This Isn't Working Out Part II

Modern societies have structured the lives of children, protecting them from the adult world, so that they will remain helpless and incompetent for as long a time as possible. Grammar school and high school are structured for preparing students for more schooling, rather than for preparing students for participating in the adult world. Youth naturally crave relevance and a sense of competence, but the adult world holds them back, "for their own good."

A "Youth Liberation Movement" has emerged over the past two decades, which demands modifications to the voting age, drinking age, and curfews--among other things. But it is easy to see why such a movement is futile. By the time youth become aware of being victimised by "adultism", they are only a few years away from being adults themselves. It is as if women who become deeply engaged in feminism suddenly became men themselves, or blacks involved in a black power movement suddenly became white.

Children and adolescents will never be able to free themselves from the neotenous society that is thrust upon them. They will try in their own fashion, but their forebrains do not mature until they are in their twenties. By then they are expected by employers and financial institutions to act like adults, even though society has prevented them from developing the skills and maturity they need.

In the absence of interaction with the adult world, youth will develop their own culture. But is "youth culture" really youth culture? Actually it is a corporate guided culture masquerading as youth culture. Clever marketers go to significant lengths to encourage a youthful impulsivity to "grow up without taking responsibility." To exercise the passions, independent action, and economic power of adulthood, without actually becoming adults.

The resulting society suffers from a lack of responsible adults, and a shortage of trained and trainable workers at all levels, resulting in the absolute need to import workers and outsource work overseas. Are you unhappy about illegal immigration? Employers will hire anyone who will do the job--often the alternative is going out of business. Penalize the businesses all you want, but going out of business is a bigger penalty, and results in less economic activity in your part of the world.

Anyone who complains about illegal immigration, but ignores the neotenous method of bringing up children in modern societies, is just blowing it out the tailpipes. The same is true about those who complain about juvenile drug use, crime, pregnancies, or other problems in the underage population. Neotenous child-rearing creates a bumper harvest of problems. It is a "lethal meme" for societies, but its lethal effects veil the underlying problem, and few people understand until too late.

Children need to learn competence early. A child should start learning how to support himself, and how to deal with the technology of modern existence, by the early teen years. By the normal age of high school graduation, a child should have at least one competence by which he can support himself by at least twice minimum wage. By college age, most youth should have multiple skills that are valued in the adult world.

Modern neotenous schooling methods are killing society. Children are not "pets" to be kept stunted for the amusement of their parents. Having twenty-five and thirty year-old children still living at home is not very amusing, but it is happening more and more often. This society of incompetents cannot survive for long, if confronted by a more primitive but more vital (rapidly procreating) society. Rome crumbled before the primitive tribes, after it had decayed from within.

Death by school. Death by neoteny. The epitaph of the modern world.

Part I.