Let's End Adolescence

Re:Let's End Adolescence by Dilpil on Sunday November 09, 2008 @10:27AM (#358296)

The real purpose of high school is keeping the roving hordes of teenagers off the street. Teenagers have no judgement (I certainly didn't), and we would like to have some method of keeping them occupied. Unfortunately, where before that method involved actual learning, nowadays schools are basically just low security prisons.

Furthermore, Newt is completely off when he claims that all adolescents want more responsibility. This is simply untrue. A small fraction of adolescents want more responsibility, the rest want to hang out with their friends all day and do nothing. Which is actually pretty close to high school.

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Re:Let's End Adolescence by Hexstream on Sunday November 09, 2008 @02:53PM (#358460)

I think it's really sad that we've come to see teenagers as a liability, not an opportunity. It might be true that teenagers have no judgement, that we need to keep them occupied in "low-security prisons" and that they don't want more responsibility. But I think the way the System(tm) is organised has a lot to do with these behaviors.

Teenagerdom has come to be the no man's land of life, the purgatory.

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Re:Let's End Adolescence by kingkongrevenge on Sunday November 09, 2008 @01:30PM (#358391)

> A small fraction of adolescents want more responsibility

It's a question of the meaning of "want." I think a small fraction of adolescents can articulate that they "want" meaningful responsibility and structure, or make any efforts to get it.

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Re:Let's End Adolescence by jimbokun on Sunday November 09, 2008 @08:26PM (#358710)

I've always found "want" to be an interesting word in English.

You can really want to be the kind of person who gets up and goes to the gym regularly. And you can also simultaneously want to sit motionless on your sofa and passively watch dumb TV programs, even though those things are totally incompatible.

I suspect it may be similar with figuring out whether teenagers really "want" to be mature, responsible, and productive individuals.

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Re:Let's End Adolescence by unalone on Sunday November 09, 2008 @01:44PM (#358401)

I think that lots of adolescents honestly do not want to do anything. They prefer having no responsibilities whatsoever.

I thought it was otherwise: that people who didn't want to work or improve or learn were people that didn't have a good method of doing so, that they were restricted by the system. Long story short, I found out that's radically not the truth. Some people are a little bit icky inside.

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Re:Let's End Adolescence by wensing on Monday November 10, 2008 @09:19AM (#359214)

I think that lots of adolescents honestly do not want to do anything. They prefer having no responsibilities whatsoever.

That's because you can't start with adolescence. You have to start increasing responsibility from roughly age 2. Get them used to it, reward it, show them the connection between increased responsibility and increased choice and freedom. Then they'll want it. The problem with most adolescents is the 12 years prior.

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