"We've invented adolescence, and stretched it out too far" says psychologist

[Jon Miller]

Originally posted by Koyaanisqatsi


Scheduled, supervised recreation periods are not the same thing as unstructured time. They're what happens in prisons, not real life.

I disagree.

JM

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Originally posted by Jon Miller


I don't think that 10 yearolds, (at least, based upon what I have seen), should spend lots of unsupervised time. It is asking for trouble.

JM

So let them get into trouble! Not the kind of oh-crap-when-did-my-8-year-old-join-the-crips type of trouble that happens when parents don't give their kids attention for months on end, but they can play with their friends for a couple of hours a day without needing to be guarded.

[Jon Miller]

B etor, it seems like you suggest that 4ish years after you become a real adult you get married. If you become a real adult at 14 instead of 22, you get 18 instead of 26. The issue is time spent maturing, not age.

I guess I have 3 suggestions:
A. 4 11 week quarters (no summer break!)
B. college is paid from the government, not from the parents (for all people), students are responsible for college, not their parents)
C. School lasts until evening instead of afternoon (since parents are not home, responsible parents already look for things for their kids to do after school, now it will be already set up at the educational facility)

JM
(this would put the age of sexual liberty at 14 or so also)

[Jon Miller]

Originally posted by Koyaanisqatsi


So let them get into trouble! Not the kind of oh-crap-when-did-my-8-year-old-join-the-crips type of trouble that happens when parents don't give their kids attention for months on end, but they can play with their friends for a couple of hours a day without needing to be guarded.

Responsible parents already give their kids things to do after school. I spent my time after school watching TV (as did many other kids) through highschool. I knew very few people who 'played' after 3rd grade.

This sort of thing isn't beneficial (watching TV).

Also, parents or some adult should be around if kids (talking kids, not young adults) are around. Any responsible parent requires this.

JM

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Depends on what they're watching. If an eight year old goes home and watches soaps all afternoon, no, that's not particularly beneficial. On the other hand, I remember watching things like Square One after school as a kid.

If you knew few people who 'played' with their friends after 3rd grade, well, sorry. 2nd and 3rd grade was about when most kids where I grew up no longer needed babysitters after school and had to actually socialize with each other to pass the time.

[Ben Kenobi]

There are other things than the current topic that contribute to this. This arrogant up turned nosed snobbishness we show to such people and jobs is disturbing.

Considering I couldn't even get such jobs without a degree, I suggest that your accusation of arrogance is misplaced. I would have much rather worked in a gas station then do treeplanting or delivery pizzas but the employer would only hire those with a degree.

My point was referring to credentialism. I think many employers demand a college degree not because of what the degree teaches, but that they can use it as a gatekeeper. This tells me that there is something wrong with the system. Why is it that someone wouldn't be qualified to work a job in a store right out of high school? Or even when they were in a high school?

[aneeshm]

Let me selectively quote one of Paul Graham's essays:

Around the age of eleven, though, kids seem to start treating their family as a day job. They create a new world among themselves, and standing in this world is what matters, not standing in their family. Indeed, being in trouble in their family can win them points in the world they care about.

The problem is, the world these kids create for themselves is at first a very crude one. If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.

......

Why is the real world more hospitable to nerds? It might seem that the answer is simply that it's populated by adults, who are too mature to pick on one another. But I don't think this is true. Adults in prison certainly pick on one another. And so, apparently, do society wives; in some parts of Manhattan, life for women sounds like a continuation of high school, with all the same petty intrigues.

I think the important thing about the real world is not that it's populated by adults, but that it's very large, and the things you do have real effects. That's what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.

If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I'd tell him would be to stick his head up and look around. I didn't really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie. Not just school, but the entire town. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children.

Where I grew up, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do. This was no accident. Suburbs are deliberately designed to exclude the outside world, because it contains things that could endanger children.

And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.

What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren't told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they're called misfits.



Life in this twisted world is stressful for the kids. And not just for the nerds. Like any war, it's damaging even to the winners.

Adults can't avoid seeing that teenage kids are tormented. So why don't they do something about it? Because they blame it on puberty. The reason kids are so unhappy, adults tell themselves, is that monstrous new chemicals, hormones, are now coursing through their bloodstream and messing up everything. There's nothing wrong with the system; it's just inevitable that kids will be miserable at that age.

This idea is so pervasive that even the kids believe it, which probably doesn't help. Someone who thinks his feet naturally hurt is not going to stop to consider the possibility that he is wearing the wrong size shoes.

