Teenage Kicks

About a week ago, I banged out a posting in the middle of the night about my doubts regarding mass schooling, which went down quite well, and I sort of implied I’d do a follow up about our attitude to children, and I’ve been trying to get it together ever since, which has turned out to be harder than I thought because I’ve Thought Too Hard about it. I plan in future to be more spontaneous.

First up, I woefully neglected to link in that post to John Taylor Gatto’s Underground History Of Education which is essential reading for “schooling sceptics”, thanks to those commenters who mentioned it.

The thing I said I’d address is that of infantilisation, which the internet tells me means “To reduce to an infantile state or condition”. In our current society we can see (at least) two aspects of this; firstly there is the general treatment of the entire population in an infantilising manner by our rulers, and secondly their is the more specific infantilisation of young people, which is basically an aspect of the first.

There are currently several popular and apparently self-contradictory narratives in play regarding the young. There is the narrative that children are eternal victims, suffering endless abuse about which Something Must Be Done. There is the contradictory narrative that our society is plagued by predatory gangs of children against which we must be protected- such that young people are described by the dehumanising term “feral”. There is the narrative that young people “grow up too fast” and have lost their innocence. Can we make any sense of all this? I think we can. Let’s do a visualisation exercise.

Imagine line-up, from left to right, of some young people. A newborn, a 3 year old, a 7 year old, an 11 year old, a 15 year old, and an 18 year old. You could extend it further to the right, though you may need larger jumps in ages- people of 25, 40, 60, 80 perhaps. The first thing we might note in our imaginary parade is that each of these persons is quite distinct. You could easily bring to mind stereotypical distinct images of each age (whereas if I said, a 7 year old next to an 8 year old, they may be too similar to distinctly imagine). The second thing we may observe is that they represent a continuum. Ageing is a gradual process. If we now fill out our lineup with many interpolations- imagine the same person at many more ages (7, 7.5, 8 etc) we don’t really see any point at which they magically transform from child to adult. In fact, where they cross the legal line between the two- say, between the 15 and 18 year olds, there is less difference than between, say, the 3 and the 7 year old, or the 11 and the 15 year old.

In legal terms, we do make a very sharp distinction. We set a legal age of majority, below which they
are legally a child and above which they are legally an adult. Now there is nothing inherently wrong with doing this, if we want to set legal ages for certain activities. The problem is, we then tend to think that this legal fiction represents an objective truth, some kind of platonic reality. So if our age is set at 16, we say that a fifteen year old actually is a child, in the same class as a five year old, but on the day of their 16th birthday a magical transformation occurs and they turn into an adult. In other words, we assign individuals to classes, and then presume that the definition of the class applies to every individual within it. This does not actually reflect any reality, but we think it does.

One characteristic applied to children is that they are not fit to make their own decisions. We can certainly say this is true of a 7 year old. The problem is, at what point does it cease to be true? It varies from individual to individual. As people we naturally understand this- we may say that one youngster is very childish, and another is very mature. We will say, “Alice is very advanced for her age” or “Bob is a late developer”. We know that individuals age at different rates.

Biology offers us one or two fairly distinct markers of ageing. Puberty is the most obvious one. There is a point in the single digits where memory switches from being eidetic (photographic) to associative. Again, these changes will occur at different ages in different individuals. You can’t easily make or apply a law based on and invidual’s puberty though (you can do X when you’ve had your first period is rather too intrusive and demeaning) so we set an age instead. If we look at most cultures that have set an “age of majority”, we tend to note that suspiciously it is around puberty- e.g. Bar Mitzvah in the Jewish culture is set at the age of 13.

What has happened since the start of the Progressive Era in the west is that more and more ages of majority have been set for various activities, and they are getting slowly but steadily later in life. Until 1929, the marriage age in Britain was 14 for boys, and 12 for girls, for instance. Then it was changed to 16. We have a minimum age for alcohol, a minimum age to buy tobacco (up recently from 16 to 18) and so on. There seems little doubt that if things carry on as they are, the drinking age will be boosted up to 21. In the 1980s, lovely Samantha Fox delighted the nation with her bosom at the age of 16- that was made illegal in 2003 and would now be classed as child pornography. There is a process underway whereby gradually childhood is being extended.

The most significant aspect for us in this article is that the age of schooling has recently been raised- against no signficant objection- to 18. Okay, you’re allowed to be in “education, employment or training” until 18, not necessarily at school, but the principle is that the State owns you as a child, until you are 18, and can decide what you must do with your time. There is also the increasing clamour for some kind of “national service” for young people. Because everyone under 18 is a “child” who is not considered capable of running their own life. There is no distinction between a 16 year old and a 6 year old, in the eyes of the progressive state.

Progressives see this as a Good Thing. In their terms, they see themselves as protecting young people from the rigours of adult life. They are protecting the young from sex, or drink, or having to go into the workplace. They see education as a gift which everybody rational must love, and cannot comprehend anyone who doesn’t appreciate it, and a young person who doesn’t much appreciate the school environment must have something wrong with them that needs fixing by psychologists. One of the most enormous problems with progressives is that although they love to talk about “diversity” they are the most terrible conformists, and cannot imagine anyone different from themselves. They followed a partiucular linear path- school, qualifications, university, degree in PPE, political researcher, MP, idiot cabinet minister- and cannot imagine why anyone would want to be any different. So they cannot comprehend that offering the gift of extended childhood- by compulsion- does not suit everybody, and that to many young people it is a damaging trap.

