The high-school problem is nothing new. In one of his early writings, James S. Coleman, the brilliant sociologist who later wrote the famous report on the equality of opportunity for education (the "Coleman Report") and the first study of public and private schools, identified the essential high-school problem: "our adolescents today are cut off, probably more than ever before, from the adult society." Thus the title of his classic work, "The Adolescent Society," published in 1961, the germ of which first appeared in the "Harvard Education Review" in 1959 as "Academic Achievement and the Structure of Competition." Writing about schools as they existed in the latter half of the 1950s, Coleman showed the ways in which the organization of school life reinforces teenage anti-learning norms. Except for some quirks of that time and place--the subordinate place of "girls" in American society (which Coleman seems to be tacitly questioning) and the use of the masculine pronoun to refer to people more generally, for example--his essay has a timeless quality, as worth reading today as when Coleman put pen to page. This article presents Coleman's still-prescient insights.