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The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager
by
Thomas Hine
Elementary schools prepare students for middle schools, which prepare
students for high schools, which prepare students for colleges, which prove, allegedly, which peacocks have the best tails--and all designed by politicians and so-called experts
unwilling to tolerate well-reasoned arguments but
nevertheless deliver cant about how important education is.
Thomas Hine does.
Why do the results of opinion polls place so much importance on the value
of a college education when the experiences of students are cycles
of cram and forget? Employers want credentials from the credentials industrial
complex because the credentials are correlated with other, more valuable,
traits--maturity, perseverance, intelligence, enthusiasm, flexibility, and
reliability. But the credentials do not cause those traits.
If most individuals in
this country had graduate degrees, it might create more harms than benefits. We
might have millions of hostile, underemployed derelicts with
high, unstable self-esteem, the sort of thing Roy Baumeister maintains leads
to many evils.
Most jobs, educationally, require little more than literacy and on the job training.
Research suggests many educational
activities do not improve overall income or economically benefit the moderately
educated. Societies and some individuals--nurses, doctors, engineers--benefit from college educations. But many jobs once done by high school grads and dropouts
are now done by college grads. In "Dropping Out? Problem or Symptom," a longitudinal study done at the University of Michigan, Delbert S. Elliot and Harwin L. Ross
suggest that dropping out does not cause bad results.
Other factors cause bad
results--value, cultural, and genetic factors dropouts have whether they drop out or not.
For teens, school is often a
custodial institution.
Hine explains: the small differences in lifetime income among high school
drop outs and high school graduates are due to employer unwillingness to hire
drop outs, but the other factors mentioned above are more important.
Delivering an absorbing
history of teenagers, Hine claims that maturity over a century ago was
primarily determined by behavior and physical strength, not chronological age.
Twelve-year-olds and 18-year-olds often did the same tasks. Many served rigid apprenticeships until one found one’s calling, often with cruel or
incompetent masters. Some apprenticeships (read: indentured servitudes) even began in
infancy for orphans.
“Youth,” Hine writes, “should be a time for learning that one’s decisions
have consequences.” young individuals should experiment and grow from their mistakes and
successes.
While many past practices were deplorable, Hine suggests at
least one idea should be revived. Teenagers should be treated in accordance
with their individual development, not as animals to be branded with an age and
herded off. Now students are legally required to attend school,
where they are legally required to watch Channel One. Whose idea of liberty is
this? That so-called education is worse than some forms of child labor.
Deferred
responsibility benefits some but not others. Teenagers' main roles now are as consumers and style setters. “Money plays a paradoxical role for
teenagers. If they are in the mainstream workforce, they’re not teenagers. But
if they don’t have any money, no youth culture emerges.” He notes: “The purpose
of high school was largely to indoctrinate youth with middle-class standards.
But by separating young people... universal high
school education gave teenagers the chance to set standards of their own.”
We protect teenagers from the world
of work, whether they want to be or not, yet teenagers are rarely protected from
adult vices. In fact, practicing adult vices is a way teenagers attain status in some teenage groups. Adults encourage the cultural
belief that teenagers are incompetent.
Hine throws out poorly reasoned conclusions on many side issues, and he delivers many fallacious statistics. But he concludes “to be [fully] human, you must become the hero of your own life.” We have not been helping teenagers become heroes. Recommended.
— J.T. Fournier, last updated July 7, 2009
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