Let’s look again at that question of what age we transition from child to adult. As I said, it varies from individual to individual. But I think it’s fair to say that after puberty, the person starts to have adult concerns. That is, they start wanting to “make their way in the world”. The strength of desire for this again is variable. To those with a stronger desire, the entrapment in childhood and its structures such as schooling is a maddening repression. They may not be very academic. They may have strong opinions of what they want to do with life, and they want to get on with that, and they are not allowed.

There is also a very strong compulsion to start doing adult things. Boys in particular desire to be seen as young men. They will attempt to engage in activities compatible with, and demonstrable of, their manhood. And society- via the law- says, “This is not allowed”. I believe this has very negative consequences.

My father left school at 14. He started working in a local shoe factory (with his uncle Bill, as it goes). A young man of 14 in such a position has started on the road to manhood. He may not be fully an adult, and he’s still living with his parents and so on, but he has attained some of the attributes of it. He is earning a wage, he is mixing in the company of men. He fits naturally into the order of things as a “junior man” who must acquire status by gaining the respect of his elders and betters. So, let us say, his first experiences with beer will be in the company of older men, where he may learn from them as role models. His natural urges towards adulthood are being accommodated. But nowadays, until he is 18, he cannot do these things. He is trapped in the school as a child until at least 16, and cannot go to the pub for another two years after that. So his desire to look grown up comes out in negative emulation of adulthood. He can’t go to the pub, so he sits on park benches with people of his own age, out of social control and flinging beer cans at old ladies. And then there is a big social problem, and the government responds by trying to intensify the infantilising policies, and just making the problem worse.

In other words, what I’m trying to get at here is that there is an intensifying gap between objective reality- how young people actually are as human beings- and how society treats them. This gap covers the teenage years, in which many young people are desperate to start living their lives, and are legally barred from doing so, and so that biologically derived urge bubbles out as very negative behaviours- uncontrolled use of alchohol and drugs, irresponsible sex, pregnancies and so on. When young people are cut off from adults, is it any wonder they don’t learn to behave in the responsible manner required of adulthood? It results in growing numbers of, er, “kidults” who fail the transition to adulthood because it was not available to them when it was required, and who will fail for the rest of their lives as a result of that bad pattern being set at a crucial formative age. We aren’t protecting young people at all. We are condemning them.

The reality is, that young people are not “growing up too fast” at all. They are trying to grow up, and we are actively as a society trying to stop them. We do not allow a natural transition into adulthood. It is now idealised that every young person should stay a child at school at least until they are eighteen, and ideally into their twenties. This suits some people, but there are many who it does not suit at all, and the social problem we experience from “out of control” teenagers are a direct consequence. If we don’t let them grow up properly, they will do so most improperly indeed. The constrictive solutions are actually the problem.

Let’s look at those “feral gangs”. I live in a chavtown, and of an evening there are often gangs of teenagers hanging about, and yes they can be scary and yes they can be violent etc. But what is the source of this phenomenon? Well, I’ll admit, I was a feral teenager once too. Now don’t get me wrong, I never hurt anybody or committed vandalism or even drank beer or anything, I was the nicest feral teenager you ever did meet. But I have memories of endlessly going “out”. Not going somewhere specific. I’d just go out, out of the house, and wander around for endless hours with my friends just doing nothing. Talking. Sit somewhere for a bit, walk somewhere else, sit there. We never meant or did any harm, but might have looked a bit scary to an old lady, I dunno.

But we went “out” because we were young men with a hardwired urge to escape the nest- to be away from parental control. To be on our own. We couldn’t actually do anything because we hadn’t got any money, or hardly any anyway. And if we had had some money, we couldn’t go to the pub because that isn’t legal. So we’d just be “out”. And it would be easy to see that if we’d been of a more assertive nature and had some girls to show off in front of we could have descended into that aggression display that is also hardwired into young men, that manifests as vandalism and violence. It is, unfortunately, human nature.

In other words, like a beardy social worker says, these youngsters are bored. But the beardy would say, “then let us build them a yoof club!” or “let us give them organised sport!”. But the whole thing about that teenage desire for adulthood is a desire to be away from artificial kiddie structures like schools and yoof clubs. I wouldn’t have been seen dead in a youth club. What they need is instead the ability to start involving themselves in real, adult life, earning their own money and socialising normally. And if that is to happen, we must stop saying that they are children.

(And being admittedly highly speculative here, we should consider also I think the mysterious growing burden of mental disturbance in young people. Girls in particular are suffering bizarre psychoses- anorexia, bulimia, self harming. We certainly live in a society where there is pressure to be thin (and the medical profession are currently piling that on in shovelfuls), but often when asked why they are driven to these behaviours, they will say something like “my eating is the only thing I can control”. My ex’s niece, an anorexia sufferer, said this. As we fret about the causes of thse disorders, do we ignore the obvious- that it is the denial of control of the self desired by these young women causing it? Is it simply the case that while boys denied their manhood are more likely to hurt others, girls denied their womanhood hurt themselves? I think it’s worth at least considering.)

The age at which the desire- the need- to put away childish things occurs is different for each individual. As I said earlier, puberty is a pretty good approximate marker of the transition. We cannot and obviously should not intrude on each individual at that personal level, but we could at least recognise again that the age of majority should best approximate to it. I have said before that I’d like to see “schooling” in its current form disappear entirely, but as a first step I would immediately reduce the age of compulsion to 14 or 13, such that those young men and women entrapped by it can escape it in those crucial transitionary years.

The immediate response to such a suggestion will be, “then they will get no qualifications, and be failures in life”- and to that I would reply that this is itself a problem created by a credentialised society, in which anyone who does not stay on a specific credentialising conveyor belt collecting diplomas is doomed, and we are thus led to reconsider that aspect of our society (which is again a consequence of progressivist ideology).

But that, as the saying goes, is another article.