Recently Mark Steyn wrote on our lovely education system in America.
His comments on adultolescence are extremely poignant:
“In droning the mantra that every kid should have the right to a college education, we’re doing the opposite of what we ought to be doing — which is telescoping education into a much shorter period. It’s taken for granted that our bodies mature much earlier than our great-grandparents so we all need access to condoms and abortion by Fifth Grade, but apparently our minds need longer than ever, and in some cases until early middle age. So we enter adolescence much sooner and leave it a decade or more later.
Right now, to put my demography hat on, the western world has a possibly terminal shortage of children. One reason it does is because the fellows on whom society traditionally depends for child-rearing — young adults — are staying in school until their mid-twenties and embarking on grown-up life ever later, if at all. Thirty per cent of German women are childless; among university graduates, it’s 40 per cent. The pursuit of a 100 per cent college-educated populace is a recipe for societal suicide.”
This whole “embarking on grown-up life later” thing does not bode well for America’s future.
See the “addendum” here.
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So you assume that education is not an ‘adult’ thing to do?
Why is ‘school’ assumed to be mutually incompatible with “grown up life”?
And “child-rearing” is not necessarily a synonym for “grown-up life” –
not all adults want either marriage or offspring.
Electric,
Thanks for offering your thoughts, but hold yer horses….a little more charity would be nice. I never made the blanket statement that education is not an adult thing to do. If I said that, I’d be quite the hypocrite–I’m 29 and still in school!
School is not “assumed to be mutually incompatible” with grown up life. My point was that many, many people are using college not as it was originally intended (to grow in knowledge and strength of character), but to extend their adolescence and postpone responsibility (adolescence is an artificial category anyway). To see this, witness the proliferation of carousing and such that goes on at a typical college Thursday-Sunday (well, Sunday through Saturday, really).
And your last comment is part of the problem, actually. Child-rearing will certainly take the little boy out of you. It calls you to a cause greater than yourself. When single and childless, you are beholden to yourself…not so much when you are married with children. Though all aren’t matured by it, parenthood and the shouldering of responsibility that goes with it changes you pretty quick, in most cases….most newleyweds and new parents I’ve talked to tell me pretty quickly: “Rich, through marriage and parenthood I’ve found out I thought I was a pretty good guy, but really, I’m a stuck-up-selfish-jerk.”
“Not all adults want either marriage or offspring.”
1) who said they do?
2) So what? What does “what adults *want*” have to do with *anything?*