Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today

Not only are kids expected to stay in school until their early/mid 20's, depriving them of necessary real-world developmental experience as discussed in the article, they are expected to accept decades' worth of debt to pay for it. The American education model is poison.

With more context and eloquence, John Taylor Gatto has been saying this for years: adolescence is artificial, and dangerously so. See his sketch of the future Admiral Farragut, who took his first command at age 12:<p><a href="http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1q.htm" rel="nofollow">http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1q.htm</a><p>...and of course, Ben Franklin:<p><a href="http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1r.htm" rel="nofollow">http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1r.htm</a>

I feel this article is worth pointing out as a reminder: Almost all concepts of school reform still takes as a given that you will have basically the same foundation of a school.<p>Sometimes it's worth stepping back and asking, "Does it actually make sense to put all children below a certain age in a big building for the majority of the day, where they spend all their time with other children of the same age, taking classes from teachers who serve as their only consistent contact with the adult world outside their own home?" Very few concepts of "education reform" are radical enough to ask that question.<p>Maybe it would be better if children spent more of their time in the company of adults in the real world, rather than in the company of each other in a kind of greenhouse-for-children artificially designed to raise them in a certain way.<p>Or maybe not; maybe after taking a step back and thinking big thoughts, we take a step right forward again and decide that schools as currently understood are what we're sticking with and any problems just mean we need better schools. But it's best to make that decision on the basis of a rational plan, rather than saying that Kids Belong In Schools because that's what the conventional wisdom was last year and we can't think of anything else.

One of PGs essays discusses similar ideas (<a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html</a>). I agree that segregating teenagers may actually be harming their development instead of aiding it.<p>The problem is specialisation and aptitude. First part of the problem: Underlying most modern education is the idea that each individual is suited to a different profession, and that both the individual and society benefit when people are allowed to pursue that specific profession.<p>Second part of the problem: there are more specialisations, professions, then ever before. How many basic professions can you think of? Farmer, sailor, doctor, ... There are hundreds or thousands. And every one has hundreds or thousands of specialisations. In some professions these change on a yearly basis.<p>Thus education becomes a search problem, and like all search problems the key is scaling: how do you find the ideal speciality for each of the millions of students? Modern education takes an iterative approach, where students learn the absolute basics of everything, then learn a little more of a slightly narrower subset. The early iterations (i.e. school) are long and concentrate on building up foundations for later choices. The later iterations (i.e. early jobs) are shorter and concentrate on quickly narrowing down huge numbers of possible specialisations.<p>Reality (young brain needs real world) vs. Idealism (direct each person to an ideal profession). The trick is how to compress the spectrum - incorporate reality into a system built on an ideal.

I'd be interested to see a study of people, like my folks, who were in their teens in the 60's and 70's. Up north where my family is from, you generally left school at 16, got an apprenticeship with a company like Caterpillar, or hit the coal mines or shipyards. There was no coddling, no indeterminate hiatus from responsibility, and it seems to have produced a generally successful group of people who rank amongst the top contributors to a variety of industries the world over, some of the largest and most successful companies ever brought to light having come from people within this generation. Something else I find interesting, and something I see in my own age group (30-40), is that a lot of the South Africans who were forced to undergo conscription into the armed forces seem to have a deeper level of self-discipline, which you'd expect from a military experience of the kind that they were subjected to. I'm not saying that you require a drill instructor to develop self-discipline, but it did have the advantage of forcing you to take responsibility for your assigned tasks, even if only to avoid a run and indeterminate PT to sooth the ruffled feathers of your shouty DI.

What my son has wanted for as long as he has been a teenager is a chance to have grown-up responsibility. That's why he loves working on his start-up project. An actual profit-making business proposal gets evaluated by investors with no "grading on the curve" or concern for "self-esteem." He can deal with that. He found school environments that attempted to coddle teenagers (he wasn't in many such environments, but encountered them in passing) very off-putting.

