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Let's End Adolescence

businessweek.com

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Re: Let's End Adolescence

#11

Post by Dilpil »

The real purpose of high school is keeping the roving hordes of teenagers off the street. Teenagers have no judgement (I certainly didn't), and we would like to have some method of keeping them occupied. Unfortunately, where before that method involved actual learning, nowadays schools are basically just low security prisons.

Furthermore, Newt is completely off when he claims that all adolescents want more responsibility. This is simply untrue. A small fraction of adolescents want more responsibility, the rest want to hang out with their friends all day and do nothing. Which is actually pretty close to high school.

Re: Let's End Adolescence

#12

Post by nihilocrat »

peakok wrote: post #3

It is naive to assume that "adolescence" was a concept invented out of the blue, then deliberately experimented by some politics, it never works this way. The opposite is true : at some point we needed a word to describe a change in society, and a new cultural phenomenon that didn't exist before. Then was born the concept of adolescence and the teenager, wich is a worldwide phenomenom in Occident and other parts of t…

Thus says the Online Etymology Dictionary (http://www.etymonline.com/):

teenage 1921, formed from -teen as a separate word + age; derived noun teenager is from 1941 (the earlier word for this was teener, attested in Anmer.Eng. from 1894). Teen-aged (adj.) is from 1952; shortened form teen is from 1951 (though this had been used as a noun to mean "teen-aged person" in 1818). Teeny-bopper is recorded from 1966, from teen but also felt as infl. by teeny. For second element, see bop.

Couldn't find the word "adolescence", unfortunately. Based on this, you could argue that the first "teenagers" showed up as early as 1894 or as late as 1941.

Re: Let's End Adolescence

#13

Post by Tichy »

Why stop there - let's remove individuality altogether. With a proper mix of drugs, children could absorb the lessons at school at a much faster rate, and could take the role they are destined for with near 100% accuracy. Unwanted and misleading desires could be done away with. Imagine the benefits for society if kids were 100% docile and controllable.

Re: Let's End Adolescence

#14

Post by thomasmallen »

Alex3917 wrote: post #10
mnemonicsloth wrote: post #2

Adolescence was invented in the 19th century to enable middle-class families to keep their children out of sweatshops. But it has degenerated into a process of enforced boredom and age segregation... The fact is, most young people want to be challenged and given real responsibility. They want to be treated like young men and women, not old children. Where have we heard this before? http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html

Gatto has a lot to say about this in UHoAE as well. My own thinking is that it is impossible to end adolescence because American society is structured around competition, and competition depends on measurement. And because there's no good theory on what can verse can't be measured, it's too easy for the proponents of adolescence to put some numbers on what they're selling. And because these metrics make the benefits…

* Who are these proponents?

* What are the numbers? What are they selling?

* What benefits? What would "anything else" be?

* Is there anything to take home from that drawn-out paragraph?

Sounds like a bullshit theory to me.

Re: Let's End Adolescence

#15

Post by frisco »

One thing that continually throws me is the whole, "more school, especially more college!" idea. The skills that have actually put me in interesting situations, like serious brain machine interface research or a startup doing quantitative methods for human resources, had nothing to do with school. At least for me, I'd have been much better suited for an "apprenticeship" rather than having just having to tolerate classes as a distraction to the lab, where I learned about Kalman filters and intricacies of neuronal tuning in a kind of learn-it-by-yesterday-as-needed setup from the people who were actually writing the papers.

Given the amount of ADD we have as a culture, training hackers with an emphasis on "you as an individual can create things that have the potential to become forces of nature with only a cheap computer and some knowledge" and deep familiarity with the internet (irc? google-fu?) seems to be the best way to graduate world class engineers. You won't get middle American teenagers to sit down and study like Chinese students will; but that's fine. Our hackers will end up just as knowledgeable as theirs, and maybe more creative.

EDIT: One more thing: we need to drill home that "post things to share with your friends for free!" is neither a business model nor a KILLERAPP!!111oneoneone. We need to inspire kids to go after the next big problems, and not just fill them up with hype and dreams, but actually give them the technical abilities to do it.

