Frog In North Georgia

Gingrich wants to end adolescence.  I just want to end the tired cycle of American women on the male professional track.  Really, now that we know the way women’s bodies work who thinks it is a good idea to graduate high school at eighteen, undergraduate education at twenty-two, grad school around twenty-four or maybe twenty-six, work for say four years and then think about having children if they desire careers?

Not me.  I graduated college at twenty-seven, wondering how many years I should spend working before children, and how many years until biology caught up with me.  I don’t wish that kind of mental and emotional ping-pong on anybody.

Do I think women should get pregnant at sixteen, become dependent on men and stay barefoot?  No, let’s not go there either.

I do think there should be respected vocational and collegiate school tracks available in high schools.  And that Gingrich has a real point about expecting young people to work and be responsible.  But it isn’t going to happen overnight.  Our laws don’t allow work until the age of sixteen, and that is restricted.  And the law doesn’t recognize individuals as adults until the age of eighteen, making it impossible for warehouses and many other types of business to hire younger teens.

And what insurance companies are going to cover younger employees and their families?

And families need to have access to good, affordable childcare prior to their children reaching school age. Otherwise, who will be minding their children while they work?  Entering the professional world at sixteen, rather than twenty-six would mean younger parents.  Would these younger graduates earn enough to support themselves, and possibly a young family?

Nothing can stop the natural occurrence of raging teen hormones that marks adolescence.  But why compound the problem with idleness?

I’m not a grandparent.  And I’m not going to go off on a tangent about how our grandparents or even parents may have married young, had children young, and still worked and may have gone to school.  I don’t think the American social model of the 50s, 60s, or 70s was better than what exists today.  Except maybe conscription - but that’s another blog post.

I agree that our present educational system needs improvement and the social model isn’t working.

Newt Gingrich: Let’s End Adolescence - BusinessWeek

The solution is dramatic and unavoidable: 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.

Tags: adolescence, biology, BusinessWeek, education, Gingrich.