Youth Liberation

[Agnapostate]

If possible, I'd like commentary on the nature of an ideology that advocates civil rights and liberties for youth that are capable of handling them, and effectively promotes replacing age restrictions with some other standard of competence measurement. The nature of these "youth rights," which are a component of a broader platform of youth liberation, can be effectively summarized in the educator John Holt's (Escape From Childhood, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974) proposal, in which he declared:

I propose...that the rights, privileges, duties, responsiblities of adult citizens be made available to any young person, of whatever age, who wants to make use of them. These would include, among others:

1. The right to equal treatment at the hands of the law-i.e., the right, in any situation, to be treated no worse than an adult would be.

2. The right to vote, and take full part in political affairs.

3. The right to be legally responsible for one's life and acts.

4. The right to work, for money.

5. The right to privacy.

6. The right to financial independence and responsibility-i.e., the right to own, buy, and sell property, to borrow money, establish credit, sign contracts, etc.

7. The right to direct and manage one's own education.

8. The right to travel, to live away from home, to choose or make one's own home.

9. The right to receive from the state whatever minimum income it may guarantee to adult citizens.

10. The right to make and enter into, on a basis of mutual consent, quasi-familial relationships outside one's immediate family-i.e., the right to seek and choose guardians other than one's own parents and to be legally dependent on them.

11. The right to do, in general, what any adult may legally do.

Now, the most obvious and ever present objection would be the incompetence and immaturity of adolescents and their inability to exercise such rights and responsibilities, let along younger children. But to put this in perspective, I typically quote Joshua Meyrowitz (The Adultlike Child and the Childlike Adult: Socialization in an Electronic Age, Daedalus, Vol. 113, No. 3, Anticipations (Summer, 1984), pp. 19-48) in an attempt to illustrate the nature of "childhood" as having somewhat fluid boundaries that are widely varying among time and place in both chronological terms (set age restrictions), and the precise nature of limited rights granted to those considered "children."

[T]hose who insist upon the "naturalness" of our traditional conceptions of childhood are basing their belief on a very narrow cultural and historical perspective. Childhood and adulthood have been conceived of differently in different cultures, and child and adult roles have varied even within the same culture from one historical period to another.

It's the modern conception of childhood itself that forms the basis behind the popular perception that children and adolescents are incapable of competently exercising the rights and responsibilities that adults currently possess, by creating a popular negative image of them based on several misconceptions. As the psychologist Richard Farson (Birthrights, New York: Macmillan, 1974) notes:

As childhood became more important, society for the first time began associating it with all sorts of negative qualities: irrationality, imbecility, weakness, prelogicism, and primitivism. It is difficult for our present culture to appreciate that these demeaning views of children are a recent development, appearing only after childhood acquired increased significance. And with this new importance, came, for the first time, antipathy toward the child, the beginnings of our present resentment.

However, we know for a fact that the concept of childhood has undergone dramatic structuring and restructuring over the past few centuries, with many of our current stereotypes about modern youth being based on the consequences of previous infantilization of them. For example, the modern Western institution of adolescence is an example of an artificial extension of childhood that has only existed since the period of the Industrial Revolution or so. The point is driven home by Frank Fussell and Elizabeth Furstenberg in The Transition to Adulthood During the Twentieth Century: Race, Nativity, and Gender.

The lives of 16-year olds in 1900 and 2000 could hardly be more different. In 1900 the term "adolescent" had barely been coined, much less popularized (Chudacoff 1989)...The status combination of attending school, living in the parental home, and remaining single and childless characterized only 40% of white 16-year olds in 1900 but grew to over 70% of this group by 1940, finally reaching about 90% by 2000.

Moreover, the education author (and former New York City Teacher of the Year) John Taylor Gatto (The Underground History of American Education, New York: Odysseus Group, 2001) elaborates on this matter, writing the following:

During the post-Civil War period, childhood was extended about four years. Later, a special label was created to describe very old children. It was...adolescence, a phenomenon hitherto unknown to the human race. The infantilization of young people didn't stop at the beginning of the twentieth century; child labor laws were extended to cover more and more kinds of work, the age of school leaving set higher and higher. The greatest victory for this utopian project was making school the only avenue to certain occupations. The intention was ultimately to draw all work into the school net. By the 1950s it wasn't unusual to find graduate students well into their thirties, running errands, waiting to start their lives.

Gatto's statement notably incorporates acknowledgment of the reality that the establishment of adolescence wasn't necessarily based on the purest motives, and some had an interest in gaining from the infantilization of youth, most obviously those who gained from the elimination of able-bodied youth from the workforce and effective imprisonment in school elaborated on by Fussell and Furstenberg (sorry about the crooked graph.)

