings. On the whole, they will respond badly to distrust, fear or rudeness from adults and well to straightforwardness and respect.

The propagandists of despair and paranoia, who currently seem to hold the floor in this debate, see it differently. In their universe, a pick-and-mix selection of adult evils - the Sixties, political correctness, one-parent families, liberal do-gooders, rich footballers, Channel Four - has spawned a terrifying new generation of what the commentator Melanie Phillips has taken to calling "feral children". Only a bright new dawn of discipline and authority will bring these wild creatures back into line.

The harrumphing disapproval of the middle-aged against the young sometimes takes bizarre forms. That perennially enraged doctor and moralist Theodore Dalrymple has recently argued that it is not so much respect that is missing in the young as respectability. He had attended a performance put on by the Royal Shakespeare Company and, perhaps predictably, had not enjoyed the production. What had appalled him most was the way the large number of adolescents in the audience had not only enjoyed the play but had "screamed and hooted their approval ... None of the teachers who were with them corrected their incontinent self-expression".

Poor doctor. What a plaintive figure he must have cut, sitting there in the stalls, seething with the thin-lipped displeasure of the respectable theatregoer as, all around him, teenagers expressed their enthusiasm for Shakespeare in a thoroughly loud and embarrassing way. How much better it would have been if they had stayed at home watching TV, allowing the RSC to put on a show that a middle-aged broadsheet correspondent could enjoy.

It was fortunate for all concerned that Dalrymple was not around in Montrose where yet more incontinent self-expression, this time on behalf of books and authors, was on open, shameless display. Doubtless the theme of the winning book (my own little story of teenage cross-dressing, I can blushingly report) would have confirmed his view of declining standards of respectability among teenagers.

A weird and dangerous gulf of disaffection and suspicion seems to have appeared between the adult world and that of the almost grown. If the doctor and Ms Phillips, plus a few politicians of the Blair/Blears/Blunkett persuasion, really want to understand about respect and the young, they might usefully hire a charabanc this time next year and travel north to take a quiet look - from the back of the hall, please - at the way these things are done in Angus.

Terblacker@aol.com