The Case Against Adolescence

Amen to this! (hat tip: Steffens and Stuart Buck)  Well, sort of.

I remember a Bible class recently that was filled with talk about how we need to understand that adolescence is extending beyond the teen years into the mid-20s.  No doubt we do need to understand these trends, but there seemed to be an unstated assumption that it was inevitable.  No one seemed to say, "Hey, wait a minute, is this a good idea?"  Can something be done?

In an interview about his new book, Robert Epstein explains the problem well:

Teens in America are in touch with their peers on average 65 hours a week, compared to about four hours a week in preindustrial cultures. In this country, teens learn virtually everything they know from other teens, who are in turn highly influenced by certain aggressive industries. This makes no sense. Teens should be learning from the people they are about to become. When young people exit the education system and are dumped into the real world, which is not the world of Britney Spears, they have no idea what's going on and have to spend considerable time figuring it out.

Some of his solutions, however, stink:

I believe that young people should have more options—the option to work, marry, own property, sign contracts, start businesses, make decisions about health care and abortions, live on their own—every right, privilege, or responsibility an adult has.

Teens don't need more legal rights.  Parents need to give them more responsibilities earlier; it doesn't take legislation.

One of the reasons we homeschool is because it provides a better "socialization."  Kids learn to behave like adults by being around adults, not by being around other kids.  Interestingly, Epstein  points to public education as part of the problem:

The whole culture collaborates in artificially extending childhood, primarily through the school system and restrictions on labor. The two systems evolved together in the late 19th-century; the advocates of compulsory-education laws also pushed for child-labor laws, restricting the ways young people could work, in part to protect them from the abuses of the new factories.

* * *

Our current education system was created in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and was modeled after the new factories of the industrial revolution. …In general, such an approach still reflects factory thinking—get your education now and get it efficiently, in classrooms in lockstep fashion. Unfortunately, most people learn in those classrooms to hate education for the rest of their lives.

The factory system doesn't work in the modern world, because two years after graduation, whatever you learned is out of date. We need education spread over a lifetime, not jammed into the early years—except for such basics as reading, writing, and perhaps citizenship. Past puberty, education needs to be combined in interesting and creative ways with work. The factory school system no longer makes sense.

Now there's a solution I can get behind.  Get teens out of public schools and put them to work.  The Democrats and the business-wing of the GOP are constantly telling us we need amnesty for illegal immigrants to fill all those entry-level jobs that "American's won't do."  Why not give our own kids a chance at those first few rungs on the economic ladder?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 12th, 2007 at 7:52 pm and is filed under Immigration, Homeschooling, The Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.