I'm suspicious of this theory that thirteen-year-old kids are intrinsically messed up. If it's physiological, it should be universal. Are Mongol nomads all nihilists at thirteen? I've read a lot of history, and I have not seen a single reference to this supposedly universal fact before the twentieth century. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance seem to have been cheerful and eager. They got in fights and played tricks on one another of course (Michelangelo had his nose broken by a bully), but they weren't crazy.

As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager is coeval with suburbia. I don't think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life they're made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere.



When I was in school, suicide was a constant topic among the smarter kids. No one I knew did it, but several planned to, and some may have tried. Mostly this was just a pose. Like other teenagers, we loved the dramatic, and suicide seemed very dramatic. But partly it was because our lives were at times genuinely miserable.

Bullying was only part of the problem. Another problem, and possibly an even worse one, was that we never had anything real to work on. Humans like to work; in most of the world, your work is your identity. And all the work we did was pointless, or seemed so at the time.

At best it was practice for real work we might do far in the future, so far that we didn't even know at the time what we were practicing for. More often it was just an arbitrary series of hoops to jump through, words without content designed mainly for testability. (The three main causes of the Civil War were.... Test: List the three main causes of the Civil War.)

And there was no way to opt out. The adults had agreed among themselves that this was to be the route to college. The only way to escape this empty life was to submit to it.



Teenage kids used to have a more active role in society. In pre-industrial times, they were all apprentices of one sort or another, whether in shops or on farms or even on warships. They weren't left to create their own societies. They were junior members of adult societies.

Teenagers seem to have respected adults more then, because the adults were the visible experts in the skills they were trying to learn. Now most kids have little idea what their parents do in their distant offices, and see no connection (indeed, there is precious little) between schoolwork and the work they'll do as adults.

And if teenagers respected adults more, adults also had more use for teenagers. After a couple years' training, an apprentice could be a real help. Even the newest apprentice could be made to carry messages or sweep the workshop.

Now adults have no immediate use for teenagers. They would be in the way in an office. So they drop them off at school on their way to work, much as they might drop the dog off at a kennel if they were going away for the weekend.

What happened? We're up against a hard one here. The cause of this problem is the same as the cause of so many present ills: specialization. As jobs become more specialized, we have to train longer for them. Kids in pre-industrial times started working at about 14 at the latest; kids on farms, where most people lived, began far earlier. Now kids who go to college don't start working full-time till 21 or 22. With some degrees, like MDs and PhDs, you may not finish your training till 30.

Teenagers now are useless, except as cheap labor in industries like fast food, which evolved to exploit precisely this fact. In almost any other kind of work, they'd be a net loss. But they're also too young to be left unsupervised. Someone has to watch over them, and the most efficient way to do this is to collect them together in one place. Then a few adults can watch all of them.

If you stop there, what you're describing is literally a prison, albeit a part-time one. The problem is, many schools practically do stop there. The stated purpose of schools is to educate the kids. But there is no external pressure to do this well. And so most schools do such a bad job of teaching that the kids don't really take it seriously-- not even the smart kids. Much of the time we were all, students and teachers both, just going through the motions.

In my high school French class we were supposed to read Hugo's Les Miserables. I don't think any of us knew French well enough to make our way through this enormous book. Like the rest of the class, I just skimmed the Cliff's Notes. When we were given a test on the book, I noticed that the questions sounded odd. They were full of long words that our teacher wouldn't have used. Where had these questions come from? From the Cliff's Notes, it turned out. The teacher was using them too. We were all just pretending.

There are certainly great public school teachers. The energy and imagination of my fourth grade teacher, Mr. Mihalko, made that year something his students still talk about, thirty years later. But teachers like him were individuals swimming upstream. They couldn't fix the system.



In almost any group of people you'll find hierarchy. When groups of adults form in the real world, it's generally for some common purpose, and the leaders end up being those who are best at it. The problem with most schools is, they have no purpose. But hierarchy there must be. And so the kids make one out of nothing.

We have a phrase to describe what happens when rankings have to be created without any meaningful criteria. We say that the situation degenerates into a popularity contest. And that's exactly what happens in most American schools. Instead of depending on some real test, one's rank depends mostly on one's ability to increase one's rank. It's like the court of Louis XIV. There is no external opponent, so the kids become one another's opponents.

When there is some real external test of skill, it isn't painful to be at the bottom of the hierarchy. A rookie on a football team doesn't resent the skill of the veteran; he hopes to be like him one day and is happy to have the chance to learn from him. The veteran may in turn feel a sense of noblesse oblige. And most importantly, their status depends on how well they do against opponents, not on whether they can push the other down.

