Another Invention We Really Didn't Need

I was just watching a 20/20 segment about a seventeen-year-old girl who was raped at a party by several college baseball players. Four college girls witnessed the rape, tried to stop it, and helped the girl. The girl who was raped was never identified and did not appear on the show. The entire story was told mostly by the four girls who found her. What struck me the most was that she was the victim of an awful crime, which probably made her feel quite powerless (and please allow me to say that I am by no means pretending to understand even a tiny portion of what rape victims must go through), yet because she was seventeen and not eighteen, she was given absolutely no control over her life at all. At least that’s how it came across to me.

Now forget all about the rape victim on 20/20. That was really just the catalyst. The point I was trying to make was that a seventeen year old is likely a senior in high school, or possibly a high school graduate, yet society doesn’t trust them to make any decisions for themselves.

I read an article recently that said that adolescence is an invention of the 20th Century. The article gave all sorts of examples of famous historical figures who joined the military when they were thirteen or fourteen and I’m sure child prodigy Mozart was mentioned at some point. But more generally the point was that, say, a hundred years ago a seventeen-year-old could be more or less a functioning adult. Many people finished their education with eighth grade (although there were a lot more high school students/graduates a hundred years ago than most people realize). The average person probably finished school, went to work, saved money, got married, and started a family by the time they were 25, and most certainly by the time they were 30.

Now before everybody starts spouting statistics about how people did everything younger because life expectancies weren’t as high, let me tell you that that’s not as true as you might think. True, life expectancies weren’t as high, but that was because more people died at young ages because of things like diseases and childbirth. It wasn’t like people died of old age at 40 and so they had to hurry up and get married and have a family. People hurried up to get married and have a family because the myth of adolescence hadn’t been invented yet.

There are a lot of books out right now about how the current generation is taking its sweet time to grow up. My favorite (although it is rather depressing) is Generation Me by Jean Twenge. I also like Generation X Goes to College by Peter Sacks. Generation Me is mostly about how the current generation (I hate to call it my generation because I make a conscious effort not to be like this) has almost narcissistic levels of self-esteem and expect to be happy, fulfilled, and (often) famous. Generation X Goes to College is the author’s account of teaching at a community college where the students expect to be babysat to such a degree that one wonders how they ever passed junior high. These books mostly focus on people in their 20’s and even 30’s who haven’t really stopped being teenagers. And after reading that article, I think the real problem is that the entire idea of the teenager is a completely needless invention.

But who invented the teenager? Well, I really don’t know. My first guess would be prosperity. If you don’t need to earn money to help feed the family, you can stay in school longer. But even in the prosperity-coming-out-our-eyeballs ‘50’s the median age of marriage was about twenty years old (lower that it was at the turn of the century, by the way). I suppose even that left people with all of their teenage years to frolic and have fun. So maybe we can generalize and say that prosperity invented the teenager. I’m also going to state what I’m sure is a less popular opinion (as well as an opinion I’m much less qualified to state) and say that I think psychology also had a hand in inventing the teenager. Now, I happen to think psychology is a load of boogers (generally) and that it screwed with a lot of things that didn’t need screwing with, but I’ll save that for another post.

Most people who know me know that I don’t like teenagers very much. I don’t like teenage culture. I don’t like teenage music. I don’t like teenage fashion. I don’t like many teenagers’ attitude that they are the most wonderful, special, unique (and/or misunderstood) creatures on the planet. I just don’t like teenagers (to all my teenage friends: you know I love you, I’m just talking in vast generalizations here). So they idea of a society where teenagers as we know them today didn’t really exist is very appealing. I also think spending thirteen years of your life in school is the biggest waste of time (and that is not counting college and beyond). I would love to see our educational system reformed so that a person could be done with school at fourteen. I am not naïve. I know that will never happen. But I can dream, can’t I? By the way, yes, I am somewhat anti-school and I have many good reasons that I will share in a future post.

I will say that I am sort of a pot calling the kettle black, here. I took a semester off of college, I live with my parents, and I don’t have a job (although, in the case of the latter two, it is more because of my very traditional values than my reluctance to grow up). But I also realize that my semester off has been my “final hurrah” before I have to truly grow up and face the realities of being an adult. I most emphatically do not intend to live like this until I’m 30, or even 25.

Well, now that I’ve rambled on and gone on about fifty different tangents, I suppose I should try to come to some sort of conclusion. My brother’s elementary school recently did an end-of-the-year program that featured, among other things, stories of children from other countries (this school has recently adopted an “international focus”) who did above average things while they were still children. After I thought about it, I realized they were able to do those things because they lived in cultures (and, I would guess, periods of history) that did not expect them to grow up “happy” and “carefree”. How is it that children in the wealthiest country in the world who have all the modern technology they could ever ask for are being out-shined by children in poorer countries and less advance time periods? There, that’s about all the conclusion I’m going to come to for now.