The most recent major elaboration on this effective infantilization of youth that has occurred has come from the American psychologist Robert Epstein (The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen, New York: Quill Driver Books, 2007). As he writes:

Adolescence is the creation of modern industrialization, which got into high gear in the United States between 1880 and 1920. For most of human history before the Industrial Era, young people worked side by side with adults as soon as they were able, and it was not uncommon for young people, and especially young females, to marry and establish independent households soon after puberty. It wasn't until the turn of the twentieth century that adolescence was identified as a separate stage of life characterized by "storm and stress." In what appears to be a vicious cycle of cause and effect, teen turmoil since the late 1800s has generated a large number of unique laws that restrict teen behavior in ways that adult behavior has never been restricted, and these laws in turn appear to have stimulated more extreme forms of "misbehavior" in teens. The rate at which such laws have been passed has increased substantially since the 1960s, with an increasingly wide range of new crimes being invented just for young people. The social reforms that created such laws were set in motion by some formidable individuals, not all of whom had benevolent motives. The extension of childhood past puberty has benefited a large number of new businesses and industries offering a wide range of products and services to the growing teen markets.

He includes this accompanying image to further illustrate the reality that the establishment of adolescence over the past century and a half involved the establishment of new age restrictions on adolescents that had not previously existed in American society:

Now, this alone obviously can't justify the elimination of adolescence or any other component of modern childhood as a phase of the life cycle, especially in light of claims that age restrictions served as protections for youth in a turbulent world that they lacked sufficient competence to deal with. These summaries offered thus far are intended to serve as explanations rather than justifications, and intended to offer a descriptive observation rather than a prescriptive recommendation. It's thus necessary to highlight a crucial difference between *is* and *ought*. And some authors (notably Neil Postman) who concede that childhood and adolescence are effectively inventions (to some extent) of the past few centuries note this not to claim that they necessitate abolition or elimination, but to claim that they're beneficial establishments of life phases that properly train and condition youth for adult life.

However, recent authors have disputed this, and have focused on some of the same dramatic restructuring of childhood that Holt proposed, this time with a specific focus on adolescence. As Epstein puts it:

Young people should be extended full adult rights and responsibilities in each of a number of different areas as soon as they can demonstrate appropriate competence in each area. Passing appropriate tests will allow competent young people to become emancipated, start businesses, work, marry, and so on, but I am not suggesting that young people be given more "freedom."

 

[Agnapostate]

We need to start judging young people by their abilities, not their age, just as we're now increasingly doing with the elderly. The societal changes I'm proposing have the potential to reconnect young people with the adult world, to inspire young people to behave in responsible ways, and to eliminate much of the turmoil we now see during the teen years. Young people have always tended to resist the artificial extension of childhood, and there are a few signs in recent decades that this century-long phenomenon may be slowing or reversing.

In recent years, this proposal has gained sufficient influence to merit endorsement from former U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich (not the best source on a progressive socialist forum, of course, but I merely wanted to illustrate the increasing popularity of this idea), who advocates the same general program of policy changes in a BusinessWeek piece entitled Let's End Adolescence:

We have to end adolescence as a social experiment. We tried it. It failed. It's time to move on. Returning to an earlier, more successful model of children rapidly assuming the roles and responsibilities of adults would yield enormous benefit to society.

Prior to the 19th century, it's fair to say that adolescence did not exist. Instead, there was virtually universal acceptance that puberty marked the transition from childhood to young adulthood. Whether with the Bar Mitzvah and Bat Mitzvah ceremony of the Jewish faith or confirmation in the Catholic Church or any hundreds of rites of passage in societies around the planet, it was understood you were either a child or a young adult.

That noted, I should also state that I disagree with the assessment of only adolescent youth being capable of exercising rights, or the prospect of rights being extended only to adolescent youth. Along with my opposition to minimum age restrictions, I envision a state of affairs wherein some persons who have not reached adolescence would obtain and exercise the rights and responsibilities that self-determination entails. The aforementiond Richard Farson notes:

The achievement of children's rights must apply to children of all ages, from birth to adulthood. Some of the rights may seem inappropriate to apply to the very young because of the obvious incapacities of small children. But rights cannot be withheld from the very young solely on the basis of age any more than they can be withheld from the very old who can be similarly incapacitated. The inability to exercise one's rights at any age, old or young, should simply mean that even greater care must be taken by society to guarantee the protection of those rights.

