Causes of the Identification Challenges from College-Aged Teenagers

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Antoine de Saint-Exupery writes in his book “The Little Prince” about values in life and presents the reader confidence and reliance. At the same time Saint-Ex awakes his audience to look critical at themselves and implies challenges and difficulties in the life of humans. He expresses the danger of less relationships and safeness from humans to their homes when he remarks that “most humans do not have roots, what is really bad for them.”1

The challenge which Saint-Ex points out in “The Little Prince”, to leave one’s home behind, is still present. When students come to college, they leave their family and sometimes also the family support behind. They have to find a new place for safety, and social life and have to deal with influences like new people and environment. They get the opportunity to look back to their past social life from an objective viewpoint. In the same way they have the chance to look forward to achieve a new social life and independence from the old one, but the effort to leave their old world behind and establish an individual idea who and how they are or want be, may create challenges. To establish relationships with unknown people contains risks and could result in less assurance. Students offer their person for friendship, but at the same time they face to identify themselves. Multiple encounters teach a lot about the new world and give first year students many ideas who and how they are. For these reasons students have to deal with many different and new emotions and feelings. Some will be pro active, but others will experience uncomfortable feelings like uncertainness and low self-esteem. Important is this subject also for teenagers who are non-students because every human have to face identification cha...

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...ave to find their own ways in college in which they can believe and identify themselves. There is not only one right way to live in successful in college, moreover to live the life, because each human has a different history and personality with different feelings, skills, wills, and goals.

Works Cited

1 Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1943), Le Petit Prince

2 Hermann Hesse (1919), Demian, p. 9, Frankfurt am Main, Shurkamp Verlag

3 Wörterbuch der Pädagogik und Psychologie (2002), München, Universitäts-Verlag

4 http://www.virginia.edu/uvatours/shorthistory/, July 2009

5 http://www.spiegel.de/schulspiegel/leben/0,1518,663096,00.html, December, 18th 2009

6 The quote is by Friedrich Nietzsche. My teacher in school quoted him in a lecture, so I do not know where to find the right preference.

7 Hermann Hesse (1919), Demian, p. 131, Frankfurt am Main, Shurkamp Verlag

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