It's an uphill battle even if you want to do something productive instead of drinking and doing drugs. I started my own company when I was 16... and my higher education (which was supposedly training me for <i>the job I was already doing</i>) did nothing but try and keep me from actually getting real world experience by using real work for my education, or god forbid, intern at my own company.<p>Not to speak of the artificial group assignments. That model just doesn't work. Period. It's the lowest common denominator that controls the quality, or it's the lone nerd that spends his entire weekend redoing his teammates sub-par work. Ugh.<p>Unfortunately, nothing learned at that university will be of use to me in the real world, save how to handle bureaucrats.

In the Napoleonic wars, 20 year old Generals commanded armies. Today, Napoleon's military tactics are taught at West Point and other noted military academies. Life expectancy was mid-thirties to forty-ish if my memory serves me correctly. Necessity drives people to do whatever is required to achieve a goal if the need is pressing enough.<p>The notion that young adults aren't able to cope with "real life" (what an oxymoron that is) is utter rubbish. Try giving them real responsibility (within reason) is the cure.

I do think that some more real-world and unstructured experience added into standard schooling would do some good, but I sometimes think there's an odd anti-schooling bias on HN, maybe because we all hated high school.<p>Another common theme on HN is how the lack of basic science knowledge amongst the voting population negatively impacts funding of and perception of science policy. Is advocating that we abolish general schooling and have everyone just learn what they need for their jobs a good idea? How does that fix that problem? Doesn't it just make it worse?<p>Tweak the schooling model, yes, but I've not been convinced yet that any of the radically different alternatives I see proposed here would still accomplish some of the important things that general schooling DOES do. Everyone hates certain subjects, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be forced to learn them at least once in your life.

One thing I noticed when I went on the employment market for the first time was that I had never had a relationship with an adult other than family or teachers close enough to discuss jobs/money. American middle class children are hermetically sealed in a child's world, with the adult world a bit outside the bubble filled with sexual predators who you can't talk to. That's another flavor of crazy.

(disclaimer: this is just my theory...)<p>Coming from an Asian perspective, I can see why the concept of schooling has become so heavily mainstream.<p>Surely enough, people in the old days didn't get as much "schooling" and entered the adult world with real responsibilities and work earlier in life. For this reason, the jobs they held would typically have been labour-based jobs.<p>In such societies, though labourers received a decent life, it was the doctors/lawyers/professors that held the highest respect socially. The reason for this is that when things got tough outside the norms of what the common people could control (health, injury, legal issues, politics, etc), people from such educated professions were the ones that were looked up to.<p>It's due to the commanded respect of such learned professions that more and more parents wanted their children to receive further education. Even to this day, I hear a lot of my aunties and uncles talk in awe of children who grow up to become doctors. They really were the celebreties in my parent's culture.<p>Times have changed. Rather than being a place to go to learn, highschool has turned into a mindless competition to get "ranked" on how well you can retain (mostly) useless information that would have little to do with what your target professsion will actually require.

I picked up a bunch of stuff from school that would perhaps have never fully developed if I hadn't gone there, or if I'd had my own choice of exactly what to do. I would never have chosen to take a history class, and yet in that class I learned critical thinking skills in a way that I would have had no direct cause to do outside of that environment. I gained a basic grounding in science. I learned enough about a variety of different subjects that I was able to make an informed choice on a career path.<p>I certainly believe that the school system needs changing, particularly as self-learning becomes easier, and I agree that kids need more responsibility (I recall aching for it in my teenage years), but the number of comments here suggesting that school is of no use whatsoever surprises me.

"Never let school interfere with your education"

