I think the current practice of extending childhood until age 18 to be counterproductive and wasteful. What’s worse is that young people are sequestered in schools that are little more than artificial subcultures of immaturity during the young person is expected to develop life-long attitudes, beliefs and behaviors that are supposed to serve him or her throughout his life. These environments can do little more than retard a person’s social and emotional development.
How are you supposed to get kids to learn subjects that have no particular usefulness in their present lives, much less on the vague promise that it is supposed to “prepare” them for an adult life that has been deliberately kept as a complete mystery to them? We infantilize our kids and then we wonder why people in our society respond to infantile political appeals (rah-rah “us,” boo “them”).
Up until the Industrial Revolution, most people were married off and having children by the age of 14 or 15. Now we expect people to put their hormones on hold until they graduate from high school, if not college. And we wonder (if it occurs to us at all) why there is so much pornography, and why it is such a veritable cornucopia of kink.
We could do much more to integrate young people into adult society by permitting them more options to do apprenticeships and internships. We could scale down the herd management practices that pass for high school and design more personalized programs based on mentorship and independent study, supplemented by special courses tailored to interests that students have in common. We could make better use of apprenticeships, internships, and subsidized entry-level work experiences, and we could have many more applied learning experiences where kids learn various aspects of geometry and physics by building a house, or something like an intricate play structure that has all sorts of intricate arches and ornamental woodwork—or some sort of Peace Corps experience.
The only thing I am not in favor of is trying children as adults. We are the only country in the world that sentences children to life in prison, and we are one of a dwindling handful of countries that sentences children to death. Even though most countries recognize age 16 as an age where people are competent to make most life decisions, simply knowing intellectually whether something is right or wrong is not sufficient to regard it as a fully informed adult decision—especially if the child has been abused, or is emotionally stunted. Unless and until young people are afforded to make momentous life decisions at a young age, we should not single out (in our wrath) their transgressions as the one thing we hold them responsible for as adults.