Teens Need a Psychological Moratorium

She remembered psychologist Erik Erickson's exhortation about teenagers: they need a "psychosocial moratorium," he wrote, an environment and a stretch of time in which they can explore different aspects of their personality and try on a series of identities without fear of consequence. In a way, that was what school was supposed to offer, but it didn't always do so with much success. She realized that this was exactly what virtual worlds offered all the time, to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection. Maybe, she thought, every student should have an avatar.

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School, Gee wrote, was basically a place where students are asked, whether they like it or not, to create an identity—in first period, teachers lay ask them to behave like scientists, while later in the day others ask them to behave like historians or journalists or musicians. It doesn't always work, he wrote, but if done well, it can be powerful: "If learners in classrooms carry learning so far as to take on a projective identity, something magical happens. The learner comes to know that he or she has the capacity, at some level to take on the virtual identity as a real-world identity."'^ One of the reasons that school works so much more smoothly and efficiently in communities with a lot of well-off, well-educated families is that these kids have already been brought up from an early age to effortlessly imagine themselves as scientists or historians or musicians. It's a much greater leap for kids whose families don't have that expectation.

A time when they can find their identity.