I think children face legal discrimination that is more severe and unfair than what women faced in the 1800’s.
As you can imagine, I rarely find anyone who agrees with me, but it wasn’t always that way. When I was a teenager and aired that idea among my classmates, I got genuine support.
Once, in a high-school class, a friend told me that his parents had banned him from using his phone. I declared provocatively that I thought minors were the most oppressed group in our society. To my surprise, he answered, “Of course,” without a hint of sarcasm.
Another time, on a bus ride home from a high-school chess tournament, the conversation turned to politics. Looking for a debate, I voiced my theory about minors again. Thinking I had said minorities, the guy across from me started to argue.
“No,” I said. “Minors. Kids.”
Then I got a familiar reply. “Oh, of course.”
Occasionally, when a classroom discussion touched on voting rights or compulsory education, I would make my case in front of everyone and fend off the inevitable rebuttals from the teacher. People rarely came to my aid in those debates—partly because it was uncool to get animated about in-class activities—but sometimes, at the end of the period, a student would get my attention privately and say thanks. They would explain how they had always agreed with me but had never heard anyone make those points out loud.
The people who expressed their support were all similar. Top performers academically. Mature. Quiet. Students who were articulate, but whom I barely recognized because they never spoke in class. Kids who participated in just enough clubs to make universities think they were “involved.” Bored, intelligent people who were biding their time until they could go to good colleges and learn real skills and start their own lives.
By the time I had graduated from high school, I had met so many people like that that I wondered if our country was hiding a massive, invisible coalition of youth rights supporters. I thought that if I just put those ideas out there, then maybe it would spark an outpouring of agreement.
On my second night at college, I put my hypothesis to the test. I told some other freshmen in my dorm building that I had hated K-12 and that I thought kids deserved more freedom. This part of the building was for recipients of a top national scholarship, so I figured that some of them were my people, the ones who sat in the back in high school and always felt like adults, who bristled at living under special restrictions reserved for a quarter of the population.
But I soon found myself in a one-versus-ten debate.
“I was an idiot at fifteen,” one of my opponents argued. “If I had been able to vote then, it would have damaged the country.”
I enjoyed the argument, but it quickly became apparent that no one in college felt kids needed more freedom. The dormant support for youth rights that I had sensed in high school had evaporated without a trace.
In hindsight, it makes sense. I was able to find high schoolers who agreed with me because the policies I was criticizing, like the voting age and compulsory schooling age, affected them personally. People are frustrated when a law treats their group as uniquely incompetent. But as new adults, those laws had no power over us, and they didn’t seem so horrible for treating other people as incompetent.
As night fell outside the dorm building and our discussion grew more lively, I finally found a youth rights issue my opponents could agree with me on. They all acknowledged that the drinking age was too high at twenty-one. They called the law ridiculous and outdated. Interestingly, it was the only restriction we were discussing that still applied to us.
It’s now been a couple of years since we had that dialogue, and the people involved are turning twenty-one. I wouldn’t be surprised if those students who had railed against the drinking age are beginning to see the wisdom of it. If so, their justifications for the policy might sound strangely familiar.
“I was an idiot at eighteen…”
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It might interest your classmates to learn that age discrimination doesn’t end at age 21. Have any of them tried to rent a car?
It’s not just explicit laws and regulations, either. When they graduate and seek work, for example, they’ll soon see that artificially requiring a particular number of years is a common way to thin the number of applicants for a position. If a job can be done by anyone who knows Java but artificially requires eight years of professional Java experience, they’re ruled out unless they somehow began professional-level coding before they were legally allowed to work. Their age will remove them from consideration.
If and when they secure employment, they’ll notice that older co-workers who are no more productive — and possibly less so — are being paid more and given more perks because they’re experienced. Spending time in a field is useful and does matter, but only because it’s supposed to lead to greater knowledge and skill. We’ve all met someone who has fifteen years of experience but really had one year of experience fifteen times, and someone else with twelve years of experience at screwing up. When “experience” is valued all by itself in a vacuum, it’s just another word for age.
When your classmates get to a team lead position, they may find that older people who are supposed to report to them refuse to take them seriously. The company will probably tolerate this, though it would never tolerate a white person not following a black lead’s instructions or a man not following a female lead’s instructions. The black and female leads would be given a manager’s support, but the young lead will be told to be understanding, to respect them, and to figure it out.
It’s not just work, either. Older people will use “You’re young; you don’t know anything” as an all-purpose trump card to win disputes on everything from politics to pet care. Others will tolerate this and even approve, though they’d never approve of “Women can’t understand these matters” as a conversation-stopper.
Your classmates might care more if they realized that they’ll be dealing with this until at least their mid-thirties.
Interestingly, that’s also the time when our physical and cognitive abilities start to slip noticeably. I have a lot to say about that, but this isn’t my blog.
Awesome input. You should be writing these posts! =)
You mentioned the phrase “Women can’t understand these matters.” Today, if a man suggested that women might be less equipped to reason about certain topics, it would end his career. But it was a perfectly normal viewpoint 200 years ago, and even women agreed that it was backed by observation and by science.
Our society has a history of wildly underestimating massive groups of people, and the science always follows the speculation. Just as there’s plenty of neuroscience indicating that teen brains are less rational than adult brains, there was no shortage of studies to explain why women and black people were at an intellectual disadvantage.
Strengthening our stereotypes is the fact that people act like they’re expected to. When you read the accounts of black Americans from the slavery era, you can detect a submissive childishness in their tone. It makes sense: Even the slaves would have internalized the opinions of the time, which said that their race was inherently childlike. But with that in mind, maybe we can understand why the Southern Democrats thought they were suited to slavery and in need of a master’s guidance. At the time, their mannerisms reinforced that view. It was only once people *expected* them to be capable, confident, and self-reliant that they convincingly exhibited those qualities. It was only once they were treated as equals that they emerged as such.
In the same vein, I think most adolescents would behave very differently if we offered them the rights and responsibilities of adults. And that’s not just conjecture. In the past, when we had higher expectations for children, they rose to the challenge. Look at the numerous historical examples of teenage scientists, professionals, and soldiers. It seems ridiculous to imagine they’re at the same stage of life as a modern American schoolboy who throws a tantrum when he can’t play video games, but that’s the power of expectations.
I’m sure you are correct. Unfortunately, it’s not something that one person, or one family, can overcome all by itself. It’s sort of like an American bringing up a child in London and hoping the child has an American accent — she can model American pronunciation, tell the child he’s American, etc., but he’s still going to have a British accent. That’s just how accents work.
Similarly, there’s no point in a parent trying to treat a 15-year-old as an adult. With the entire surrounding environment treating him as a kid, he’s almost certainly going to act like a kid. That’s just how enculturation works.
I don’t have a solution. Childhood stretching longer and longer is unfair both to the individuals and to society, but I don’t see a simple way out. Completely revamping our educational system would probably need to be part of it.
Well said