<i>"I never let public schooling interfere with my education."</i> - Mark Twain<p>-----<p>At 12 years old my sister and I were "off the dole" as my parents put it. No more allowance, which had topped out at $2.75/wk. If we wanted money, we were expected to use our heads. We ended up mowing lawns, gardening and shoveling after having my mom introduce us to the neighborhood.<p>At 14 I wanted a computer to mess around with. That's fine, but the family computer wasn't for that. I went with some juniors and seniors in the computer club to dumpster dive behind businesses, or sometimes to the dump itself. Ended up with a working stack of 386s to put FreeBSD and Linux on.<p>I had a part-time job at 15 to save for a car, because at 16 we were told we were going to be on foot. At 16 I used to take on contract work that one of my teachers had to pass up, doing web-development. Mostly PHP, ColdFusion and some Classic ASP. Two of those sites, 12 years later, are still running just fine on the custom CMS built for their needs.<p>I had partial scholarships to top tech schools, but the debt load of going to CMU or WPI was still approaching that of a home mortgage where I grew up. I had saved enough money to go to state school and pay cash. Yet when I got there, I was completely underwhelmed. Bored out of my mind. There was very little I would learn until my 3rd or 4th years, they didn't end up applying AP course credit to get me out of 10x courses, and the social environment was akin to drunken day care (and I didn't need to be on campus to make new friends or go on dates). After 3 semesters I ended up in the Vice Chancellor's office with my parents having a very long, very candid discussion about the pros and cons of me sticking it out. They're weren't paying for it, but they were livid at the idea of me dropping out. Long story short, no one could punch a hole in my argument and I even managed to get a partial refund for the 3rd semester. I had until the end of the week to pack up and move out.<p>I'll go back eventually for a proper engineering degree when I'm bored building trading systems for investment firms.<p>Point is, nothing like being stuck with a dilemma (no more allowance, so unless you want a video game, we expect you to find a way to make money) and being forced to work out a solution at the ripe old age of 12. I learned more about how to further myself in my free time than I ever did through some state-mandated curriculum.<p>Would I recommend this exact approach to everyone? Absolutely not. Yet there's always a playing field everyone can succeed on, and there's an immense amount of value in kids finding that out for themselves with a bit of guidance.

Additionally, this seems to explain why some people are getting married and having children later. It's a combination of a lack of life experiences and financial unreadiness from school.

Don't forget there are some positions that require a fair amount of training. I guess if those in school because they're forced go away, it would leave a better environment for those picking up the background for advanced studies.<p>And I see criticisms of the American model of college. Yeah, it pushes a lot of debt on the students but I thought the European model resulted in more years spent in college. There's ways to secure funding for school (such as taking the King's Shilling), and there's no real reason to try for Harvard vs. less-expensive schools, etc.

A few months ago I read Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman's excellent book <i>Nurtureshock</i>:<p><a href="http://www.nurtureshock.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.nurtureshock.com/</a><p>If you have or are responsible for children, I <i>highly</i> recommend it as an excellent overview of current research into cognitive development.

I tend to see this type of article and the associated discontent with a protracted adolescence quite a bit on ycombinator, and I can't understand it as of yet. Is their really that much research suggesting that an extended education and a delayed maturation really is detrimental? Or is it more of a shared experiential resentment? Or is it just a resentment at the lack of flexibility and accommodation in our current system, a system that assumes that one size fits all?<p>In some ways, I wouldn't have minded earlier exposure to questions that forced me to discover my innate passions as opposed to continuing to be fed prerequisite course after prerequisite course. However, I can't say that this is equivalent to wishing that I had started my adulthood at age 15 (or earlier). Modern society is more complex, as are the roles that adults assume in modern society, and I presume that a protracted adolescence serves to give maturing adults longer to find their place in this increasingly complex society.<p>Is the resentment founded in the fact that we force everyone to extend their adolescence for so long? Or that such a period provides no usefulness whatsoever?

Oddly enough, Newt Gingrich agrees:<p><a href="http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/08_45/b4107085289974.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/08_45/b41...</a>

Interesting... however I would really like to know how could anyone convince the teenage me that moving to yet another step of school doesn't really matter - that I should think about actually starting to do some serious freelance work in microcontrollers / electronics instead, which is what I liked to do. In the end, it didn't matter that much what I did during the studies - being good enough to pass, or even putting uni off for a couple of years could be probably more beneficial to me long-term.<p>But would I believe anyone saying that? Now I wish I tried... But at the same time I'm thinking about what I could tell my future kids, so that they join studies only if they really, really <i>like</i> learning in the academic way - not because "everyone does that".

More readable print version of article:<p><a href="http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/nurtureshock/archive/2009/11/05/why-teenagers-are-growing-up-so-slowly-today.aspx?print=true" rel="nofollow">http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/nurtureshock/archive/2009/11/...</a>

I hate being lumped in with the rest of American culture and society. I'm very glad that my parents didn't lose all sense of worldliness or intelligence when they decided to procreate.

i don't agree .. teenagers are growing much much faster then before .... and its all because of technology .. the major thing is Internet