Court hierarchies are another thing entirely. This type of society debases anyone who enters it. There is neither admiration at the bottom, nor noblesse oblige at the top. It's kill or be killed.

This is the sort of society that gets created in American secondary schools. And it happens because these schools have no real purpose beyond keeping the kids all in one place for a certain number of hours each day. What I didn't realize at the time, and in fact didn't realize till very recently, is that the twin horrors of school life, the cruelty and the boredom, both have the same cause.



The mediocrity of American public schools has worse consequences than just making kids unhappy for six years. It breeds a rebelliousness that actively drives kids away from the things they're supposed to be learning.

Like many nerds, probably, it was years after high school before I could bring myself to read anything we'd been assigned then. And I lost more than books. I mistrusted words like "character" and "integrity" because they had been so debased by adults. As they were used then, these words all seemed to mean the same thing: obedience. The kids who got praised for these qualities tended to be at best dull-witted prize bulls, and at worst facile schmoozers. If that was what character and integrity were, I wanted no part of them.

The word I most misunderstood was "tact." As used by adults, it seemed to mean keeping your mouth shut. I assumed it was derived from the same root as "tacit" and "taciturn," and that it literally meant being quiet. I vowed that I would never be tactful; they were never going to shut me up. In fact, it's derived from the same root as "tactile," and what it means is to have a deft touch. Tactful is the opposite of clumsy. I don't think I learned this until college.



Nerds aren't the only losers in the popularity rat race. Nerds are unpopular because they're distracted. There are other kids who deliberately opt out because they're so disgusted with the whole process.

Teenage kids, even rebels, don't like to be alone, so when kids opt out of the system, they tend to do it as a group. At the schools I went to, the focus of rebellion was drug use, specifically marijuana. The kids in this tribe wore black concert t-shirts and were called "freaks."

Freaks and nerds were allies, and there was a good deal of overlap between them. Freaks were on the whole smarter than other kids, though never studying (or at least never appearing to) was an important tribal value. I was more in the nerd camp, but I was friends with a lot of freaks.

They used drugs, at least at first, for the social bonds they created. It was something to do together, and because the drugs were illegal, it was a shared badge of rebellion.

I'm not claiming that bad schools are the whole reason kids get into trouble with drugs. After a while, drugs have their own momentum. No doubt some of the freaks ultimately used drugs to escape from other problems-- trouble at home, for example. But, in my school at least, the reason most kids started using drugs was rebellion. Fourteen-year-olds didn't start smoking pot because they'd heard it would help them forget their problems. They started because they wanted to join a different tribe.

Misrule breeds rebellion; this is not a new idea. And yet the authorities still for the most part act as if drugs were themselves the cause of the problem.



The real problem is the emptiness of school life. We won't see solutions till adults realize that. The adults who may realize it first are the ones who were themselves nerds in school. Do you want your kids to be as unhappy in eighth grade as you were? I wouldn't. Well, then, is there anything we can do to fix things? Almost certainly. There is nothing inevitable about the current system. It has come about mostly by default.

Adults, though, are busy. Showing up for school plays is one thing. Taking on the educational bureaucracy is another. Perhaps a few will have the energy to try to change things. I suspect the hardest part is realizing that you can.

.........

If life seems awful to kids, it's neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It's because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do. Any society of that type is awful to live in. You don't have to look any further to explain why teenage kids are unhappy.

I've said some harsh things in this essay, but really the thesis is an optimistic one-- that several problems we take for granted are in fact not insoluble after all. Teenage kids are not inherently unhappy monsters. That should be encouraging news to kids and adults both.

[Jon Miller]

I remember watching saved by the bell, cartoons, etc. And square one was not at all valuable also. I think currently a lot of MTV is watched.

I think that currently even few people 'play'. I think that computer games has taken some of that up. And what is wrong with scheduled, supervised, play time? You make it sound like a terrible thing, but all I can see is positives.

And, as I said, many/most people already had that as sports or what have you after school anyways.

You are trying to fit people into your nostalgic childhood. This doesn't work in today's society.

Really thouh, this is a side issue. We could have standard 8-3 hour days (with less recreation and sports time, and no study hall) with the summer school and still have it so that people who are 14 are no longer required to be their parents responsibility.

JM

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Originally posted by Jon Miller
I remember watching saved by the bell, cartoons, etc. And square one was not at all valuable also. I think currently a lot of MTV is watched.

