High school with (or without) ashtrays...

Things change. Not exactly a novel observation, I'll grant, but sometimes you have to start with the obvious. Still, let's be more specific: childhood has changed. It used to be that childhood functionally ended in the mid-teens with most people at that point going off into a trade (if they hadn't already--e.g. in the 18^th Century you could evidently enlist in the British Navy as young as the age of nine) and getting married. The conventional wisdom is that lifespans were shorter then, which is true up to a point--actually, if you made it to your thirties or forties, you could reasonably expect to go on until you were in your sixties or seventies; the sense that lives were shorter comes at least partly from the fact that childhood mortality rates drag down average figures for life expectancy (could be all those nine-year-olds in the Navy... sorry, couldn't stop the snark).

These days, we keep kids in school by law until they're sixteen, and stagger out the perks and penalties of adulthood out through the ages sixteen to twenty-one: driving, voting, drinking--even joining the Navy, since it keeps coming up. It's not unusual to hear this lamented, but the reality check on this is that the human brain isn't an adult brain until its early twenties, with the prefrontal lobe (responsible for duties such as foresight and planning and understanding consequence) remaining in a plastic, unfixed state until early adulthood (c.f. this interview with Jay Giedd at NIMH). This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who's ever attempted to get a teenager to give a coherent answer to the question, "What the Hell were you thinking?" In other words, extended childhood isn't so much a "luxury" as it is an acceptance of reality that brings our expectations in line with our biology. Yes, people used to be thrust into the world when they were fourteen or fifteen, expected to work and have and raise kids--but unless you're postulating that human brain development was fundamentally different a hundred years ago, the reality is not that these kids were more mature at that age and adulthood began earlier; the reality is that a hundred years ago children were expected to work and have kids at ages when their brains were works-in-progress. I actually find it to be a wonder that things worked out as well as they did insofar as the human race survived, but then perhaps the innate immaturity of human beings placed in roles of responsibility before their brains were fully functional goes some way in explaining why life was harder, uglier and more violent.

The notion that humans are children until their early twenties is radical but biologically grounded; but such a statement also isn't to say that older children shouldn't be given any responsibility at all. Indeed, just as a five-year-old is capable of exercising more responsibility with less supervision than a thirteen-month-old, so it's reasonable to assume that a nineteen-year-old ought to be more independent and responsible than a sixteen-year-old. The notion that the nineteen-year-old is still, at least in many respects, a child isn't to say that he should be stuck in a diaper and given a pacie. But I think it's also reasonable to say that a nineteen-year-old shouldn't necessarily be dropped off in the figurative wilderness with a knife and a piece of string and left to his own devices. Sure, the parts of the nineteen-year-old's brain concerned with physical and linguistic development may be in good shape, but remember: the parts of his brain involved with appreciating the consequences of his own actions (and the actions of others) remain, well, kind of retarded, to put it bluntly. The young man (or older boy) is sort of a moron, at least in some respects, which is why he's apt to do something stupid or to get himself in over his head. Indeed, this is a dangerous age precisely because some parts of his brain are well developed while others are basically broken.

A sensible society that takes heed of this--perhaps unconsciously and by accident--might well decide that the sensible thing to do with these man-children (and women-children: I've been using the male example, but girls are hardly better) is to find some place for them where they get a few "adult" options and responsibilities while continuing to live in a somewhat structured environment without the full range of adult responsibilities or freedoms. Of course, even a sensible society rarely engages in thought-out, long-term advance planning. No, what usually happens is that some social institution originally designed for some other purpose gets jury-rigged into a new role, perhaps over time and accidentally. Thus, a social institution originally intended to protect the body politic or a social institution designed to preserve and extend knowledge might become a culture's transition ground for children becoming adults. Just to cite, you know, two completely off-the-cuff possibilities... oh, wait.

I can't really speak to the military experience as a formative experience for kidults; had the draft been instituted in the late eighties, when I myself was a mentally-defective manchild lurching uncertainly towards adulthood, I would have been a conscientious objector or, barring that, in jail (I resolved I wouldn't flee the country to flee a draft--perhaps an example of possessing an unfinished frontal lobe, I don't know). But I can speak to the college experience, something I entered into when my ambitious plans of "making it on my own" worked out about as well as you might expect most eighteen-year-old idiots' plans to.

No doubt there are some ambitious souls who go to college to learn useful skills or a trade. More power to them. And, of course, this accounting doesn't apply to the "non-trads": those who return to college as actual bona-fide adults. But, I suspect, for most kids college isn't a place where you go to learn about the "life of the mind" or to learn a "useful" field. Rather, I think that for most kids college is the place you attend for grades thirteen through sixteen, which is why large numbers of the children entering college as freshmen seem a bit confused about why they're even there. There's a line, I believe, from the recently late John Hughes' She's Having A Baby in which a character describes college as "high school with ashtrays"; I don't believe there's been a more apt description of the contemporary university experience, at least there wasn't until they banned smoking on most college campuses. Now, I suppose, it's just high school, except some of the kids can actually purchase alcohol legally.

Let me be explicit, if you haven't figured out the cut of my jib yet: I think this is understandable, expected, and good, or at least as good as it gets. I think society has implicitly taken this into account in the fact that a college degree has replaced the high school diploma and postgraduate degrees have effectively replaced the college education as the mark of the dedicated few who wish to become experts, professionals and the elite in their fields. I said "as good as it gets" a moment ago because you can argue that a better solution would be to extend high school to age twenty-one and I wouldn't argue the point, I just think you'd have a helluva time getting anyone to agree to do it that way. And let me be explicit about this: college is not a waste of time, even if a kid learns nothing academically, any more than high school is a waste if the kid doesn't get much out of that, either. At best, college is a learning opportunity, don't get me wrong; but at worst it's a kind of holding pattern for people who shouldn't be out on their own and can't be locked up at home, either, and that's a good thing, too.

Naturally, there are conservatives who will dispute nearly everything I've just written, and will go on to ask why should society pay for it if I'm right. One of the problems with conservatism as a philosophy, of course, is right there in the name, and here we come back to the very first-and-obvious sentence of this post: conservatives are remarkably resistant to the notion that things change, and if twelve-year-olds in Roman times had jobs and wives or were sold into slavery, well, by God, that ought to be good enough for the pampered and coddled proto-commies of this era. Or something like that. Realizing that eighteen-year-olds are too dumb to hold jobs and ought to have their hands held until they're twenty-two isn't something I have a problem with, obviously, and if we could agree an eighteen-year-old is too dumb to take up arms for his country I'd be happy to agree he's also probably too dumb to vote; American society has certainly agreed he's too dumb to sell liquor to, and I'm not sure you get dumber than that. Things change, and just as we can adapt to the idea that women can do math and drive and that poor people shouldn't have to work fourteen hours just to lease their dinner from the company stores, I'm sure we can adjust to a new sense of what college is, if we haven't already (I'd contend we have, and that it's implicit in our expectations for high school graduates and in the way jobs are posted). I think it's in the nature of conservatism to cling to prejudices as keenly as they cling to "tradition," assuming arguendo that there's a difference between the two.