However, the abolition of age restrictions isn't intended to create a societal environment of toddlers owning submachine guns or some similar absurdity. As Farson writes, "[n]obody believes that one year old children will vote, but that does not mean we must deprive them of the right to vote. How many elderly people in our society are (almost) senile? Do we take away their right to vote?" Hence, the purpose of the abolition of age restrictions isn't intended to foster an environment of toddlers driving, voting, and working, but to recognize the fact that age is an arbitrary measurement of competence that will fail to permit some persons below almost any age restriction to become independent.

Now, returning to my somewhat nuanced response to the question of the general competence of youth to make informed and rational decisions (and thus manage their own welfare) overall, I'd contend that youth, particularly adolescent youth, are more equipped to deal with the turbulence and difficulties of "adult life" to a greater extent than is commonly perceived. I typically refer to the empirical research that has been conducted into the capacities of adolescents to offer informed and rational consent to medical treatment, since this could be reasonably extrapolated into a functioning analysis of their capacities to make similarly informed and rational decisions about their own welfare. For instance, I frequently refer to Weithorn and Campbell's The Competency of Children and Adolescents to Make Informed Treatment Decisions:

This study was a test for developmental differences in competency to make informed treatment decisions. 96 subjects, 24 (12 males and 12 females) at each of 4 age levels (9, 14, 18, and 21), were administered a measure developed to assess competency according to 4 legal standards. The measure included 4 hypothetical treatment dilemmas and a structured interview protocol. Overall, 14-year-olds did not differ from adults. 9-year-olds appeared less competent than adults with respect to their ability to reason about and understand the treatment information provided in the dilemmas. However, they did not differ from older subjects in their expression of reasonable preferences regarding treatment. It is concluded that the findings do not support the denial of the right of self-determination to adolescents in health-care situations on the basis of a presumption of incapacity. Further, children as young as 9 appear able to participate meaningfully in personal health-care decision making.

I'd thus agree with their analysis that "[t]he ages of eighteen or twenty-one as the 'cutoffs' below which individuals are presumed to be incompetent to make determinations about their own welfare do not reflect the psychological capacities of most adolescents."

Next, I'd note that the deliberate infantilization of youth plays a role in hobbling their intellectual development, and thus, their ability to defend against the very conditions that it's presumed they need to be "protected" from. As John Darling (A.S. Neill on Democratic Authority: A Lesson from Summerhill?, Oxford Review of Education, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1992), pp. 45-57) notes:

[There is a] common-sense perception, endemic in our culture, of children as rather silly and immature, unfit to be given responsibility. Yet such a view is clearly in danger of being self-confirming; for where children are seen as silly and immature, they will not be given responsibility, and where they are not given responsibility, they are likely to remain silly and immature.

The very perception of children and adolescents being incompetent and irresponsible, and unable to exercise those rights that all the combined facets of individual self-determination entail, plays a role in conditioning them to be incompetent and irresponsible to some extent, in alignment with societal predictions and expectations, on which policies that infantilize modern youth are formed. Darling also notes this:

It is not entirely clear why tardy development should be seen as a virtue, but it seems likely that one reason for disliking rapid maturation is that this upsets our low-level expectations of what is possible. Because our society has these low-level expectations, it is entitled to treat children with an enveloping paternalism, which in turn fosters the infirm condition previously assumed.

However, it's important to note that I don't advocate forcible or coercive integration of youth into "adult society" against their will, thereby "robbing them of their childhood." While I regard our current state of affairs as undesirable, neither is it the case that I support tossing youth into the water and simply hoping they don't sink. For example, I don't support setting an age of majority of 10 or 12 and forcing people to "cope" from that point on any more than I support the artificial extension of childhood that characterizes our current state of affairs. Instead, I'd agree with the voluntary nature of the aforementioned John Holt's plan. He used an insightful analogy to illustrate this:

Most people who believe in the institution of childhood as we know it see it as a kind of walled garden in which children, being small and weak, are protected from the harshness of the world outside until they become strong and clever enough to cope with it. Some children experience childhood in just that way. I do not want them to destroy their garden or kick them out. If they like it, by all means let them stay in it. But I believe that most young people, and at earlier and earlier ages, begin to experience childhood not as a garden but as a prison. What I want to do is put a gate, or gates, into the wall of the garden, so that those who find it no longer protective or helpful, but instead confusing and humiliating, can move out and for a while try living in a larger space.

So, this proposal as a whole seems excessively radical at first mention, but when we consider the fact that many modern conceptions and boundaries of childhood are artificially set social constructs, the fact that the aforementioned empirical literature indicates that adolescent youth and some children possess the ability to make informed and rational decisions about their own welfare, and the aforementioned fact that "the abolition of age restrictions isn't intended to create a societal environment of toddlers owning submachine guns or some similar absurdity," it's not so far-fetched, in my view.

What are your thoughts?