Yeah, MTV definitely goes in the 'counterproductive' category...I'm not so sure about the rest, though. There are more productive things that could be happening, but they're not completely useless.

I think that currently even few people 'play'. I think that computer games has taken some of that up.

Amazingly, we now have computer games that allow more than one player! Gaming as social interaction is pretty underrated. That being said, yes, there should be more than just video games...perhaps if children were free to interact with one another instead of being kept in their homes, they would actually do something else...

And what is wrong with scheduled, supervised, play time? You make it sound like a terrible thing, but all I can see is positives.

The problem with it is that it forces children into neat little boxes where they don't have to think or make decisions, only do what the adults tell them to do. This is one of the problems with schools now...they kill any hope of creativity in any child that doesn't actively thirst for it.

And, as I said, many/most people already had that as sports or what have you after school anyways.

Oh, well then, if it's been happing for the last fifty years it must be right...

You are trying to fit people into your nostalgic childhood. This doesn't work in today's society.

That would require me to have had a nostalgic childhood, I'm afraid.

Really thouh, this is a side issue. We could have standard 8-3 hour days (with less recreation and sports time, and no study hall) with the summer school and still have it so that people who are 14 are no longer required to be their parents responsibility.

Yes, because demanding even less of parents is what's needed in a society that already has a ridiculous level of generational disconnection. Besides, children in school don't need to be a burden...unless, of course, you want to schedule all their time and supervise all their activity, in which case I can see why parents would want them out the door as soon as possible.

[Jon Miller]

I agree strongly aneeshm

I always did the least necessary to get a B, only takeing more time to do stuff I was interested

in graduate school (1st year), I got tired of jumping through hoops (I actually used those words) at all, and even failed to do the work necessary to get a B a few times

I started doing less and less, and lost a number of the skills I had (as I started spending more and more time playing video games, and started drinking a lot)

by the end of the 3rd year I realised what was wrong, I realised that I needed to start doing something (which I thought was joining a research groip) or get out and find a job

I joined a research group, and have been much happier, much more successful, etc

I still feel like an apprentice, and am frustrated about that, but it is much better then just taking classes..

I was 24 at the end of my 3rd year...

JM

[Jon Miller]

to Koyaan:

did you read the OP (or aneeshm's essay), people being kept as kids when they are young adults are a serious problem, and maybe the central problem with teenagers

they aren't kids, they shouldn't be treated as kids, they should be independent, which includes financially

you are ignoring that we have a problem, and what the evidence is of the solution

the source of the problem is that we are encouraged to play and treated like children from 14-22, instead of like adults

JM

[Koyaanisqatsi]

I've read them, but the solution isn't to say "you're a kid, go to school" for the first 14 years of their life solid and then boot them in the ass and tell them to get a job. The solution is to instill in them the ability to be a responsible adult...which is not mutually exclusive with education as you seem to think it is or only possible by militarizing their childhoods.

[Jon Miller]

How is this militarizing their childhoods? This just is saying that it should be structured for 11ish hours a day. They can do what they want (with parental approval) in the evenings, when their parents are their and can decide what to allow or not to allow (including running around).

In most of earth's history, kids were assumed to help out and be involved, etc for similar ammounts of time. At a minimum 8 hours is needed for educational purposes. I don't see how the extra 3 hours, espeically since it is to be used for studying/recreation, is adding any more stress/difficultly, etc in the kids lives.

I think that you are trying to keep the kids as babies (1-5, before going to school), instead of allowing them to grow up.

JM

[aneeshm]

Originally posted by Jon Miller
I agree strongly aneeshm

I always did the least necessary to get a B, only takeing more time to do stuff I was interested

in graduate school (1st year), I got tired of jumping through hoops (I actually used those words) at all, and even failed to do the work necessary to get a B a few times

I started doing less and less, and lost a number of the skills I had (as I started spending more and more time playing video games, and started drinking a lot)

by the end of the 3rd year I realised what was wrong, I realised that I needed to start doing something (which I thought was joining a research groip) or get out and find a job

I joined a research group, and have been much happier, much more successful, etc

I still feel like an apprentice, and am frustrated about that, but it is much better then just taking classes..

I was 24 at the end of my 3rd year...

JM

That was only a part of his essay. The full thing deals with the issue of intelligent people being misfits in a fundamentally consequenceless and therefore unreal society, which we have turned school into.

Link

[Jon Miller]

Having more time to screw around is part of the problem. It is not the solution. What is the solution is more responsiblility and being treated as such.

JM