Re: Let's End Adolescence

#16

Post by bokonist »

peakok wrote: post #3

It is naive to assume that "adolescence" was a concept invented out of the blue, then deliberately experimented by some politics, it never works this way. The opposite is true : at some point we needed a word to describe a change in society, and a new cultural phenomenon that didn't exist before. Then was born the concept of adolescence and the teenager, wich is a worldwide phenomenom in Occident and other parts of t…

It wasn't invented out of the blue, but it was an evolved creation of politics. In classic democratic fashion, a lot of factions were pushing their own agenda that ended up making the country as a whole worse off. The education establishment has continually upped the drop out age. Labor unions ( in alliance with wealthy parents) pushed for stricter child labor laws to reduce competition for jobs. Aristocratic progressives wanted an institution to indoctrinate immigrants in the American way of live. The rise of credentialing laws made college a necessity for earning a decent income. Since colleges require a high school diploma, this put teenagers in an eight year holding pattern, waiting for a piece of paper.

The result of this has been every bit as disastrous as Newt claims.

Re: Let's End Adolescence

#17

Post by Alex3917 »

thomasmallen wrote: post #14
Alex3917 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gatto has a lot to say about this in UHoAE as well. My own thinking is that it is impossible to end adolescence because American society is structured around competition, and competition depends on measurement. And because there's no good theory on what can verse can't be measured, it's too easy for the proponents of adolescence to put some numbers on what they're selling. And because these metrics make the benefits…

* Who are these proponents? * What are the numbers? What are they selling? * What benefits? What would "anything else" be? * Is there anything to take home from that drawn-out paragraph? Sounds like a bullshit theory to me.

"Who are these proponents?"

Schools, colleges, associated faculty and staff, parents, politicians, employers, etc.

"What are the numbers? What are they selling?"

Degrees, GPA, US News rank, X vs educational attainment (e.g. future earnings potential), etc.

"What benefits?"

The story of school. That is, what it means to be well educated/qualified is having a degree, having gone to a good school, having gotten a good GPA, etc. The social currency these things bring is all tied up with the story of school, or its foundational myth, or whatever you want to call it. By going through the system you earn the right to invoke the story.

"What would "anything else" be?"

Anything else. As it stands the only way to renounce adolescence is to become sanyasi sankalpa, which isn't a very good option.

"Sounds like a bullshit theory to me."

Maybe it's a bullshit theory, maybe it's the most poignant observation about western civ ever made, but you're smart so figure it out for yourself, I'm not here to play Bodhisattva.

Re: Let's End Adolescence

#18

Post by ChaitanyaSai »

If Newt Gingrich says this, I have to wonder if it is because Republican think tanks have come to the conclusion that the allure of Democratic ideals are too irresistible for school/university inhabiting kids, and they must be converted to tax paying realists much earlier.

Re: Let's End Adolescence

#20

Post by peakok »

bokonist wrote: post #16
peakok wrote: post #3

It is naive to assume that "adolescence" was a concept invented out of the blue, then deliberately experimented by some politics, it never works this way. The opposite is true : at some point we needed a word to describe a change in society, and a new cultural phenomenon that didn't exist before. Then was born the concept of adolescence and the teenager, wich is a worldwide phenomenom in Occident and other parts of t…

It wasn't invented out of the blue, but it was an evolved creation of politics. In classic democratic fashion, a lot of factions were pushing their own agenda that ended up making the country as a whole worse off. The education establishment has continually upped the drop out age. Labor unions ( in alliance with wealthy parents) pushed for stricter child labor laws to reduce competition for jobs. Aristocratic progres…

You give too much power to politics. I think that the dramatic increase of productivity and the creation of much more wealth in the post-industrial society is the main factor in the emergence of the "adolescent". Suddenly families didn't spend their whole budget on food, housing, and they had a lot more of free time to do something else than satisfying their basic needs. They sent their childs to education because they could afford it, and it made them happy to do so.

You'll notice that it also allowed the society of services to emerge, and we wouldn't have this discussion on Hacker News if we had to work 12 hours a day just to satisfy our basic needs.

Overall, I don't share your opinion that the country is a "whole worse off" now. We only face different challenges because our fathers did their job in their own time.

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