Site Meter Reflections on Playboy: Parents and teachers have to earn teens’ respect

September 30, 2006

Parents and teachers have to earn teens’ respect

After the first two sentences, this post doesn’t mention Playboy. But I rationalize its publication here on the grounds that, with all due modesty, it’s the kind of essay that Playboy should be proud to print.

Lest anyone beat up a straw man in response to this post, let me emphasize that I exclude the police from the list of persons whose authority over teenagers must be earned. I’m a libertarian, but not an anarchist: citizens of all ages must be equally subject to the rule of law. Even as I oppose compulsory schooling for teens, I take a fairly tough stand on “juvenile” crime. Having sincerely tipped my hat to law and order, I’m ready to get radical now.

Every day, I struggle with guilt and rage over my failure to rebel against the illogical, self-serving, condescending, time-wasting, boring, humiliating, totalitarian bullshit of my suburban home and my public schooling. To keep from going mad, I’ve had to boycott my family’s Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations this year unless they let me wear my custom T-shirt with the words MY FATHER DIED BEFORE I COULD KILL HIM on both sides. As a champion of Judith Rich Harris, I can’t honestly blame my parents for the kind of man I’ve become. But I do blame them for trying to make me a voiceless coward in their own image (I was “arrogant” whenever I said anything controversial on any subject). James Hillman, Thomas Szasz, and personal experience with the mental-health establishment have persuaded me not to medicalize my madness, so I’m taking it to the streets rather than a therapist’s office. Soon, I’ll get a T-shirt with this post’s title on both sides and wear it proudly.

Teenage irresponsibility is largely the self-fulfilling prophecy of a school system that artificially prolongs childhood. Former New York City and State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto puts our historically aberrant treatment of young adults to shame:
Do we really need school? I don’t mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don’t hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn’t, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever “graduated” from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn’t go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren’t looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.
I have problems with Gatto’s anti-Darwinism, his anti-consumerism, and his sentimental belief that “genius is as common as dirt,” but I find his case against school very strong nonetheless.

Do you smile at the sign that says, “Hire a teenager while they still know everything”? If so, you’re a bigot and a hypocrite. Your elders sure as hell weren’t always right just because they were older, were they? If you parent according to the sign’s philosophy, you deserve to be abandoned in your old age. If you defend the status quo with any statement that boils down to “Misery loves company,” you deserve a punch in the nose.

Update, January 2, 2007, 5:16 p.m.: My attitude towards my anger has changed since I wrote this post. I now see it as less of an affliction and more of a pleasurable compulsion. But I’m still haunted by the thought that I’m wasting time, energy, and potential on it.

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 5:26 PM

  • Blogger TerraPraeta left this comment at October 1, 2006 7:21 AM  
    I agree with you on this one, Brian. I've plugged Gatto a few times recently in blog comments.

    Although, there was a post on Town Of Autumn a couple weeks ago about a teenage girl conned by a 'fake policeman'. The commentators were bitching about 'how stupid could she be -- to get in his car...' and all I could think was that we teach our kids to recognize and submit to that authority without question. So was she really being stupid, or was she doing exactly what she has been taught to do?

    tp

  • Blogger Brian Sorgatz left this comment at October 1, 2006 10:23 AM  
    TerraPraeta,
    Have you seen the 2002 movie Catch Me If You Can? It’s based on the true story of a brilliant teenage con man of the 1960s, and it vindicates my post and your comment on many levels. It suggests that teenagers’ abilities are commonly underestimated. It shows how easily people can fall under the spell of badges of authority: the young man needs only to dress like an airline pilot, a doctor, or whatever, and people trust him even when he drops hints about his ignorance of those professions. In a debate that began elsewhere (scroll down), Doctor Marco, a self-described freethinker, called me a conspiracy theorist for questioning the standard practices of the psychiatric profession. He was too lazy to refute my arguments; he thought he could make his case by pointing out how many Ph.D.s and M.D.s disagree with me. Essentially, he defends authoritarian schooling because we have to destroy the village of independent thought in order to save it.

    But on another level, Judith Rich Harris has ruined that and many other biopics for me. Thanks to her, I know that parents don’t deserve so much blame for messed-up kids.

    Can you give me the permalink for the specific post on Town of Autumn?

  • Blogger TerraPraeta left this comment at October 1, 2006 5:46 PM  
    Hi Brian,

    Here is the specific post.

    I have not seen the movie -- I rarely see any movies or tv anymore -- but it vaguely reminds me of the '90's tv show . A bit campy, but I kinda liked i :-)

    I am absolutely certain that teenagers are far more capable than most adults give them credit for: after all, until the last, what, 60-70 years, 'teenager' really didn't mean anything. Once puberty set in, they were adults after all...

    tp

  • Blogger TerraPraeta left this comment at October 1, 2006 5:48 PM  
    Your comment page is giving me all sort of trouble tonight. That second paragraph should read:

    "but it vaguely reminds me of the '90's tv show The Pretender. A bit campy, but I kinda liked it :-)"

    tp

  • Blogger Ron Amos left this comment at January 3, 2007 5:14 PM  
    Well here I go agreeing without
    being disagreeable... what am I
    doing, there must be something
    wrong with me.

    Nice article...

    Reminds of me of what I
    might have written if I
    hadn't been so angry that I
    went out robbing gas stations
    to get even with the Education
    Establishment.

  • Blogger Anxious Grad Student left this comment at January 15, 2007 9:46 AM  
    Interesting post and I definitely agree with the assertion that US public education, and its evolution in our society into its current state and form, encourages a prolonged adolescent period which did not exist in human societies until our very modern period of institutional education. To take it further, perhaps you should discuss the inherent power structures established in secondary education and their relationship with the overarching power structures of our capitalistic republic and Western society in general. Particularly the relationship between authority figures and the emerging independent thinker our system is supposedly set up to produce, which in actuality is geared towards making citizens easier to control and manipulate.

    Also - I wonder what your solution to the problem of institutional education would be.

  • Anonymous Anonymous left this comment at December 26, 2007 6:09 AM  
    You do not earn respect. You lose it by your actions. You earn trust.

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