 

[dahermit]

The whole thing is an impossible wistful ideal that is too complicated to be implemented.
The reason they do not have more freedom is that as a group they demonstrate that they do not deserve it. They are the most destructive group on earth. What abandoned factory, house, etc. does not have all its windows destroyed by rocks if they are not boarded up? Who is doing it? 72 year olds in wheel chairs?
It is the custom where I live to put white crosses along the roads where people have been killed in cars. The countryside is littered with white crosses. Almost all represent youths. Youths who might have passed your test for responsibility.
They need more laws restricting their behavior, and more vigorous enforcement.

 

[Agnapostate]

Can you refer to reliable empirical research that evidences this alleged epidemic of reckless irresponsibility? I've found that such assertions are often more dependent on media exaggerations than reality.

 

[dahermit]

Can you refer to reliable empirical research that evidences this alleged epidemic of reckless irresponsibility? I've found that such assertions are often more dependent on media exaggerations than reality.

Can you refer to any review of the methodology by researchers and the conclusion by psychologists of the cited research?

Or, at least list the location of a factory that has been abandoned for three or so years and that still has its windows intact?

Also, it seems to beg the question: If there were a test for adulthood instead of the automatic system that is arbitrarily set at 18, what happens in the event that a kid never is able to pass the test? Cannot vote? Cannot enter into contracts?

 

[Mare Tranquillity]

I think that the process would impossibly complex to administer. Dahermit's question about adults who can never pass the test and become legal adults is valid. This idea would require testing a huge number of people repeatedly on a vast array of subjects and then professional assessment of the test results. There would have to be an appeals process, court intervention when an impasse is reached, differing experts arguing about test results and their meanings, an endless legal battle that would only enrich lawyers.

There would also have to be a concomitant process by which the parents were relieved of responsibility for the emancipating minor. Right now parents have legal responsibilities to the children and for the children's behavior.

Would this be an all or nothing process? Would a child of 12 who was demonstrably capable of voting competenly be allowed to vote but still be barred from driving? Or would a child have to pass all the tests and achieve total emancipation before receiving any of the perks of adulthood?

 

[Dante the Marxist]

The whole thing is an impossible wistful ideal that is too complicated to be implemented.
The reason they do not have more freedom is that as a group they demonstrate that they do not deserve it. They are the most destructive group on earth. What abandoned factory, house, etc. does not have all its windows destroyed by rocks if they are not boarded up? Who is doing it? 72 year olds in wheel chairs?
It is the custom where I live to put white crosses along the roads where people have been killed in cars. The countryside is littered with white crosses. Almost all represent youths. Youths who might have passed your test for responsibility.
They need more laws restricting their behavior, and more vigorous enforcement.

The factorys and homes are abondoned. They deserve to be destroyed if nobody does anything. The car accidents happen as much with adults as children. Maybe not in your area, but overall.

Do you think it is fair for sentient humans to have thier lives controled down to what they eat, what they wear, sometimes what they read, what faith to follow, etc.? If we can mix education with productive work, then kids would be doing the same as adults, while being educated. They would then be obligated to the same rights.

Great idea, in my opinion.

 

[dahermit]

The factorys and homes are abondoned. They deserve to be destroyed if nobody does anything.

Factories and homes that could and likely be sold if they were not destroyed. They are owned by someone, even if empty. Why is it ok to destroy the investment that they represent to the owners be it a bank, company, or individual just because some over-induldged pair of jerks are "bored"?

The car accidents happen as much with adults as children. Maybe not in your area, but overall.

Not so. That is why the under 25 insurance rates are so high.

Do you think it is fair for sentient humans to have thier lives controled down to what they eat, what they wear, sometimes what they read, what faith to follow, etc.? If we can mix education with productive work, then kids would be doing the same as adults, while being educated. They would then be obligated to the same rights.

Great idea, in my opinion.

13 year olds getting married. Entering into contracts. Yup. Great idea.

 

[Dante the Marxist]

Factories and homes that could and likely be sold if they were not destroyed. They are owned by someone, even if empty. Why is it ok to destroy the investment that they represent to the owners be it a bank, company, or individual just because some over-induldged pair of jerks are "bored"?.

They should have done something with those things before they were known as "80 year old factory that has been out of use for 50 years and is now a giant toy".

Having your own home as private property is understandable. But a factory, or a office building? Those are public-purpose buildings, and should be owned by the public, for the public.

Not so. That is why the under 25 insurance rates are so high.

They are so high because nobody trusts a responsible teen to drive a car.

13 year olds getting married. Entering into contracts. Yup. Great idea.

Whats wrong with that? Human beings, falling in love, making thier own decisions, voting, and having jobs. Only a person who hates love, free decision making, voting, and jobs could be opposed to this.